It’s Time for an NFL Draft Lottery

The reverse-order method of determining the No. 1 pick encourages bad teams to lose so they can land a franchise quarterback, and that’s not the message the league wants to send.

Football is a game of details, and the NFL’s Competition Committee is its anal-retentive bookkeeper. On Sunday through Wednesday at the Biltmore in Phoenix, the committee will consider proposals ranging from whether players can wear the number zero to whether game clocks should show tenths of a second. In pro football, no idea is too small, and no proposal is too esoteric. Maybe this focus on small changes is why the league keeps missing a large and obvious one.

The NFL should institute a draft lottery. Why wait until a public relations disaster forces the league to do what the NBA, NHL and MLB have already done?

Recent events should worry the league. In the final week of the season, the Texans went to Indianapolis, tried to win and got punished for it. Meanwhile, the Bears sat starting quarterback Justin Fields—he said his strained hip was “80%” and trainers shut him down—for their finale against the Vikings. The Bears split snaps between Nathan “Please Don’t Make Another Nathan Peterman Joke” Peterman and Tim Boyle. The Bears lost, the Texans won and Chicago passed Houston for the No. 1 pick. The Bears used the proceeds to get a haul from Carolina. Houston will now get the second choice of available quarterbacks instead of the first.

The NFL is driven by two forces: the thrill of competition and the desire to build wealth. The current method of determining the No. 1 pick serves neither end.

The NFL was the first league to recognize the value of drafting in reverse order of record, a feature of the very first draft in 1936 :: Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

The draft does not encourage teams to tank for entire seasons—nobody has done that and won a Super Bowl—but it absolutely encourages franchises to tank at the end of seasons when they are already bad. Texans players got something out of beating the Colts. The Texans’ organization would have been better off losing.

Two years ago, the analytically inclined Eagles effectively tanked their season finale against the Commanders, costing New York a playoff spot. The Giants needed the Eagles to beat Washington to clinch a playoff spot. But Philly coach Doug Pederson pulled Jalen Hurts for Nate Sudfeld with the Eagles trailing 17–14 early in the fourth quarter. The move showed how uninterested the Eagles were in winning the game. Plus, the loss moved Philly up to the No. 6 draft choice. The Eagles are still benefiting far more from that loss than they ever would have from a win. Well, next year’s draft looks like it will begin with two franchise quarterbacks: USC’s Caleb Williams and North Carolina’s Drake Maye. If you’re a fan of a bad team, would you rather finish 3–14 and get one of them, or 4–13 and miss out?

A weighted lottery would reduce the benefit of losing one more game enough to eliminate any desire to do it. It would also be lucrative. The NFL draft already draws exponentially more interest than other leagues’ drafts. What would the ratings be for an NFL lottery? The 2017 NBA draft lottery drew 4.43 million viewers who wanted to see which team would get to select Zion Willamson. The draft, when the Pelicans actually chose Williamson, averaged 3.5 million. An NFL draft lottery would draw an enormous audience, and it would build even more interest in the draft.

This is just common sense, and the NFL was the first league to recognize the value of drafting in reverse order of record; it was a feature of the very first draft, in 1936. The concept is so ingrained in U.S. sports that we take it for granted. But at the time, it was new and brilliant. Reverse-order drafts allow leagues to rebalance talent without redistributing it. The worst teams get a chance to make up ground on the best teams, but they don’t get to take players from the best teams.

One could argue that, in a salary-cap era, leagues no longer need drafts. If rookies came in as free agents, they would have a say in where they played, and leaguewide payroll limits would ensure competitive balance. But as long as leagues hold drafts, they have an obligation to keep drafts from infecting the integrity of the regular season.

By the final weekend of the season, any team with a chance at a top-five pick has put a lousy team on the field all year. There is no reason to reward teams for being terrible for one or two extra weeks.

If an NFL draft lottery sounds weird at all, it’s only because the NFL has never done it, and the league takes tremendous pride in not being like other leagues. But think about it this way: If the NFL already had a lottery, would anybody argue to take it away? In the almost 40-year history of the NBA lottery, I have never heard anyone argue in favor of eliminating it. The arguments have gone only the other way: Level the odds even more to reduce the tanking incentive even further (which the NBA has done).

The old NFL did not need a lottery as much. But the rookie wage scale and emphasis on quarterback play have changed the math. The most valuable player any NFL team can employ is a star quarterback on a rookie contract. The current draft format encourages bad teams to lose so they can land one. Is that the message the NFL wants to send?