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3 Ways to fix tanking in the NFL: From lottery to NFL Draft Bowl

By Ryan Messick

UNSPECIFIED LOCATION - APRIL 23: (EDITORIAL USE ONLY) In this still image from video provided by the NFL, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell speaks from his home in Bronxville, New York during the first round of the 2020 NFL Draft on April 23, 2020. (Photo by NFL via Getty Images)
UNSPECIFIED LOCATION - APRIL 23: (EDITORIAL USE ONLY) In this still image from video provided by the NFL, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell speaks from his home in Bronxville, New York during the first round of the 2020 NFL Draft on April 23, 2020. (Photo by NFL via Getty Images) /
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Draft Lottery

NY Giants
The NHL and NBA already use draft lottery systems. Here, NHL Deputy Commisioner Bill Daly (Image via Getty Images) /

Instituting a draft lottery would be the easiest and most obvious fix, given that it’s already how things are done in the NBA and NHL. In the NBA, the worst 14 teams (all of the non-playoff teams) have a shot at winning the lottery, and four teams are chosen – everyone else is then ordered by worst record.

The NFL could do something like that, but I don’t think it would address what happened Sunday Night. The Eagles tanked the game to move up from ninth to sixth. Surely they would also have tanked the game to increase their odds of getting the number one overall pick from 4.5 percent to 9 percent.

So for a lottery to work, there needs to be a randomization for the entire process. I would suggest a different weighting system than the NBA uses, as well. Once you’ve decided how many teams are in the lottery, award them one ball for each loss. I would suggest 12 teams making the lottery. So this year, you would have the following number of balls for each team:

Jacksonville 15
New York Jets 14
Miami (via Houston) 12
Atlanta 12
Cincinnati 11.5
Philadelphia 10.5
Detroit 11
Carolina 11
Denver 11
Dallas 10
New York Giants 10
49ers 10

That would have been 128 lottery balls. In such a system, tanking at the end of the year would have impacted the Eagles chances of moving up by less than one percent. The downside is that Jacksonville would only have about a 12 percent chance of picking first, which is pretty low, while the Eagles would have an 8 percent chance. There’s not enough spread there between a 1-15 team and a 4-11-1 team.

So, you cap the number of spots a team can move up and down, say to three. That means the bottom four teams have a shot at the top pick, and the Eagles could have only moved up as high as third or dropped as low as ninth – and their tanking would only give them 1/128th more of a chance of moving up.

But that’s only one way to go…

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