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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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Reverse Incentives

Would it be cruel to punish bad teams for losing late season games? Perhaps, but it would make them a lot more watchable. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Would it be cruel to punish bad teams for losing late season games? Perhaps, but it would make them a lot more watchable. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images) /

You could do something like this by itself or in conjunction with a draft lottery. But what if, for the teams that miss the playoffs, their final four games counted opposite for their draft position? So a win moves you up the draft board and a loss moves you down.

In other words, the Eagles would have been playing to win in order to draft as high as possible. This would have applied to the Jets and Jaguars a month ago, too. It would easily eliminate all tanking down the stretch of the season, and apply more pressure on bad teams to try to turn things around in-season.

Everyone would be playing to win, and the only form of tanking would be “soft tanking” by resting key veterans – which would mostly be done by good teams in the playoffs, with their seeding solidified, but also might be done by bad teams looking to avoid critical injuries.

There’s nothing you can do about that with the playoff teams, and it would be punished for teams fighting for draft position – so you’d probably only see it with players who genuinely had injuries.

I actually think this system might be best. It’s a little bit funky, but I think it’s more interesting than a lottery and it makes late-season games more interesting for fans of bad teams. Thus it should increase leaguewide television ratings.

A really small idea along the same lines that could also work would be to make the first tiebreaker for draft order whoever won most recently. This wouldn’t have changed the Eagles situation given that they had a tie, but it would mean that coming in at 4-11 and winning to improve to 5-11 would still have left them drafting ahead of all of the other 5-11 teams. This would be a really simple change that would eliminate some tanking incentive.

The last idea is a little bit more outside the box, but I think it would be a lot of fun for fans and generate quite a bit of revenue for the league.

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