Bill Belichick Offers Simple Solution to Fix Tanking in the NFL

The legendary head coach wants the NFL to borrow another sports league's system to alleviate late-season draft position jockeying.

Bill Belichick / Bob Donnan-Imagn Images

As the penultimate week of the NFL season comes to a close there's been a lot of focus on how the draft order is shaking out. The New York Giants found themselves at the center of that particular storm by beating the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday, and in the process, dropping themselves down the draft order from No. 1 overall.

Bill Belichick has thoughts on this discourse— and he is not a fan.

The newly-minted head coach of North Carolina appeared on the Pat McAfee Show on Monday and the conversation strayed to how the Giants beating Indy paved the way for the New England Patriots, Belichick's longtime employer, to hold the top overall selection. This led Belichick to express his opinion that eliminating the whole appeal of tanking would be good for the competitiveness of the league. And there's an easy way to do so: borrow from the NBA.

"I was never involved in [tanking] but I don’t know what happens somewhere else," Belichick said, per Awful Announcing. "It’s different than the NBA. The NBA kind of rectified that by having a lottery. So even if you’re the worst team, you’re not guaranteed the first pick. In the NFL, that’s not quite the case. If you are the worst team, you do get the first pick.

"Personally, I don’t think it would be a bad idea for the competitiveness of the sport to do something similar to what basketball does with those lottery picks. Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation — well we might be having it, but there’d be other circumstances besides just your record. There’d be actually a lottery part of it."

It's easy to see the appeal the way Belichick lays it out. The lottery disincentivizes tanking and avoids continually rewarding perennially terrible franchises, which in theory would inspire positive change within those organizations. It would also add some intrigue to the draft cycle, which the NFL is always interested in.

On the other hand, tanking is not nearly the problem it was in the NBA when the basketball lottery was introduced. There may be some strategic benchings in the interest of holding onto a high draft pick in the final week of the season, but no football team is going to intentionally lose games for months at a time the way NBA teams have in the past. The game itself is too punishing, and careers too short to get every member of a 53-man roster (plus a practice squad, plus a whole coaching staff) on board with losing on purpose.

Nevertheless, what an interesting path for the NFL to potentially take. Delicious food for thought from Belichick.

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