Nobody would go into the season saying Jared Goff is the best quarterback in the NFL. That doesn't really matter for the MVP discussion, however.
There is a formula for MVP. The days of Emmitt Smith or Lawrence Taylor winning the award are long, long gone. But it's not just narrowing it down to quarterbacks or even quarterbacks from playoff teams. You need to figure out the quarterback whose team will have one of the top two records in their conference. If someone came from the future and told you which teams had the top four records in the regular season, you could narrow the MVP race down with remarkable accuracy.