Some owners only care about the bottom line. Some care deeply about winning over all else. Most are somewhere in between.
To be honest, it isn’t clear that you know what you are talking about either. James Dolan has been mentioned. How about Donald Sterling? Neither of them made moves towards winning a championship. In fact, you could probably say that Sterling went out of his way to make sure the Clippers were not a good team.
Harold Ballard never did anything to ensure the Leafs were competitive but he loved the money they generated.
David Glass took over as CEO of the Kansas City Royals in 1993, and became sole owner in 2000. His first move in 1993 was to cut the payroll from 41 million to 19 million. Under his ownership, the Royals have had exactly 4 winning seasons. Their 2015 championship team has been gutted, and they currently are tied for the worst record in baseball.
Even with the “owners like to win” mentality, is there really going to be that much of a difference between going 3-13 and 4-12?
For most, probably not.
And, barring it being a first-year head coach, and/or a team that’s acknowledging that it’s in rebuilding mode, either of those records are likely indicators of a coach that’s about to be shown the door anyway.
This whole discussion is based on a false premise because owners don’t hire and fire coaches, general managers do. General managers are unlikely to look kindly on a coach that turns even a meaningless game into a joke. The coach would be saying in effect, “The talent the GM gave me is such crap that this game will be a joke anyway so we may as well treat it as one. Screw player development, screw player evaluation, this is a joke.” This is not a message designed to appeal either to the incumbent GM or to future GM’s that may be in a position to hire the coach.
I suspect a head coach who tried this would get a call from the players’ union, possibly before the game was even played when the players saw the game plan.
Football is a dangerous, violent sport. Players risk their health and careers on every single play. It’s deeply ingrained in the culture of the sport that players should still go all out and take such risks even in meaningless games in an effort to win the game. I rather suspect the players, and their union, would take a much dimmer view of taking such risks in order to execute plays just for the lulz.
Also, at least some players would most likely have performance-based bonuses at stake. Again, it’s ingrained in the culture of the sport (but not as deeply) that players should accept diminished roles and possibly missing out on performance bonuses due to coaching decisions made in a genuine effort to win a game. But due to to coaching decisions made just for the lulz? If any players missed out on any significant performance bonuses, I’d expect union grievances and lawsuits.
And yeah, I’d expect a call from the commissioner’s office. It would probably be seen by traditionalists as an insult to the dignity of the game. More importantly, it would be probably be seen as a blatant attempt to tank in order to secure a better draft position. There’s no doubt NFL teams do deliberately tank, but they usually try to have at least a vaguely plausible cover (evaluating and developing young talent with real game experience, typically). I doubt the NFL would be as willing to look the other way for a team that just ran deliberately silly plays.
That’s not even close to being universally true. In many cases the GM and HC are on equal footing in the front office (like Seattle). Or if you’re Bill Belichick, you are both HC and GM in one person. You seem under the impression that there’s this clear hierarchy in the NFL and all HCs report to GMs. It’s going to vary from team to team.
IANAFootballFan, but why not?
Never change a winning game, always change a losing one. If both teams are 3-12, what they have been doing so far isn’t winning. At worse, you’ve made your last loss entertaining. At best, you’re 4-12. You can’t do it all the time, but the last game of the season when you aren’t going to the playoffs isn’t “all the time”. Send in your second-stringers, try a triple lateral, pull the plucky but under-sized yet hard-working water boy and send him in after playing a montage of training scenes on the stadium screen with the theme from “Rocky” playing in the background.
Sport is spectacle. The season has been tragedy - might as well let it become farce.
Regards,
Shodan
I assume most do, but not all- Donald Sterling pretty much admitted he was fine with the Clippers losing for twenty years because the payroll was low and he made a profit each year.
Somewhat related question… has there been a situation where it’s the final game of the season, and the two teams are both playoff-bound, and both have their seeds 100% locked up. So winning and losing matter literally not at all. I’d imagine that both teams would rest all their starters, and, heck, why even risk injuring backups, and you’d get the most boring, tepid football imaginable. And presumably the league would not be happy with that.
It would be a bad idea for several reasons. Even the worst team wants to win even the last game of the season so it’s bad for morale.
Yes there’s a call from the Commissioner because the NFL is serious business with billions of dollars on the line and does not like to look ridiculous.
Finally, it might be bad for the future of the team. This final game might be a way to yes try a few new plays, but maybe sit some starting players and give bench players some reps. For bad teams Game 16 is the first pre-season game for the next year so why not practice the basic schemes rather than clown around?
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The last week of NFL football always involves division rivals playing each other. So your scenario can’t happen. It’s impossible for two teams in the same division to have the #1 seed.
The closest would be if one team had the #1 seed locked up and the other was so bad it had last place locked up. Then both teams might not care. But… Division rivals tend to get feisty no matter what. Which might be why the NFL schedules that way.
Also, trick plays don’t work as well if the other teams know when you are going to run them and what they are. Why reveal all of them to the rest of the league in a meaningless game?
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That wasn’t what MaxTheVool asked. He said “the two teams are both playoff-bound, and both have their seeds 100% locked up.” This absolutely could happen, even if both teams are in the same division. It’s not uncommon for multiple seeds to be locked in with a game to play, even if two playoff-bound teams happen to be playing each other in the final week.
Right. I’ve read occasionally about late-season NBA games where all the starters were rested, and, assuming I’m not just totally pulling this out of my ass, the league ended up fining the teams or something, because of course the aim of the league is to provide an entertaining product. It seems like a much bigger deal in the NFL in both directions, because the incentive to rest all the valuable players is much higher as the risk of injury is higher, but at the same time, not getting to see a “real game” when the season is so much shorter seems like a bigger blow to the fans as well. On the other hand, what would stop both teams from tacitly agreeing to just not really try very hard, no rough tackling, yada yada yada?
The OP is not talking about teams laying off and not competing. He’s talking about actual football plays which can work, and do provide plenty of entertainment. And even knowing that a team is going to attempt some trick play doesn’t help that much if they don’t know what it is. The OP doesn’t mention any tacit agreement either, it’s just one coach calling these plays.
On top of all that, the team with all the ‘trick’ plays might win. If that happens a coach of a last place team may just save his job.
OP would have been a Jack Patera fan.
I doubt this very much. For two playoff-bound teams in the same division to have their seed “locked” before the end of the season, that’s such a tall order. I doubt that this has ever or would ever happen with the way that schedules and the playoff seeding format work in the NFL.
So do you mean, say, the Steelers are undefeated at 15-0 and the next-highest team to win its division is at 13-2? And they are playing the Browns in Week 17 who are at 13-2, and the next-best team that is a wild card contender is 11-4?
So the Steelers are guaranteed to have the #1 overall seed, and the Browns are guaranteed to have the higher wild card spot and play whoever is the #4 seed as a wild card.
I guess something like that is possible, but it depends a lot on what is happening in the rest of the AFC. I’d be surprised to ever see that. And again, I expect both teams to still want to rip each others’ throats out (going back to the subject of running trick plays because “whatever”).
Just because I’m a stubborn bastard…
In 2012, after Week 16, the Baltimore Ravens had a record of 10-5 and had clinched the AFC North. They could not improve their position and were locked in as the #4 seed. The Cincinnati Bengals had a record of 9-6 and had clinched the second wild-card berth. They couldn’t improve their position and were locked in as the #6 seed.
The Bengals hosted the Ravens in Week 17 and won the game 23-17. Both teams played their backups most of the game. With the win, the Bengals finished 10-6, same record as the Ravens, but Baltimore won the division.
So there were two teams from the same division, both playoff-bound, and both locked in to their playoff seeds. And they both played their second-stringers.
Here’s a recap of the game: