Sunday night, Doug Pederson and the Eagles threw an NFL game in an obvious tank job to improve their NFL Draft position that the league must address
The Eagles threw a football game last night, and it was hideous to watch. Let’s just be honest about that, first of all. This was a blatant example of tanking in the NFL for the purpose of getting a better NFL Draft pick.
Would the Eagles have won if they left Jalen Hurts in and coached to win? Maybe, maybe not.
Were the Giants screwed? I’m not quite willing to go that far, largely due to the fact that the NY Giants were 6-10, which reduces their right to gripe. I’m also of the mindset that the Eagles might have ultimately done them a favor.
The Giants are picking 11th now, whereas they would have picked 19th or lower had they won the division.
Is that worth a game of playoff experience for Daniel Jones? That’s a whole separate discussion.
Let’s also be honest that the league and its fans have accepted for a long time what I’ll designate as “soft tanking” by both bad teams and playoff teams with their seeding locked in. Nobody’s mad that guys like Fletcher Cox and Miles Sanders didn’t suit up for the Eagles last night, with injuries they might normally have played through. Nobody’s mad that the Steelers rested their starters.
The unwritten rule seems to be, “Play whoever you want, but once the game starts, you play to win and you play the best players dressed for the game.”
If you really think about it, that’s sort of a silly designation, isn’t it?
I mean, if the Eagles had announced that Jalen Hurts was out with an injury and Nate Sudfeld was starting the game, we’d have seen an even uglier product and people wouldn’t be half as upset. If we care about the on-field product and the integrity of the game, we should be just as upset by that.
Regardless, we clearly cannot rely on some sort of unwritten rule and this is a major competitive issue in the NFL. It’s one thing when it happens at the end of the season in the NBA or NHL. They play 82 games, so even if a team tanks for a long stretch at the end of the year, the “free” wins are spread out amongst several teams and each one makes up 1.2 percent of each of their schedules. But in the NFL, with a 16 game schedule, each game is 6.25 percent of a team’s season.
So tanking one game in the NFL and awarding an opponent a “free” win would be like doing the same for more than five games in the NBA or NHL, or more than 10 games in baseball (although tanking isn’t really a thing in MLB).
That’s why it’s so gross to watch play out as a Giants fan in this spot. Washington won seven games, so more than 14 percent of their wins were gifted to them.
That’s why the NFL has a tanking issue, and it should address it because it’s a pretty easy fix.
And let’s be honest, that game Sunday night wasn’t fun for anyone to watch.
The NY Giants and their fans were justifiably furious that the Eagles weren’t trying to win, Eagles fans were frustrated watching the season end in a miserable fashion instead of seeing a full four quarters of Jalen Hurts, and Washington fans watched their team struggle to close out a divisional opponent trying to lose.
That wasn’t good for anybody.
It’s tough to avoid playoff teams resting their starters in Week 17, but at least they typically don’t rest their entire starting units and thus based on the quality of their team still can pose a bit of a challenge. When a 12-4 team rests some key players, they’re still trying to win and they have some quality talent on the field. When a 4-10-1 team tries to lose a game, it’s ugly.
Here are a few ideas to fix it.
Draft Lottery
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…
Reverse Incentives
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.
Play a Tournament for Draft Position
What does the NFL love more than just about anything? More football.
More football means more revenue for the league. Imagine if the NFL simply seeded the worst eight teams and they played a single elimination tournament that determined NFL Draft seeding. Win three games, get the number one pick. The runner-up picks second, the “championship game” losers go third and fourth with the worst regular season record picking higher, and so on.
Play the games on Mondays and Thursdays during January. I bet the ratings would match or exceed random regular season games. You’d have in-game hits from draft experts like Mel Kiper and Todd McShay breaking down both teams’ needs and the mock draft. The “championship” game could be called the Draft Bowl, and it could be sponsored by Clorox.
The 2021 Draft Bowl, presented by Clorox. Clorox, our bleach can even clean up the Jacksonville Jaguars and New York Jets. Just don’t drink it!
The biggest complications would be getting the NFLPA on board, condensing the offseason for teams most in need of offseason changes, and complicating the coaching carousel timeline.
I think getting the players on board might be simpler than imagined.
First, you exclude all players over the age of 30 or who have started more than 50 games from playing in the games or practicing in the leadup. This reduces the injury risk to players later in their career, who are probably going to benefit the least from extra football. Young players who are still developing get the extra practice and game reps. If this is an issue in terms of depth, you could shorten the games down to 10 minute quarters.
You would also pay the players extra – playoff players get bonuses of $25,000 or more per game (as high as $118,000 for the Super Bowl winners). You could create a similar structure, and those amounts would be more meaningful to younger players who had earned less over their careers.
Next challenge, condensing the offseason. I don’t really care, point blank. Play better! If this generates a couple hundred million in extra revenue for the league, adds interest for the fans, and protects the integrity of late season games, it’s well worth it. The offseason is six to seven months, a few teams losing a few weeks is not a big enough deal to squash the idea.
Finally, impacting the coaching carousel. I think it’s unfair to give the worst teams in the league a disadvantage by making them wait a few more weeks to fire/hire new coaches, and there would be a lot of drama making a change before these games. Of course, that drama means more content for sports talk shows on radio and tv, and more for writers to pontificate about – all of which is good for the league.
But I actually think this could solve another problem. Assistant coaches on playoff teams can be at somewhat of a disadvantage in that the more they win, the more their potential hiring by teams with job openings gets delayed. Teams don’t want to risk waiting and missing out, so this can cost good coaches jobs and lead to weaker hirings.
So just delay the date of the first hiring of coaches for the next league year until a couple days after the Super Bowl. Problem solved. The coaching carousel would happen in early February instead of early January, there would still be more than two months before the draft, and things would proceed normally.
Like I said, it’s an outside the box idea, but it would fix the problem, and personally I think it would be fun to watch and garner good ratings. What more could the NFL hope for in a solution?