I had medium high hopes for my New England Patriots at the start of the season. By the time they lost to the Dolphins in late October and fell to 2-6, however, I, and most of my fellow fans, had decided the season was over and that it would be better if they keep losing and get as high a draft position as possible, especially since the upcoming draft has been rated as having multiple potential franchise quarterbacks. The Patriots would go on to lose their next four games, and they were so bad that their game against the Chiefs, which was scheduled to be a Monday night game on national television, became the first Monday night game in league history to be “flexed” out of its spot and replaced with another, despite the star power of Patrick Mahomes (and Taylor Swift).
At 2-10, the Patriots were in prime position for a top pick and would do no worse than #2 if they don’t win more than one game the rest of the way. But then they beat the Steelers and Broncos, two teams with playoff hopes, in the following three weeks and then almost beat the Bills last week. Whatever their fans were rooting for, the team is still trying as hard as they can to win all their games.
Patriots fans are not alone in this. Many fans in Arizona, New York, Washington, and elsewhere have also been rooting against their teams for months, and bemoan every win that knocks their teams a few steps down in the draft order. Those teams, like the Patriots, have also still been trying to win all their games. The Giants and Commanders made quarterback changes within the last month to try to win more games this year. Giants fans have been joking for months about how Tyrod Taylor would lead the Giants to a meaningless win against the Eagles in the last week of the season to keep them away from drafting a top quarterback, and now it has a good possibility of actually happening.
In sports, it’s called “tanking” when a team doesn’t try its best to win their games because they’d rather have a higher draft pick at the end of the year. This is something fans of losing teams often root for, and the incentives for the team are there, especially in football and basketball where there is a (relatively) good track record of top picks becoming stars.
So why do teams tank way less often than fans want, even when everyone on a team would agree that the best thing for the team long term is for them to lose? One answer is that even though it would benefit the team, it wouldn’t benefit the players or the coaches. Players are not going to play poorly or lose on purpose, when many are fighting just to stay in the league, and every point or yard means more money in the next contract. Player careers are short and player turnover is high each season. A team drafting a better player often just means that player is taking your job. Why would Tyrod Taylor want the Giants to draft a franchise quarterback, when he’s likely not even on the team next year, and he’s trying to show he’s good enough for the Giants or another team to take a chance on him as their starter? The same applies to coaches. If your team is that bad, chances are the coach is getting fired unless it’s a new coach in his first year. The benefits of tanking do not go to the players and coaches who won’t be there next year.
But of course tanking does happen in sports. This happens most often in the last game of the season, when it’s clear how a single win or loss affects a team’s draft position, with a team benching their best players. In 2014 the Buccaneers sat down their starters in the second half to surrender a three touchdown lead and secure the #1 pick for Jameis Winston. In the NBA just this year, the Mavericks, despite still being in contention for a playoff spot, sat their starters in the last two games because they’d traded their first round pick on the condition that it was lower than #10. By losing their last two games, the team was fined $750,000 by the league, but retained their pick.
In the NFL, teams sometimes tank for more than just one game. The most famous recent case was the 2011 Colts “suck for Luck” season. Peyton Manning was injured at the start of the season and the team quickly fell out of contention. The team went with Curtis Painter then Dan Orlovsky as their quarterbacks despite better players being available, and Manning healthy enough to play by the end of the year. This secured them the worst record in the league which allowed them to take Andrew Luck in the following year’s draft.
In the NBA, tanking is a much bigger problem, and the league has been fighting a decades long battle with teams to limit it. In 1984 it got so bad that the league instituted a lottery system so that every team that missed the playoffs has a chance at the top 3 picks. Even with this change, teams continue to tank mostly in years with a highly ranked prospect, and the NBA have had to continually adjust the draft lottery system to discourage tanking.
This Sunday, the Patriots host the Jets in the final game of the regular season. Depending on the results of the final week, the Patriots could draft anywhere from #2 to #7. The Patriots have beaten the Jets 15 games in a row, and fans around here are conflicted over whether breaking that streak is worth having a higher draft pick. To which I say: J-E-T-S-JETS-JETS-JETS!
Draft picks are just lottery tickets.
Shiny new can’t miss rookies are a lot of fun until the games start.Report
I don’t think it’s in the DNA of elite level athletes to intentionally tank and trying to make it happen from the top even where totally rational can be so destabilizing as to be counterproductive. I also find it tough to truly root for that as a fan. I’d definitely like the Skinmanders to end up with the 2nd overall for the post Dan Snyder rebuild that’s about to begin but I’m also not going to be sad if they unexpectedly give a black eye to the as usual overrated cow turds this weekend.Report
Skinmander sounds like a Pokemon evolution. Which I guess it is.Report
Either a pokemon or a punchline to a joke about a circumcision going wrong.
I hate the new name so much.Report
There’s the game and the meta-game. It’s not *BAD* to play the meta-game so long as the point is to win the game.
But it makes no sense to me to keep having 1-15 and 2-14 seasons year after year. Eventually you should aspire to 8-8.
(Detroit had a *ROUGH* decade there in the oughts. What the heck.)Report
From the NFL standpoint* if you’re going to be bad you kind of want to be really bad, as getting stuck in mediocrity can make it harder to dig out. It forces you to overspend draft capital to get the elite talent you want and/or put a lot of eggs in FA which if not done well gets you stuck in salary cap hell and relying on players with 2nd contract ‘I got paid’ malaise. So if you aren’t good the quickest path to getting good is really to hit rock bottom.
*This all assumes competent ownership and front offices which are inconsistently distributed around the league. Some are so bad there is no helping them.Report
How long at rock bottom is reasonable? 3 years? Surely not more than that.Report
If you are competent in todays NFL you should be able to turn it around and be competitive in 1-2 years max.Report
Disagree. I think this is sometimes true for the NBA where you can only play 5 players at anytime. One “generational” talent can change the fortunes of a franchise.
The NFL is an entirely different beast. If you want to turn around a franchise quickly, it starts with a good front office and a great coaching staff that can overcome inevitable roster construction mistakes and key injuries (see 49ers)
In terms of talent acquisition in the NFL, the best teams excel at selecting impactful players in the middle rounds of the draft year in and year out. They are good at developing those players And almost as importantly, they are excellent at pro scouting. Teams like the Ravens, 49ers, Rams, Steelers, Eagles, Chiefs and Patriots all have superior coaching staffs as a common denominator.Report
Sure, the front office matters more than anything, even the coach IMO since hopefully they are picking the coach, hence my asterisk. But the teams that are drafting late are doing it because they’re good they aren’t good because they’re drafting late. If you’re trying to rebuild it’s better to draft 1 or 2 than 11 or 12.Report
I suppose this is also a question worth asking: Is there really so much of a difference between a number one draft pick and a number eleven?
I had someone explain to me once that, in the NBA, if you’re not a first-round pick, you’re a benchwarmer but, in the NFL, they’re on round 6 and still picking first-string offensive linemen.Report
Teams find value throughout the NFL draft and even the ‘sure things’ at the tippy top are more like a 50/50 proposition at best (and probably not even that). But for key positions like QB there’s a reason most of the really successful ones were first rounders, with the exceptions tending to either prove the rule or be the products of really good coaching and/or systems.Report
According to ChatGPT:
Slightly less than half of the Qbs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame were drafted in the first round of the draft.
There have been 30 Qbs drafted #1 in the draft and only 4 of them are in the Hall of Fame.
The bottom line, if you are picking a QB with a top 5 pick, you better be right or you’ll be out of a job within 4 years***
***Unless your boss is Woody Johnson.Report
Yea but ask it how many of those are in the pre-FA era when the draft itself was completely different as was the rights teams had over the players.Report
I think I broke ChatGPT 4.0 asking it your question.
There have been 135 Qbs drafted in the first round since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.
Currently there are only 13 QB who were drafted post-merger that are in the Hall of Fame. Of those, 7 were drafted in the first round.
This will dip below 50% when Brady and Brees go the HoF.Report
Quarterbacks are important, but putting an early draft pick on the field leading a 2-14 team could just get you an injured quarterback and another 2-14 record.
There’s no completely talentless team outside Cleveland in NFL history. You have to train or trade the people you’ve got, and it’s easier to do both with a serious effort on Sundays. I’d much rather draft the fifth-best player onto a team that won the last two games of its season, than expect the #1 to join a squad whose spirits have been broken.Report
Well, here were the QBs drafted in the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft:
1. Baker Mayfield (Browns)
3. Sam Darnold (Jets)
7. Josh Allen (Bills)
10. Josh Rosen (Cardinals)
32. Lamar Jackson (Ravens)
Lamar is going to win his 2nd MVP award and every single team in the league could have drafted him if they wanted.Report
The fact that not all of them pan out doesn’t mean it isn’t the right strategy or that there are good qbs at every round for the taking. The better question is which active QBs are highly successful that weren’t picked in rd 1 and right now I think your answer is at most 4, those being Hurts, Purdy, Cousins, and (arguably) Prescott, and with Purdy you almost have to assume his success is really more about Kyle Shanahan until proven otherwise. Meanwhile when you’re talking about cream of the crop for the league the conversation is much more about Mahomes, Allen, Jackson (until his legs fall off), and Herbert, all of whom went in the 1st. Even in your list from 2018 3 of the 5 are still starting and 2 of them at a very high level.Report
It’s not that some of them don’t pan out.
It’s that most of them don’t pan out.
https://www.drafthistory.com/index.php/positions/qbReport
None of the creme of the crop guys you mentioned were the first Qbs taken in their respective drafts. None of them were taken with a top 5 pick.
Tanking played no role in them being selected.Report
Oh, jeez. I look at that list and I think “I probably need to know more about college football to have an opinion on this sort of thing”.
Baker Mayfield was a Sooner.
Sam Darnold was University of Southern California.
Josh Allen was Wyoming.
Josh Rosen was UCLA.
Lamar Jackson was Louisiana.
I guess I kept expecting to see “Alabama” show up.Report
Why should college football be any different?Report
Because every single professional football player appears to be plucked from a decent college football team and it’s reasonable to expect that someone who is a top player at this short list of schools will make it to the NFL and it’s unreasonable to expect someone who is a top player at this much longer list of schools will even show up in the draft.Report
Mac Jones of the Patriots went to Alabama. I’m not sure which school has the best track record of producing pro QBs. My observation as a fan is that there are a whole bunch of things a QB has to get right to succeed and any one of them being wrong is enough for them to fail, sometimes spectacularly. Even the best in the business are only so/so at predicting it.Report
Alabama’s record on QB’s is at best fair to middling. Tua looks pretty good if he can hold up, which is a big question. Bryce Young and Mac Jones, not so much. Jalen Hurts transferred to Oklahoma. The last big-time Alabama QBs were Bart Starr, Joe Namath, and Ken Stabler, whom most of the people here are too young to have seen play. The Tide’s success has generally been the result of superior line play and backfield defense. Even the best schools send only a small fraction of their players to the NFL, and the best teams find lots of value from lesser schools. So Alabama or Michigan will send more prospects to the NFL than lesser programs, which is what you’d expect, but most of their players’ football careers end after senior year post-season bowls.Report
I can only think of one example where one player selected in the draft enabled a dramatic turnaround. The 2012 Colts lost Peyton Manning to injury, the team imploded and they drafted Andrew Luck with the first pick in the draft, who took them to the playoffs the next season.Report
The Texans aren’t having a dramatic turn around this year?
And I agree with you that if you drop the ball on your 1st round picks you aren’t long for a job. But look at the teams you listed. I believe all of them have either attempted to draft a QB in the 1st round that didn’t work out/jury is out on (SF, Pats, Steelers) or are starting a successful qb picked in the 1st round (Rams, Ravens, Chiefs), with the one exception being the Eagles, with Hurts being a 2nd rounder.Report
I’m glad you brought up Stroud. If the Texans tanked properly, they would have picked Bryce Young. CJ was the consolation prize.
Proof positive why you may as well not lose on purpose. Nobody knows anything. Especially when evaluating college QbsReport
I don’t totally disagree but I look at it more like lottery tickets of varying odds with your highest picks being something like a 40% chance of winning. Even the best get it wrong all the time but if I’m going into a burn it all down rebuild I’d rather be 2-15 than 7-10 or 8-9.
But to the question of tanking I’m just not sure it’s possible to orchestrate in the NFL.Report
If you take your Washington squad, they have drafted 4 QBs in the first round since 1994 (Haskins, RG3, Ramsey, Shuler). While RG3 flashed for a season, they are all huge busts. Your best QBs in that time is Kirk Cousins (4th round) and then Gus Ferrotte (7th round). Weirdly, those guys were taken in the same drafts in which a first rounder was spent on a QB (Shuler & RG3).
Of course, my Jets are even worse at picking QBs. Their best is Chad Pennington selected in the 1st round in 2000 (one of 4 first round picks the Jets had that year). Of course, they could have drafted Tom Brady at any point, like the rest of the league. But they didn’t.
You’d have better results throwing darts at names on a wall than you would taking the guys these respective teams have drafted.Report
Well yea but that was my whole point about ownership and front office competence. There’s no working around that problem, as I am reminded every time they show a coaching chart of that 2012 staff. You could bring the best people into the building and it didn’t matter. On that exact kind of note I thought it came out over the last few weeks that the Panthers scouting team wanted Stroud but the owner stepped in and made them draft Young instead. That was allegedly what happened here with both RG3 and Dwayne Haskins. That’s a disaster of an unrelated kind.
But to give an example of a well run organization I don’t think anyone is going to look at the Steelers in a bad light if Kenny Pickett doesn’t work out or that Mac Jones is going to tarnish the Patriots. They swung at 1st round pedigrees and that’s just what you do. IIRC the Chiefs traded up for Mahomes so someone there got something right, and the Bills have coached Allen through what looked like it could have been a bust. As I see it the problem isn’t that there are no sure things, it’s that people take too long to swing again once it becomes clear the last one was a miss.Report
I dunno. You definitely have to pick the right guy. But I’m convinced more young QBs are ruined than developed. The QBs drafted later in the first round into organizations who have a clue, demonstrably do much better than those that don’t. They likely have better talent and a better coaching staff. Right now Stroud’s early success is an outlier. But time will tell if he will be a star or if he’s actually better than Young. No doubt they will be linked like Bledsoe/Mirer, Manning/Leaf, Winston/Mariota, Couch/McNabb, Goff/Wentz, Luck/RG3 and Lawrence/Wilson (gulp)Report