Nothing wrong with an academic discussion…or a drunken bar debate…whichever analogy fits.
But there’s just one basic problem with it. While adding randomness might disincentivize certain teams under certain conditions from benching starters down the stretch, it also by definition will sometimes punish the worst teams who didn’t tank on purpose. It’s inextricable. And it will probably punish the worst teams more often and more materially than it will punish teams who sort of tank.
Said another way, randomness and parity can’t both exist. They are zero sum, if you move the slider one way it moves it away from the other.
And there’s no way to distinguish between teams benching a starter to tank from teams benching a starter to protect them from injury, benching a starter to give a developing rookie reps, or benching a starter who is legitimately hurt.
Lots of gimmicks will be interesting and might make for good TV, but interesting isn’t better than competitive.
If you really are rolling a four-sided die, the result has to be at least 1. The last game of the season will never affect draft order, and everyone would know that in advance. You could roll the die and announce the result with one week left in the season and it wouldn’t reveal any information the teams could act on.
Yeah, I guess that’s why I don’t love the lottery. It lessens the incentive to tank, but it doesn’t remove it. And with the added downside that the teams who most need a high pick don’t necessarily get one.
Which is why my proposal is better (and yes, this is much more a drunken barstool debate). The worst teams generally still get the best pick (barring some big turnaround or crash, which certainly can happen but isn’t the rule). And it completely removes the incentive to tank the last games.
True. But it feels like a good end-of-season thing.
Your proposal sort of assumes that wins and losses are evenly distributed. They aren’t. A team with 3 really tough divisional games to end the season might be 3-11 heading in to the cutoff. A team with 3 comparatively easy games against bottom feeders or a teams who has clinched and are resting starters might also be 3-11. At the end of the year one is 3-14, the other might be 6-11. But team B wins the tie breaker and gets the first pick due to strength of schedule.
Yeah, there’s no coin flip or lottery ball, but it’s just moving the randomness into the luck of schedule.
It also occurs to me that this proposal could cause more controversy than it solves. Suppose the league did their die roll at the end of a season and that bumped the Cowboys, Giants, or Steelers up to the first pick in a year that they wouldn’t otherwise have had it. Fans of every other team would be screaming that the fix was in.
Here’s an idea: I think a real problem with the NFL is how often we see this storyline play out: Brilliant QB prospect gets drafted high by a crappy team, whose crappy coaches throw him out there behind their crappy offensive line before he’s ready, destroying his confidence so he never develops to his potential.
How about we keep the draft the way it is, but say that the top five or so picks can’t be used on a QB. Now THAT would discourage tanking!
Or if you REALLY want to prevent tanking, make a rule that the worst team in the league has to be sold to new ownership in the offseason! Finally, we in Chicago would have something to realistically hope for at the beginnning of each season!
Yeah, I think it’s a problem in search of a solution. And as you rightly point out, it’s devilishly hard to predict NFL success from college success. History is rife with examples of fantastic college players who didn’t pan out in the NFL and vice-versa. And often those vice-versa players come from smaller colleges and didn’t even get a look in the draft process.
All that said, I could be talked into some sort of rolling X year (or game?) average record for draft position sort of scheme. That way, an otherwise good team with one fluke year isn’t drafting the super-duper player, and an otherwise bad team with a good run during one season is still drafting low. The big question would be what that X would be.
The very worst teams, by definition, have a lot of holes, and would still be able to get a great player, at a position where they’re less likely to screw up his development. If a team is able to get one of the best non-QBs available for a few years running and still can’t even manage to get even the 27th-best record, maybe we don’t want to reward that level of ineptitude? Also, a team that has good players at multiple positions but lacks a quality QB will be much more appealing to free agent QBs, so they’d have that route to filling the position.
And the sixth-worst team in any given year probably wants to draft a QB, and won’t be interested in trading “up” to a pick that won’t let them do that. But sure, some years it would happen, just like some years the team picking first feels set at QB and is able to trade down for more assets and still draft the player they want most.
QB is the only position in football with the potential to change a franchise. You can’t argue that other positions of need would have the same impact. It’s a horrible idea.
My suggestion: base the draft order on the previous three seasons. This reduces the impact of any particular game on the draft order. As a part of this, I would also not distinguish between regular season and post season. Simply count all the wins over the previous three seasons (regular and post combined) and sort from low to high. (Tiebreak with randomization.)
Edited to add: I’m thinking three years because that’s something like the average career length of a typical player, who’s not a star. The point is to advantage teams that have systemic problems, not just a single poor season.
Players have explained that in the NFL, if you are not giving 100% every play you will get injured. Like I said above, the coach may give some game time to backups or play a conservative game to avoid injuries but that’s not tanking.