As Dolphins plod, NFL has no plans for NBA-style lottery
The draft remains a highly speculative venture, even when it comes to supposedly can’t-miss quarterback prospects.
There’s no tanking in football. Just ask the NFL, which says it has no plans to institute an NBA-style draft lottery in response to the approach being taken by some teams, including this season’s no-win Miami Dolphins.
“The good news for us is we don’t see that,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said at the owners’ meeting last week in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I don’t think the league has ever been more competitive than it is today. You see that in teams going from last to first in dramatic fashion. I think that’s unique to the National Football League. … And so for us, the competitiveness of our game is obviously critical.”
Even while some observers accuse the Dolphins of tanking their 2019 season in pursuit of the top overall selection in next year’s NFL draft, Goodell said the league doesn’t see a lottery as the answer to any competitive issues that might arise.
“I don’t think that’s solved with a lottery,” Goodell said. “I think that’s solved by all the other issues that we try to deal with on a regular basis through the competition committee and the league in trying to make sure our league is competitive.”
The Dolphins have a record of 0-6 and have lost an average margin of 24.7 points. They traded away some of their best players — left tackle Laremy Tunsil, wide receiver Kenny Stills and safety Minkah Fitzpatrick — to stockpile draft picks. The “race” for the No. 1 choice in the 2020 draft could come down to the result of the Dec. 22 game in Miami between the Dolphins and the Cincinnati Bengals, who are currently 0-7.
The team with the top pick in next year’s draft will have its choice of potential franchise quarterbacks, perhaps Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa or Oregon’s Justin Herbert. The reward of finishing with the worst record in an NFL season is the guarantee of the draft’s top selection. That’s not so in the NBA, which has dealt with tanking allegations in a different way by having a lottery in which teams are encouraged to do their best to win games because even the franchise with the worst record in a season must take its chances when it comes to the draft order.
The Dolphins have denied the tanking allegations. And indeed, there’s no evidence that Coach
Brian Flores and his players aren’t doing all they can to try to win each game. Flores has gone back and forth between Ryan Fitzpatrick and Josh Rosen at quarterback. He went for a potential winning two-point conversion at the end of a near miss against the Washington Redskins. The Dolphins had a fourth-quarter lead Sunday in Buffalo before succumbing.
There’s no disputing, however, that the team’s front office has taken a bigger-picture view with the trades. So does that qualify as organizational tanking or merely being realistic and prudent?
The NFL is a league that thrives on its “any given Sunday” unpredictability and parity, based on the notion that the sport’s overall prosperity is enhanced when fans in more cities are convinced that their teams have legitimate Super Bowl possibilities. The sharing of national TV revenue evenly between franchises keeps teams on relatively equal financial footing. The salary cap keeps spending on players fairly even. The scheduling formula and draft order also are components.
Yet even in a 2019 season in which TV viewership is on the upswing, there is a big disparity between a handful of have and have-not teams. At the top end, the New England Patriots have a record of 7-0 and an average victory margin of 25 points, the highest by an NFL team to this point in a season in the Super Bowl era. At the bottom end are the Dolphins, who suffered a 43-0 defeat to the Patriots in Week 2 in Miami, and the Bengals.
There also is a huge middle class of teams, though, in which anything still could happen.
“I think our competitiveness is really good,” Atlanta Falcons President Rich McKay, the chairman of the NFL’s rulemaking competition committee, said at the owners’ meeting.
McKay said that the number of games decided by seven points or fewer was the most in league history through six weeks of a season.
“So that’s a good stat,” McKay said. “Our margin of victory is good. So we’ve got a lot of good trends from a numbers standpoint.”
This isn’t the first time that tanking allegations have surfaced in the NFL. There was, notably, the “Suck for Luck” talk when quarterback Andrew Luck, considered a once-in-ageneration NFL prospect, was to be available in the 2012 draft.
The reality is that the NFL draft remains a highly speculative venture, even when it comes to supposedly can’t-miss quarterback prospects. Luck was taken first overall by the Indianapolis Colts in 2012 and replaced Peyton Manning, with owner Jim Irsay predicting multiple Super Bowl wins. And while Luck established himself as a top NFL quarterback, the Colts never so much as reached a Super Bowl with him before Luck announced his shocking retirement just before this season.
The last 14 quarterbacks taken first overall in the NFL draft — since Manning in 1998 — are Baker Mayfield, Jared Goff, Jameis Winston, Luck, Cam Newton, Sam Bradford, Matthew Stafford, JaMarcus Russell, Alex Smith, Eli Manning, Carson Palmer, David Carr, Michael Vick and Tim Couch.
That list contains a mixture of successes and busts. Only one, Eli Manning, won a Super Bowl. So it is far from guaranteed that tanking works in the NFL, perhaps bolstering the case for Goodell’s rejection of the NBA model.