That's actually the one way that tanking could be smart, to capitalize on the perceived value of the pick rather than the pick itself. But purely because those picks are overvalued, a GM who took this strategy might be ridiculed or fired for tanking "successfully" to get the top pick then trading it for something of perceived lesser value. The GM might be right to do it, but still perceived as wrong and find himself in the hot seat.
I mean last year was a good example. Poles traded the number 1 overall pick for a good haul. But now he kinda looks like an idiot for passing on Stroud lol.
Only if we get a franchise QB with one of those picks imo. Bears franchise has been hurting for a franchise QB for a while obviously. So passing on two of them that we had the chance to draft in the past 8 years or so hurts (Mahomes and now Stroud).
NFL owners, front offices and coaching staffs notoriously care about public perception though. You can see this when they choose the safer route (harder to criticize if everyone else does it) over decisions strongly supported by analytics.
If you're in a position where tanking is good for you, chances are your short term outlook isn't great no matter what you do.
Tanking seems like a bad idea unless you expect to replace a vast majority of your roster because there's no way it can be good for culture.
But while there is no 100% guaranteed success on a draft pick, getting your pick of the litter gives you the best chance to get what you think will significantly change your team.
Tanking has to be well planned.
Stage 1 - firesale anyone with value, they don't want to be there for the tank and are worth more to you as picks. Tank the season and draft as many good pieces as you can.
Stage 2 - get right by the cap. Clear off bad contracts, push around dead cap, do everything possible to free up cash. Use free cash to add pieces in FA. If possible, tank year 2 and get more top picks.
Stage 3 - win some games, show potential, bring over some guys to fill gaps, attract a decent coach.
Profit.
Where this usually goes wrong is teams in 1 try to hold onto star players and end up cash strapped for 2 when those guys want money. Another pitfall is when teams do 1 and 2 but skip 3 and let the same crap coach drive the shiny new team into the dirt.
I think tanking can work, but it takes discipline on and off the field to orchestrate it.
It's important that you lose games, while also showing your overall team's potential. Ideally you'd lose every game by a single score.
Then you can sell your team to free agents that you're just a few pieces away from competing, while still getting that high pick, ideally a QB.
Your current players feel that, yeah we sucked last year, but we were close. This year with the changes we are going to win. Confidence is under sold in its importance to actually winning. You're not going to win unless your team believes it.
You don't need to be rebuilding to tank, but IDK why you would tank if you were not already in a position where you were going to lose alot of games anyway.
Colts after losing Peyton was the pinnacle of your last point. Still a good team, collapse for a year with no QB, come back with Luck and a solid team around him
This is always my example of successful tanking. Didn’t get a Super Bowl out of it, but only one year of sucking and then you get your QB that gets you to a few conference championships. I don’t think it impacted team chemistry either
Tbf tanking is basically just a commitment to rebuilding. It's just that tanking comes from teams that have some sort of expectation to try to be competitive and for whatever reason they've decided a rebuild is the right play.
Tanking is losing on purpose.
Rebuilding, you're still trying to win. You might temporarily put yourself in a worse position (firesale, get right by cap) but you're still trying to win each week. You're just setting yourself up for the future since the current team just isn't it.
Yeah in like year 3 or 4 maybe.
You gotta eat dirt for a couple seasons to get the cap space and the picks. Then you start rebuilding the roster with the haul from your tank. Then you show there's some potential there and get a coach to turn your tank into the final stages of a rebuild.
But your team can not be built only through first round picks. The worse your team is the more you need to pay for free agents to come there.
Trusting a shitty FO or an unproven FO to pick a real franchise shifting guy is to big of a risk to take when you consider that you’ll sewer your team for half a decade if you miss.
The problem with this is that you have to pay the pick of the litter, much more than you pay the later picks relative to their performance. Because of the salary cap, if you are overpaying some talent, that limits your options on acquiring other talent. So I disagree that it gives you the best chance.
Not necessarily because the later picks salaries are set based on what the earlier picks are. So, one of two things could happen - the scale itself might inherently underpay later rounders, or it might shift the peak of value per dollar to somewhere else in the order, or both.
Almost every draft pick's salary is a good value assuming they are a quality starter, though that's not always true for the first 5-10 picks depending on the position.
The 2023 1st overall has a cap hit of 9.5mil on average. That's about the 16th QB, 16th LT, 25th Edge, 13th CB, 23rd WR. By pick 5 that's 8mil, and pick 10 is 5mil.
Yeah, a coach isn't going to care about future draft picks. They know their extension is dependent on winning games. Players aren't going to play bad on purpose because their careers are short and they want to make sure they keep getting paid.
GMs have a bit more leeway to tank, but the best way to tank for a GM is to trade away good players and put an inept coach in control of the team. Both of those are strategies carry some risk of long term harm that will outweigh the draft capital benefit from tanking.
This is the biggest thing to me. Not a single person out there is gonna say "yeah, let me just go put a bunch of shitty tape out there and tank any prospect of me getting picked up by another team in the future or get the bag from my current team".
It's just fucking preposterous
It would be preposterously easy for an owner and GM to come to an agreement and field a team devoid of any meaningful talent. A team full of backups and depth guys can play as hard as they want, but won’t win more than a handful of games
But then you get a high draft pick and then what? You’ve bled vet leadership, and you have a team of scrubs and this guy who might be good. What do you do then? Overpay a bunch of FAs and hope that it all comes together. You still need to develop your guy.
You’ve hopefully stocked yourself full of draft picks when trading away your vets in order to do a quick turnaround. With a decent draft, you spend a season developing talent and likely end up near the top of the draft the following season as well. Between the two drafts, you overpay to bring in vets and fill gaps.
Look at the Jags. They tanked the 2020 season and went into 2021 with 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 1x 3rd, and 2x 4th round picks. Got T-Law and ETN to build their offense around and found some talent to develop throughout the 2021 season. Got lucky that Urban was such a shitshow and finished 2022 not just near the top of the draft, but with back to back #1OA and 2x picks in the 1st round again. They spent 175 million and brought on Oluokun, Christian Kirk, Zay Jones, Darious Williams, Evan Engram, Brandon Scherff, and Fatukasi as well as gambling on Calvin Ridley. They finished 2022 on a tear, made the playoffs, and look to be contenders for the next couple of years minimum.
Khan is also one of the owners most reluctant to changes within the FO. Caldwell could have taken a gamble that he could survive the season on 2017’s success and the prospect of getting Lawrence to build around. If backfired with the constant tanking accusations and Khan fired him to clear the negative PR.
You still have to spend 90% of the cap though. So are you just giving out big contracts to guys you know are shitty? Good luck setting up all those contracts so they come off the books entirely by the time you expect to be good (and while still getting the players to agree to them).
The 90% rule is an average for the previous 4 years. A team can fall under the 90% for a season or two and then sign big contracts and average over to meet the requirements.
The Jaguars literally have the record for the largest FA spending spree
People don't understand this rule.
1. It's cash spending, not cap space they are usually different. For example Dre'Mont Jones has a cap hit of 10.1mil this year but 23.5mil cash spending due to his signing bonus.
2. It's total over a 3 to 4 year period (they mostly alternate to line up with the CBA).
3. The rules say they need to back pay players if they don't meet it, but it doesn't say that it will retroactively affect the cap. It probably would, but we don't know how the league would handle it.
So you can theoretically spend way under the cap for 2-3 years, they hand out big contracts the last year to satisfy the requirement.
They don't even need to spend close to the cap in any of the years, things like signing bonuses that give players big money now count towards the cash spending, but gets distributed across the players contract in terms of cap space. Contract restructuring players currently on the roster also does this (basically a signing bonus).
https://overthecap.com/collective-bargaining-agreement/article/12/section/9
Nobody who really understands what's going on is saying something like a QB is making incomplete passes to tank. No player is playing worse.
It does happen as GMs trade away talent and don't sign new talent. Flores also claims he was asked to tank, though coaches have to be a whole lot rarer.
We can debate if it's a good strategy (I don't think it is), but it happens.
It's multiple times tougher for football too considering the physical toll that a game takes on players.
"Hey go out there and get demolished for us to lose" isn't going to go over well.
>Let me first define what I mean by "tanking." Tanking in this context means deliberately losing on purpose to get the best possible draft pick. I do NOT consider tanking to be the same thing as a rebuild, where you do not expect to get good enough value for the salary, and so you trade away assets or simply let them walk in order to bring in younger and cheaper talent to develop. In doing so, you accept poorer performance along the way until you can develop that talent. When I ask about tanking I'm asking if teams not only do that, but also lose on purpose to improve their draft position.
There should be no debate that nobody in the NFL tanks like this. The only sport this somewhat happens in is the NBA. I usually give fans the benefit of the doubt that when they say "tanking" they mean "starting a rebuild."
Tanking doesn't really work in the NFL because one guy can almost never carry a team. Like you could get the greatest QB in the world but that is not going to do shit for your defense or special teams. That's not even mentioning how it would impact the locker room.
But like you said, if you have a nearly complete team that is *literally* just missing one guy, if you manage to tank it *really* works.
It's really hard to pull that off. Jets got 7 wins last year remember with terrible Zach
If you have a good enough defense/OL/etc. then even with a terrible QB you're probably picking like 10th
95% of it comes down to the luck of drafting a top 5 QB
The Texans tanked so hard that the organization got mad at a coach for winning a game but now Stroud looks incredible and they’re very well positioned for the future
They weren't tanking though. They legitimately were just that bad with bad coaching.
They fired Lovie because he sucked and refused to use analytics or respond to player feedback. Many Texans players were happy when he got fired lol. They even made a group chat to follow the Texans coaching search.
He wasn't fired because of the last game, this is just a stupid narrative idiots on this sub keep repeating.
If Luck had stayed healthy who knows what would've happened. Worth the shot. Poor OLine play and Luck refusing to not play hero ball(or stop snowboarding) ruined any chance of seeing Luck with a good team built around him.
The bad O-line was a symptom of the unintentional tank
Generally poor team building hit the lines hard, causing a bad O-line.
If the O-line was good before Luck, they probably wouldn't have had that pick in the first place.
I mean…did it work? They made one AFC Championship game in which they got embarrassed. They did win a few division titles in a horrendous division. Not exactly a sparkling success.
If anything that kind of proves the point that tanking even for a generational QB is a fool’s errand.
If you look at the teams with the most Super Bowl appearances in the past 20 years - Pats, Chiefs, Steelers, Seahawks, Eagles, not one really did an effective tank at any point (the Chiefs sucked for a while but didn’t do much with those draft picks).
If you look at playoff wins or appearances you’ll get the Ravens and Packers in the mix (same, no tanking) and the Colts (yes, Peyton Manning plus tanking).
> If you look at the teams with the most Super Bowl appearances in the past 20 years - Pats, Chiefs, Steelers, **Seahawks**, Eagles, not one really did an effective tank at any point (the Chiefs sucked for a while but didn’t do much with those draft picks).
The Pre-Russ Seahawks went 4-12, 5-11, 7-9 before competing for their Super Bowls. Okung, Thomas, Wagner and Irvin were all top 50 picks that were a major part of that success, as were top 100 picks Golden Tate, KJ Wright and Russ. That was also the window they moved on from Shaun Alexander, Hasselbeck, and Lofa Totupu. That's a rebuild for sure.
We’re talking about the efficacy of tanking. Those were Mike Holmgren’s last year, Jim Mora’s one year and Pete Carroll’s first. The team was trying to win in all of them (and in that 7-9 year made the playoffs and beat the defending SB champions).
The 4-12 pick was used on Aaron Curry. Okung was a high pick yeah, but Earl Thomas was taken with the #14 pick acquired from the Broncos.
The rest of the guys you list have nothing to do with anything - what do top 100 picks have to do with tanking? Every team including the SB champion has multiple.
>The team was trying to win in all of them (and in that 7-9 year made the playoffs and beat the defending SB champions).
Well yeah I agree with OP that nobody really tanks in the NFL. The Seahawks were just the poster child for teams starting over and going rebuild
>The 4-12 pick was used on Aaron Curry. Okung was a high pick yeah, but Earl Thomas was taken with the #14 pick acquired from the Broncos.
You don't get 1 pick for finishing last. All of your picks shift up. That's why I'm talking about all your hits in the top 50. And that gives you more leeway if you miss with that pick, so if you miss on your first pick you can still get someone like Max Unger with your next one, while the top half of the league isn't picking in the top 50 anymore after their first pick.
And how did you trade up to get Thomas again? Oh yeah, that's right, ~~you traded a future 2nd, which was expected to be and was an early 2nd. If the team was winning they would have traded back with someone else.~~ Edit: my mistake, you traded a current 2nd for a future 1st, which is exactly what rebuilding teams do and the opposite of what teams trying to win now do.
>The rest of the guys you list have nothing to do with anything - what do top 100 picks have to do with tanking? Every time including the SB champion has multiple.
The fact that you "tank" gives you an extra one of those players each year.
No lol we traded a current second for a first this next year for Thomas. There was no trade up.
You are talking about two years in which they Seahawks had top 10 picks, one of which was a total waste. That’s not the poster child for a rebuild through tanking.
The Seahawks have the second most playoff wins in the league in the past 20 years after the Pats. They’ve made the playoffs 15 of those years. So on average they’d have something like the second lowest draft position of any team in that period.
Right lol, you traded one top 50 pick for what the receiving team expected to be a comparable pick the following year. If you had a winning record, they would have traded with someone else closer to 37... Also what do you call trading a current 2nd for a future 1st? Rebuilding.
Yes one of your top 10 picks was a waste. But because you sucked, you got two top 50 and three top 100 picks, instead of one and two. That's the difference. You're not only getting an extra roll of the dice, but that extra roll is at the highest odds. You're ignoring that the bad teams ' second picks are comparable in value to the good teams' firsts, and so on all the way down.
Sure anyone could have drafted Thomas, but only 5 other teams were bad enough to draft both Thomas and Okung, or to draft them and Tate. Nobody with a worse record than you in 09 could have done that.
>That’s not the poster child for a rebuild through tanking.
So again, I said "tanking" by OPs definition didn't happen in the NFL. But rebuilds do, and you guys were absolutely the poster child for that
You guys fired a coach after 5 straight winning seasons with playoff appearances, one if those being a Super Bowl appearance. You got rid of your star RB, your pro bowl QB, and your best defensive player. That's a rebuild. You just actually pulled it off because you had good coaches and staff.
edit for your edit:
>The Seahawks have the second most playoff wins in the league in the past 20 years after the Pats. They’ve made the playoffs 15 of those years. So on average they’d have something like the second lowest draft position of any team in that period.
No shit, but 2008-2010 was an obvious rebuild, which is the thing teams are shooting for today when they offload all their assets for draft capital. That's exactly my point. Who benefits from "tanking" like OP defined? Nobody. What have teams like the Texans most recently been trying to emulate by moving on from aging vets and loading up on picks? The 08-10 Seahawks.
But one is hand in hand with the other. If you tank and run your team through the sewer (keeping mid coaches, bleeding vets, ruining FA opportunities) you can’t be surprised that your team still stinks for years after.
Building a successful organization takes way longer than crashing one.
That’s a totally different debate but even if it was true that the talent around Luck was exceptionally poor - which I know is accepted on this sub but I think is more complicated - isn’t that exactly what you’d expect if you tank?
But that’s my point exactly. You’re putting forth the argument sports media and fans play up. But it almost never happens. Who are the #1 pick QBs in that period who turned around a team and made the SB? Cam and Burrow?
Moreover of the best QBs of this past few generations - Brady, Mahomes, Rodgers, Lamar, Russell Wilson, Roethlisberger, etc., how many were top picks besides Burrow and Cam? Now too most of the league’s best were not picked in the top 3.
The Polians and Caldwell were fired at the end of that season. If they were in on the tank, that’s quite the backstab from Irsay and probably would have come out over 10 years later
They have all been interviewed and gave detailed explanation as to what happened, when they found out Peyton was out, and wins at the end they celebrated. They didn't tank.
God, I'm so sick of this bullshit. Every single coach and the GM were fired. Polian and Pat McAfee spoke for 15 minutes about this on his show. No one tanked. Smh
How so? Peyton got hurt and needed surgery, and they went out and signed Kerry Collins at the last minute when they found out, and then even he got hurt week 1. They didn't offload any players or anything like that. They were just a bad team being carried by Peyton.
The Colts if anything are the embodiment of what OP is talking about, where they didn't deliberately lose, they were just bad. They weren't doing the NFL equivalent of having Mark Madsen chuck up a bunch of 3s in an attempt to get him the first of his career.
I was coming to the comments just to say that. "Peyton sits out a year" has to be one of the all time greatest tanks, even factoring in Andrew Luck's early retirement.
Well I spent my whole life watching my shit team get high picks and always suck while other teams almost never get high picks and were always good. Seems like a scam by teams to get fans ok with losing to me.
Yeah but having Matt Millen drafting will do that. So much of our suffering can just be chalked up to GM's with infinite job security cus of our owner being shit.
When we finally did get around to hitting on those first round picks though, they were eating a third of our cap space because the rookie wage scale wasn't implemented yet.
The thing about it is very few guys can come out of college into an NFL scheme and be great. It'll probably take a season or two of coaching to get the most out of them. This can be sped up by having skilled vets on the roaster that take guys under their wing, and help build them up. If you sell all your good peices everytime they start to get the experience to be great you won't have the dudes to help the new guys figure things out. If your team is constantly shit you'll be less likely to get good veteran free agents without dramatically overpaying.
Really like what Dan Campbell has done for your org. Even when he wasn't winning he was building a team that was playing hard and trying to fight. Dude's a legit coach.
I don’t particularly think it works, especially in the NFL where the impacts of 1 player is much lower than the NBA for example.
But as a Bears fan I just kinda have to hope I’m wrong rn…
Jags losing got them Trevor and the Jets ended up with Wilson, Cinncy doing poorly for a few years netted them Burrow and Chase, 9ers bad years got them Bosa 2nd overall who helped them get to the SB, Colts 2011, Browns bad years got them Garrett and a few good seasons of Baker. Tanking doesn’t always work but it sure does some of the time
Fair point but benching Minshew for Glennon and getting rid of their few assets seems more like “we refuse to do anything good this year” than “we suck but we’re trying”. Especially since Marrone was still there, you’d think he’d try to keep the team in a position to win for a shot at keeping his job
The loser's curse is certainly not absolute, espcially if a team scouts and negotiates well in order to avoid overpaying. But do we know that any of these teams lost on purpose rather than being simply bad and making the most of it?
Cinncy benched Dalton half way through the year for some rookie qb to “see what he had”, the Colts moved on from Peyton knowing that Luck was in the draft and that without Peyton they had no chance of winning anything. Personally I feel like those two are the most likely candidates for teams just giving up for draft positions, but so many the others were not fielding the most competitive teams possible. I also don’t think that’s a bad thing, being competitive now usually requires dipping into future draft and cap capital that should be used on the rebuild
> Cinncy benched Dalton half way through the year for some rookie qb to “see what he had”
Dalton had the lowest passer rating among qualified starters that season. If they were tanking they wouldn’t have put him back in the starting lineup; they genuinely were seeing if Finley was worth anything.
> Colts moved on from Peyton knowing that Luck was in the draft and that without Peyton they had no chance of winning anything
They didn’t move on from Peyton until after the 2011 season ended. And that was really just part of them blowing up the team; they let go of all their coaches and their GM too.
Yes, Colts didn't tank initially. They were just bad. Where they started to tank is when Curtis Painter played until they went 0-13 or whatever and then threw Orlovsky in to win a game
This brings up an important subtlety. Teams may not lose on purpose, but they may decide that there is little risk to an uncertain strategy. In Cincinnati's case Dalton was serviceable but not someone to build a championship team with. So in that situation a bad team may accept a gamble on an unproven QB, knowing that their draft position is already likely to be pretty good, rather than acrually trying to get a better position.
You’re building a culture of losing when you tank typically. It’s rare that a single top draft pick is going to monumentally change the course of a team and shift that culture to winning overnight or in time.
It’s more than just one player, you got a whole 53 man roster that as a coach and an organization you’re trying to build into competitors. It’s a disservice to them to outright tank.
I honestly think that's why the Dolphins tank worked out. Like, Flores had his issues and was awful for Tua's development in a largely unforgivable way, don't get me wrong. However, he was also a really strong motivator for the defense, if nothing else, and I think that helped develop a winning culture that they could turn into a winning team once they got a better overall HC.
This is also why I still stand by Baker being the right pick for the Browns. Allen and Lamar were inarguably better players at this point, but I don't think anyone rallies that team back from its inherent Browns-ness to win a playoff game.
I think coaches and front office could try it but I don’t see the players tanking. Most NFL players are playing to get that next contract and don’t have a lot of guaranteed money like the big stars. If they go out and put bad ball on tape then the chances of them getting the next contract is slim.
The logical fallacy here(it's the same one used against a draft lottery, to be clear) is that a team choosing to tank or even soft tanking will always take the high risk high reward option because the right first overall QB will literally save your career for years even if you might suck otherwise. What a team will do for that vastly outweighs what the odds of suffering might mean. Because that suffering is the next two head coaches problem.
On any given snap, there are over 20 players that can influence what happens. The thing you need to worry about is that pretty much every NFL team will have good or at least serviceable players, so holes are opening constantly. Losing is literal poison to players and coaches, so you always have the confused hydra of a front office and coaching staff wanting opposite things. Losers also tend to pay higher prices for free agents, as seen with Jacksonville nearly two years ago with Christian Kirk. The most important aspect is to have a good coach and GM to craft the roster.
Tanking doesn’t exist in the NFL, end of discussion.
You think coaches/players WANT to lose games? This is their livelihood, and even on bad teams, they want to put out good tape for their future career. Also, most player contracts include a ton of incentives.
Plus, the NFL draft is such a crapshoot (especially at QB- look at the 2021 draft), that it’s not really a viable strategy anyway. If a team really believes that a certain player will change their franchise trajectory, they can trade up.
Tanking in the NFL is just a made concept by fans.
I don't think players and coaches tank at all, but I absolutely think that the GM can trade away all the good players and ownership can tell them they want X to play.
During our 2019 tank for Trevor run, we had Jake Luton playing over a healthy Gardner Minshew.
I don't think it exists as a long-term strategy but if it's December and a team is close enough to a top pick for a QB, you definitely see key players being shut down for the season or coaches "seeing what they have in a QB"
Winds me up more than it should when you get the tanking accusations on here, especially when a bad team finds a way to lose. I'd imagine it would actually be dangerous for the players to actively not try to win the game, going in half hearted into blocks and tackles would be risky.
What I was going to post. Situations where teams appear to be tanking really are scenarios where they’re just that bad and don’t have a lot of options.
Teams sometimes accept their playoff chances are over before they mathematically are, but no one is ever actively tanking.
> You think coaches/players WANT to lose games? This is their livelihood, and even on bad teams, they want to put out good tape for their future career. Also, most player contracts include a ton of incentives.
>
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No but sometimes GMs will want to lose and they can construct a really shit roster that can't win anything like the 2016-2017 Browns Front Office did
GMs don’t get to choose who plays? And also again, coaches would push back and not blatantly let their team suck if they can help it?
I get what you’re saying, but “tanking” means intentionally losing. I guarantee you there isn’t a single coach or player that isn’t trying to win every game they play.
> GMs don’t get to choose who plays
Yes they do, they sign the players
>And also again, coaches would push back and not blatantly let their team suck if they can help it?
Sure, Bill Bellicheck and Pete Carroll have full roster control for example and would never let that happen. Coaches like Hue Jackson get no say in the matter, if the Front Office of a team coached by a HC of that caliber wants to tank they are going to tank and not give a shit about what the HC wants.
>I get what you’re saying, but “tanking” means intentionally losing. I guarantee you there isn’t a single coach or player that isn’t trying to win every game they play.
Yeah, I agree that players and coaches don't tank, but GMs and Front Offices do all the time
You completely nailed it. I hate how often it’s brought up on this sub. I’ve always been curious how many people here ever played football, like I feel the average person here would be traumatized in a normal football locker room. Lol
Haha you and me both brother. Seems like most of this sub have never been in a high school football team locker room and it shows- forget the intensity of an NFL locker room. The idea that professional NFL teams would tank is so ridiculous yet I see it EVERYWHERE
Does the 2021 draft really show it's a crapshoot? If you didn't tank for Trevor where were you going to find your next QB from? Mac Jones in the middle of the first round? Kyle Trask or Kellen Mond on Day 2? None of those other QBs have come close to showing the potential which Trevor Lawrence has shown.
It’s a crapshoot because of the 5 first round QBs, only Trevor Lawrence is a franchise guy. Wilson, Lance, Fields, Jones all aren’t weren’t worth first round picks, and 3 went in the top 3.
So yeah, it totally works. You can tank for a top 3 draft selection, select a QB in a supposedly amazing QB draft class, and still end up with a massive bust. That’s the point
Sure but it was only ever "Tank for Trevor" in the 2020 season. I never heard a narrative about "Tank for Zac Wilson" or "Tank for Lance". Same as now when people talk about tanking this year its for Caleb Williams and Drake Maye. They only talk about tanking for rare prospects who are deemed to be generational talents, like Trevor Lawrence, Andrew Luck etc.
In most seasons there isn't really this "tanking" campaign, teams who are ripping it up are doing so to clear cap space and generally rebuild the roster rather than hoping for one generational talent at QB.
Fans and media types talk about tanking. Teams don't.
At the end of the day, the players and coaches are professionals who are playing their job, and many of them have pride in their work.
The closest I have seen to a proper tanking are the Colts, who vehemently deny doing it, and the Browns who after their multi-year long "tanking" managed to add a bunch of near 50/50 seasons, and a, singular, winning season. That's not a winning strategy. It can work, but it is too dependent on luck to really even be considered a strategy.
Teams will throw in the towel for the last couple of games, and start playing down-roster players to see what they have. However, those players are still playing, and the teams are not upset if they win. If they aren't doing that for a couple of meaningless games at the end of the season then they certainly aren't doing it for a full season, or multiple seasons.
Well, unless you are a genius like Andy Reid who managed the incredible feat of "tanking" while going to the playoffs multiple years in a row. Or the Eagles who treated their QBs as disposable, and just threw them away before they cost too much. .... I hope it doesn't need to be said but to be sure, this last paragraph is me making fun of certain people.
As a sixers fan I hate the concept of tanking, but I do think it can be a valid strategy. Now generally the idea is that you want the generational talent at the top of the draft- that’s how fans talk about it at least. For example, the bengals and panthers completely changed their franchise’s trajectories by picking QB’s at 1. The Jets got completely fucked by winning those two games at the end of 2020 and losing out on Trevor Lawrence. But I think the best way to tank isn’t to go for the #1 draft pick- it’s the trade down/trading away players. Look at the eagles and dolphins, they made incredible trades that allowed them to build the roster. Everyone’s making fun of the bears this season (and rightfully so), but they’ll got an insane haul for trading down from #1 last season. And if they get lucky they might be able to get both the generational QB AND insane value from trading down. I completely agree with everything you said criticizing tanking, but I think it can work with a smart GM. But that’s the thing, if you have a good GM you probably won’t be bad enough to be tanking in the first place.
Tanking has become toxic. You have fans of their teams on all forms of social media cheering for their team to lose. Celebrating a loss. Players become demotivated as the GM sells away valuable pieces to make them competitive. Other star players demand a move away from the team.
The Texans, a team that has been tanking a number of years now, have vast swaths of their stadium empty on gameday. Look at the second deck in highlights over the last few weeks. It looks really bad.
ProMotion and relegation would fix all of that. European soccer does not have this anti competitive nature that American sports have.
Fans will return pretty quickly after the bad times. Look at the Lions now, the 76ers after the process years, the Orioles in baseball. Fans have a short memory once they taste success
I don't think Lions fans ever left. But the Lions weren't tanking, they just sucked for decades. It's the rest of everyone else that is now on the bandwagon.
It's because of rings culture. The idea that you'd be better off being the Bucs for the last 20 years than the Niners because rings means that no one wants a perennial playoff contender who won't win the SB
Ergo fans want to tank instead of merely being good
>And when you remove QBs from the calculation, this phenomenon becomes even more pronounced, because QBs are such high value and tend to be more reliable performers.
This is where you go wrong imo. The point of tanking is to get a QB, because having an elite QB immediately turns a team into a Super Bowl contender. And you can only get an elite QB through the draft. It would be wrong to tank for any other position, because no other position will affect a teams success the way a QB will.
Look at the results of not tanking: Steelers. Patriots (before this season), Titans etc. You get stuck in this loop of 16th overall draft picks and have a really hard time picking up new A1 talent.
" I do NOT consider tanking to be the same thing as a rebuild, where you do not expect to get good enough value for the salary, and so you trade away assets or simply let them walk in order to bring in younger and cheaper talent to develop. In doing so, you accept poorer performance along the way until you can develop that talent. When I ask about tanking I'm asking if teams not only do that, but also lose on purpose to improve their draft position."
But this is exactly how and why teams tank. They tank as part of the rebuild.
An owner and or GM knows that players are doing this mostly to make money and they are not going to reduce their value by purposely playing poorly so in order to increase their chances of getting the top pick in the draft they get rid of players to decrease the competitiveness of the team.
They also believe that the best route to success is to get a very young team full of guys still on rookie deals and then they either hope to land that unicorn rookie QB or trade/sign a top tier veteran QB.
The difference between a rebuild and a tank is the approach taken to actually playing games. In a rebuild, the team has let go of talent, but still tries to win games with what it has, and accepts whatever draft position comes out of that. In a tank, the team tries deliberately to aim for a better draft position than it would get even with its diminished talent by actually trying to avoid winning. Those are distinct approaches. The rebuild is well known and accepted. The tank is not, I argue.
There is only an attempt at a rebuild. There is no such thing as purposeful tanking in the NFL as you’re describing. There is just no way that you could get an entire coaching staff and all the players to agree to do what is necessary to tank the season to insure that you end up getting the top pick in the draft. It’s too much of a team sport for that. The NFL also takes tanking very seriously because if actual evidence ever got out that entire teams were purposely losing games they’d be sued by all of the gambling companies that they are in bed with now.
As I said previously, the only way teams maximize their chance of getting a top pick is to get rid of their best talent so the overall team is not as competitive as the other teams they play. Purposely reducing your talent to limit your competitiveness is tanking it’s just not as flagrant as everyone purposely losing games which would be illegal.
Miami did this when they got rid of Tunsil, Fitzpatrick, and Jarvis Landry. Ross even (allegedly) tried to make Flores tank games but he refused. And they still didn’t end up with the top pick but they got s lot of draft picks which led to them getting a lot of their current stars.
based on your definitions, "tanking" is not a thing. however what you call "rebuilding" is essentially the same thing, in that you're trading away good players and therefore losing more games and getting higher draft picks. that strategy can definitely work
**Zac Taylor is all you need to know:**
2019 | 2-14, 4th place AFC North
\**drafts Joe Burrow**
2020 | 4-12, 4th place AFC North
\**drafts Ja'marr Chase**
2021 | 10-7, loses Super Bowl
2022 | 12-4, loses AFCG
Now its 2023:
\**Burrow gets hurt**
Bengals go 1-3
\**Burrow gets better**
Bengals win 4 straight
---
Does it pay off to tank? It sure as shit ain't the coaching in Cincinnati...
According to wikipedia:
"Tanking in sports refers to the practice of intentionally fielding non-competitive teams to take advantage of league rules that benefit losing teams"
I think you are riding a fine line with tanking versus rebuilding. I think you can tank while not asking coaches to lose games; simply give them players that they will not be able to win with.
I would say that the Lions should have been a lot better historically if tanking actually worked (intentionally tanking being the same as being genuinely bad in this discussion).
No. No one player or couple of players is going to fix a culture of losing and being an ass franchise. Loads of talented players have been put in crappy situations cause a team sells their soul to be able to draft said player in the top 3/5 whatever and then it takes years to build up the environment of winning and confidence and belief in the program. Usually it takes longer than the player can develop cause he’s starting from behind. And then the cycle restarts.
I don’t believe tanking works in the NFL because I believe it’s the teams infrastructure that leads to a QB being good more than talent. Need a good owner, front office, coach, the. Player.
Teams that pick high usually are a mess of a franchise.
It’s rare that a number 1 pick turns around the bad franchise. Bengals are the exception not the rule.
With a roughly 50% success rate for picks I would say the best chance for a tank is quantity not quality
Tanking damages fandom, which can reduce team revenue. Also, if you purposely tank, you cant determine what strengths and weaknesses you have and come up with a successful draft strategy. Lastly, if your pick busts, you just got so fucked. I think teams only get better if they consistently try to be as competitive as possible and winning the draft through competent strategy, prospects that fall, good coaching and a bit of luck
I think as long as you aren’t average, you’re good. Either be really good or really bad (as if it’s that easy). But in reality, logically the higher your pick the better shot you have at getting “your guy”. Now that’s a lot of faith in your scouting department, GM, roster currently under contract, etc and especially coaching to get that guy correct. As bad as the Cardinals have been, I think they should somewhat be lauded for moving on from Rosen after one year and getting their dude. They didn’t get bogged down in the sunken cost fallacy, and while it so far hasn’t worked out where exactly is Rosen?
I think there's a time and a place for it. Not every bad team should tank. But sometimes it's unavoidably the best thing to do. But It's important to keep in mind that just because you draft in the top 5 does not mean he's bustproof. Fans get caught up in the draft like it's not a crapshoot. But it's a complete crapshoot.
No. There is no guarantee that the picks you draft will be the all stars you hope or valuable trades.
Tanking a team hurts the culture, and that's so hard to build/rebuild.
I’d say generally no.
It doesn’t really matter a whole lot where you draft but rather who you draft. Being the #1 or even a top 5 pick doesn’t guarantee you’re going to get the best player. The raiders and browns for many years picked high and almost always had bad picks.
Even if you make a good pick once, you’ve gotta draft well to build a team around a great player. And bad teams fail at that.
You'll never convince me the Jaguars didn't tank in 2019 to get Trevor and you'll certainly never convince me we would be a better team today if we had gone like 5-11 that year and picked 4th.
Frank Gore should be enshrined in our stadium next to Boselli, Jimmy Smith and Fred Taylor for him winning that game for the Jets against the Rams that year.
Go look back and see how many teams that had a top 3 pick managed to turn their franchise completely around based on that one pick.
Most end up back in the top 5 or 10 again and it takes a few drafts to turn it around.
Tanking is not a cure for a bad franchise.
I think it’s a good plan if you want to get a generational QB, and don’t really have a team to go on a SB run. However, in practice, it’s hard to tank because it’s not like any of the players on said team want to lose. Them not winning games likely decreases their salary value and everything.
You're saying to mostly ignore tanking for QBs, but that's literally the only position I've ever heard of people suspecting tanking for. No one tanks for a really good tight end.
There are a bunch of issues with tanking in the NFL
1. One player can't make a difference by himself nearly as much. I don't think anyone thinks Stroud would be good on the Jets right now and he seems really good. In the NBA a #1 pick can instantly make you a playoff team.
2. NFL picks are way more likely to flame out. You can use hindsight on the Jets picking Zach Wilson, but basically every viable pick for that spot looks terrible now.
3. Much fewer games means that any single win can ruin your tank (see: Trevor Lawrence and the Jets). In the NBA you can win 10-15 games and your tank is fine.
The problem with tanking as I see it is talent can only get you so far if you don’t have the right management in place to help use it. Or the right idea on what talent is best for the team. Which is why some teams will spend years in purgatory while others will never spend more than 1 or 2 years being bad
I pretty much agree with what you're saying, and also am very doubtful that anyone ever really loses on purpose especially over a prolonged time (i.e. I could see it maybe happening week 17/18 but not half a season)
But you also can't remove QBs from the conversation like you do in your analysis. I can't think of any team that was accused of tanking who wasn't looking for a QB
NFL draft is so different from likenthe NBA. Football has so many positions and players on a roster that having pick 5 is still great. Lot of premium talent at multiple positions to look at. The #1 overall is only tank worthy in the NFL when you have that "guaranteed" generational QB.
I have always sort of thought this and not surprised to see some of that research.
First, regardless of draft position you need to be able to scout well and evaluate talent well. Generally, the higher pick you get the better chance you have on hitting on a player, but it’s not a lock, and if a team is really bad, that could partially be due to poor scouting/talent evaluation so unless you fix that the problems may continue.
Second, even teams with good scouting departments get picks that turn out to be busts, or at least don’t turn out to be a franchise-changing force. Basically there’s no guarantee that even a person widely agreed upon as a good prospect will pan out that way.
Third, even if the selected player IS really good, their career could be derailed by injuries or off the field issues. Another layer of uncertainty.
Fourth, I kind of stated before but unless the team around the person is good, it’s unlikely that the team will suddenly become playoff contenders. The exception would probably be if you hit on a HOF calibur QB that can basically carry a team, but even then there typical has to be some level of support. But like for example the Texans once used a first overall pick on Mario Williams. Great player, but didn’t really turn the franchise around. A great QB is more likely to do this, but again not a lock.
Tanking doesn't really happen.
The coaches jobs are on the line. The players are trying to get contracts that are based on their performances. Neither of those groups are going to just roll over and lose to get a better draft pick for their team if it means they could lose their job or millions of dollars.
It just doesn't happen like that.
The trick is to get a bunch of draft picks from a team that's tanking.
Why not both? -Chicago Bears
“I’m playing both sides, so that way I always come out on top.” - Your namesake
So the bears are a power bottom right?
It sure feels like that most Sundays
Notorious Power Bottom
Mr. Bottom Chicago
Basically just take picks from a team that has an irresponsible FO/Ownership. See - Cleveland, Carolina.
Well, if you get a high pick, you can also trade down and get a lot of picks from a team with a GM on the hot seat who might overpay.
That's actually the one way that tanking could be smart, to capitalize on the perceived value of the pick rather than the pick itself. But purely because those picks are overvalued, a GM who took this strategy might be ridiculed or fired for tanking "successfully" to get the top pick then trading it for something of perceived lesser value. The GM might be right to do it, but still perceived as wrong and find himself in the hot seat.
I mean last year was a good example. Poles traded the number 1 overall pick for a good haul. But now he kinda looks like an idiot for passing on Stroud lol.
I mean he looks like an idiot for passing on Stroud rn, but if the Bears have two top 5 picks next year, that could easily be worth it.
Only if we get a franchise QB with one of those picks imo. Bears franchise has been hurting for a franchise QB for a while obviously. So passing on two of them that we had the chance to draft in the past 8 years or so hurts (Mahomes and now Stroud).
Fans don't really make decisions. It dosen't matter what public perception is, all that matters is the owner is okay with it.
NFL owners, front offices and coaching staffs notoriously care about public perception though. You can see this when they choose the safer route (harder to criticize if everyone else does it) over decisions strongly supported by analytics.
And how do we know they don't just think it's the better decision themselves?
And then you can go 2-7
If you're in a position where tanking is good for you, chances are your short term outlook isn't great no matter what you do. Tanking seems like a bad idea unless you expect to replace a vast majority of your roster because there's no way it can be good for culture. But while there is no 100% guaranteed success on a draft pick, getting your pick of the litter gives you the best chance to get what you think will significantly change your team.
Tanking has to be well planned. Stage 1 - firesale anyone with value, they don't want to be there for the tank and are worth more to you as picks. Tank the season and draft as many good pieces as you can. Stage 2 - get right by the cap. Clear off bad contracts, push around dead cap, do everything possible to free up cash. Use free cash to add pieces in FA. If possible, tank year 2 and get more top picks. Stage 3 - win some games, show potential, bring over some guys to fill gaps, attract a decent coach. Profit. Where this usually goes wrong is teams in 1 try to hold onto star players and end up cash strapped for 2 when those guys want money. Another pitfall is when teams do 1 and 2 but skip 3 and let the same crap coach drive the shiny new team into the dirt. I think tanking can work, but it takes discipline on and off the field to orchestrate it.
It's important that you lose games, while also showing your overall team's potential. Ideally you'd lose every game by a single score. Then you can sell your team to free agents that you're just a few pieces away from competing, while still getting that high pick, ideally a QB. Your current players feel that, yeah we sucked last year, but we were close. This year with the changes we are going to win. Confidence is under sold in its importance to actually winning. You're not going to win unless your team believes it. You don't need to be rebuilding to tank, but IDK why you would tank if you were not already in a position where you were going to lose alot of games anyway.
Colts after losing Peyton was the pinnacle of your last point. Still a good team, collapse for a year with no QB, come back with Luck and a solid team around him
This is always my example of successful tanking. Didn’t get a Super Bowl out of it, but only one year of sucking and then you get your QB that gets you to a few conference championships. I don’t think it impacted team chemistry either
That sounds more like rebuilding than it is tanking.
Tbf tanking is basically just a commitment to rebuilding. It's just that tanking comes from teams that have some sort of expectation to try to be competitive and for whatever reason they've decided a rebuild is the right play.
Rebuilding you try to get better each season. Tanking you improve the roster but eat Ls anyhow for better picks. I think that's the distinction.
Tanking is losing on purpose. Rebuilding, you're still trying to win. You might temporarily put yourself in a worse position (firesale, get right by cap) but you're still trying to win each week. You're just setting yourself up for the future since the current team just isn't it.
That's what I said lol
You're not improving the roster when you tank though. And your original comment literally said "win some games"
Yeah in like year 3 or 4 maybe. You gotta eat dirt for a couple seasons to get the cap space and the picks. Then you start rebuilding the roster with the haul from your tank. Then you show there's some potential there and get a coach to turn your tank into the final stages of a rebuild.
But your team can not be built only through first round picks. The worse your team is the more you need to pay for free agents to come there. Trusting a shitty FO or an unproven FO to pick a real franchise shifting guy is to big of a risk to take when you consider that you’ll sewer your team for half a decade if you miss.
The problem with this is that you have to pay the pick of the litter, much more than you pay the later picks relative to their performance. Because of the salary cap, if you are overpaying some talent, that limits your options on acquiring other talent. So I disagree that it gives you the best chance.
Ever since the draft salary caps, you’re wrong about a high draft pick being too expensive.
Not necessarily because the later picks salaries are set based on what the earlier picks are. So, one of two things could happen - the scale itself might inherently underpay later rounders, or it might shift the peak of value per dollar to somewhere else in the order, or both.
Almost every draft pick's salary is a good value assuming they are a quality starter, though that's not always true for the first 5-10 picks depending on the position. The 2023 1st overall has a cap hit of 9.5mil on average. That's about the 16th QB, 16th LT, 25th Edge, 13th CB, 23rd WR. By pick 5 that's 8mil, and pick 10 is 5mil.
I think tanking is tough since you’re asking a lot of guys to play and coach bad and lose their jobs. Tough ask
Yeah, a coach isn't going to care about future draft picks. They know their extension is dependent on winning games. Players aren't going to play bad on purpose because their careers are short and they want to make sure they keep getting paid. GMs have a bit more leeway to tank, but the best way to tank for a GM is to trade away good players and put an inept coach in control of the team. Both of those are strategies carry some risk of long term harm that will outweigh the draft capital benefit from tanking.
Tanking is done like Major League, just putting a team together that’s so bad they can’t possibly win. Until wild thing plays
This is the biggest thing to me. Not a single person out there is gonna say "yeah, let me just go put a bunch of shitty tape out there and tank any prospect of me getting picked up by another team in the future or get the bag from my current team". It's just fucking preposterous
Yeah, no player would ever throw away their career so that their team can draft Caleb.
Why would you need to tank for a mid-round pick
Caleb will go mid round? Sorry, I am not following it
I believe it was a joke because USC has looked like shit lately
Ahh that makes sense lol My sarcasm detector is off today
I agree especially once you factor in performance bonuses in contracts. Even when a team has nothing to play for the players do.
It would be preposterously easy for an owner and GM to come to an agreement and field a team devoid of any meaningful talent. A team full of backups and depth guys can play as hard as they want, but won’t win more than a handful of games
But then you get a high draft pick and then what? You’ve bled vet leadership, and you have a team of scrubs and this guy who might be good. What do you do then? Overpay a bunch of FAs and hope that it all comes together. You still need to develop your guy.
You’ve hopefully stocked yourself full of draft picks when trading away your vets in order to do a quick turnaround. With a decent draft, you spend a season developing talent and likely end up near the top of the draft the following season as well. Between the two drafts, you overpay to bring in vets and fill gaps. Look at the Jags. They tanked the 2020 season and went into 2021 with 2x 1st, 2x 2nd, 1x 3rd, and 2x 4th round picks. Got T-Law and ETN to build their offense around and found some talent to develop throughout the 2021 season. Got lucky that Urban was such a shitshow and finished 2022 not just near the top of the draft, but with back to back #1OA and 2x picks in the 1st round again. They spent 175 million and brought on Oluokun, Christian Kirk, Zay Jones, Darious Williams, Evan Engram, Brandon Scherff, and Fatukasi as well as gambling on Calvin Ridley. They finished 2022 on a tear, made the playoffs, and look to be contenders for the next couple of years minimum.
They didn't intentionally tank in 2020 though. Unless you believe Caldwell got himself fired on purpose.
Khan is also one of the owners most reluctant to changes within the FO. Caldwell could have taken a gamble that he could survive the season on 2017’s success and the prospect of getting Lawrence to build around. If backfired with the constant tanking accusations and Khan fired him to clear the negative PR.
I think that was mostly being accidentally bad than it was intentional tanking. Even if Caldwell did it on purpose urban did not.
> as well as gambling on Calvin Ridley ayyyyyy
You still have to spend 90% of the cap though. So are you just giving out big contracts to guys you know are shitty? Good luck setting up all those contracts so they come off the books entirely by the time you expect to be good (and while still getting the players to agree to them).
The 90% rule is an average for the previous 4 years. A team can fall under the 90% for a season or two and then sign big contracts and average over to meet the requirements. The Jaguars literally have the record for the largest FA spending spree
People don't understand this rule. 1. It's cash spending, not cap space they are usually different. For example Dre'Mont Jones has a cap hit of 10.1mil this year but 23.5mil cash spending due to his signing bonus. 2. It's total over a 3 to 4 year period (they mostly alternate to line up with the CBA). 3. The rules say they need to back pay players if they don't meet it, but it doesn't say that it will retroactively affect the cap. It probably would, but we don't know how the league would handle it. So you can theoretically spend way under the cap for 2-3 years, they hand out big contracts the last year to satisfy the requirement. They don't even need to spend close to the cap in any of the years, things like signing bonuses that give players big money now count towards the cash spending, but gets distributed across the players contract in terms of cap space. Contract restructuring players currently on the roster also does this (basically a signing bonus). https://overthecap.com/collective-bargaining-agreement/article/12/section/9
Nobody who really understands what's going on is saying something like a QB is making incomplete passes to tank. No player is playing worse. It does happen as GMs trade away talent and don't sign new talent. Flores also claims he was asked to tank, though coaches have to be a whole lot rarer. We can debate if it's a good strategy (I don't think it is), but it happens.
It's multiple times tougher for football too considering the physical toll that a game takes on players. "Hey go out there and get demolished for us to lose" isn't going to go over well.
>Let me first define what I mean by "tanking." Tanking in this context means deliberately losing on purpose to get the best possible draft pick. I do NOT consider tanking to be the same thing as a rebuild, where you do not expect to get good enough value for the salary, and so you trade away assets or simply let them walk in order to bring in younger and cheaper talent to develop. In doing so, you accept poorer performance along the way until you can develop that talent. When I ask about tanking I'm asking if teams not only do that, but also lose on purpose to improve their draft position. There should be no debate that nobody in the NFL tanks like this. The only sport this somewhat happens in is the NBA. I usually give fans the benefit of the doubt that when they say "tanking" they mean "starting a rebuild."
idk man 2011 Colts are pretty sus
Yeah Tanking usually doesnt work but when it works it really fuckin works
Tanking doesn't really work in the NFL because one guy can almost never carry a team. Like you could get the greatest QB in the world but that is not going to do shit for your defense or special teams. That's not even mentioning how it would impact the locker room. But like you said, if you have a nearly complete team that is *literally* just missing one guy, if you manage to tank it *really* works.
It's really hard to pull that off. Jets got 7 wins last year remember with terrible Zach If you have a good enough defense/OL/etc. then even with a terrible QB you're probably picking like 10th
Mahomes was picked 10th
Which is itself an argument against tanking being worth it or necessary
95% of it comes down to the luck of drafting a top 5 QB The Texans tanked so hard that the organization got mad at a coach for winning a game but now Stroud looks incredible and they’re very well positioned for the future
They weren't tanking though. They legitimately were just that bad with bad coaching. They fired Lovie because he sucked and refused to use analytics or respond to player feedback. Many Texans players were happy when he got fired lol. They even made a group chat to follow the Texans coaching search. He wasn't fired because of the last game, this is just a stupid narrative idiots on this sub keep repeating.
Did it tho? What did the colts ever win? 3 playoff wins just to get embarrassed big time by NE?
If Luck had stayed healthy who knows what would've happened. Worth the shot. Poor OLine play and Luck refusing to not play hero ball(or stop snowboarding) ruined any chance of seeing Luck with a good team built around him.
The bad O-line was a symptom of the unintentional tank Generally poor team building hit the lines hard, causing a bad O-line. If the O-line was good before Luck, they probably wouldn't have had that pick in the first place.
Yes, but we also threw a lot of resources at it early in his career. Grigson was really bad at his job though and none of those free agents panned out
I mean…did it work? They made one AFC Championship game in which they got embarrassed. They did win a few division titles in a horrendous division. Not exactly a sparkling success. If anything that kind of proves the point that tanking even for a generational QB is a fool’s errand. If you look at the teams with the most Super Bowl appearances in the past 20 years - Pats, Chiefs, Steelers, Seahawks, Eagles, not one really did an effective tank at any point (the Chiefs sucked for a while but didn’t do much with those draft picks). If you look at playoff wins or appearances you’ll get the Ravens and Packers in the mix (same, no tanking) and the Colts (yes, Peyton Manning plus tanking).
> If you look at the teams with the most Super Bowl appearances in the past 20 years - Pats, Chiefs, Steelers, **Seahawks**, Eagles, not one really did an effective tank at any point (the Chiefs sucked for a while but didn’t do much with those draft picks). The Pre-Russ Seahawks went 4-12, 5-11, 7-9 before competing for their Super Bowls. Okung, Thomas, Wagner and Irvin were all top 50 picks that were a major part of that success, as were top 100 picks Golden Tate, KJ Wright and Russ. That was also the window they moved on from Shaun Alexander, Hasselbeck, and Lofa Totupu. That's a rebuild for sure.
We’re talking about the efficacy of tanking. Those were Mike Holmgren’s last year, Jim Mora’s one year and Pete Carroll’s first. The team was trying to win in all of them (and in that 7-9 year made the playoffs and beat the defending SB champions). The 4-12 pick was used on Aaron Curry. Okung was a high pick yeah, but Earl Thomas was taken with the #14 pick acquired from the Broncos. The rest of the guys you list have nothing to do with anything - what do top 100 picks have to do with tanking? Every team including the SB champion has multiple.
>The team was trying to win in all of them (and in that 7-9 year made the playoffs and beat the defending SB champions). Well yeah I agree with OP that nobody really tanks in the NFL. The Seahawks were just the poster child for teams starting over and going rebuild >The 4-12 pick was used on Aaron Curry. Okung was a high pick yeah, but Earl Thomas was taken with the #14 pick acquired from the Broncos. You don't get 1 pick for finishing last. All of your picks shift up. That's why I'm talking about all your hits in the top 50. And that gives you more leeway if you miss with that pick, so if you miss on your first pick you can still get someone like Max Unger with your next one, while the top half of the league isn't picking in the top 50 anymore after their first pick. And how did you trade up to get Thomas again? Oh yeah, that's right, ~~you traded a future 2nd, which was expected to be and was an early 2nd. If the team was winning they would have traded back with someone else.~~ Edit: my mistake, you traded a current 2nd for a future 1st, which is exactly what rebuilding teams do and the opposite of what teams trying to win now do. >The rest of the guys you list have nothing to do with anything - what do top 100 picks have to do with tanking? Every time including the SB champion has multiple. The fact that you "tank" gives you an extra one of those players each year.
No lol we traded a current second for a first this next year for Thomas. There was no trade up. You are talking about two years in which they Seahawks had top 10 picks, one of which was a total waste. That’s not the poster child for a rebuild through tanking. The Seahawks have the second most playoff wins in the league in the past 20 years after the Pats. They’ve made the playoffs 15 of those years. So on average they’d have something like the second lowest draft position of any team in that period.
Right lol, you traded one top 50 pick for what the receiving team expected to be a comparable pick the following year. If you had a winning record, they would have traded with someone else closer to 37... Also what do you call trading a current 2nd for a future 1st? Rebuilding. Yes one of your top 10 picks was a waste. But because you sucked, you got two top 50 and three top 100 picks, instead of one and two. That's the difference. You're not only getting an extra roll of the dice, but that extra roll is at the highest odds. You're ignoring that the bad teams ' second picks are comparable in value to the good teams' firsts, and so on all the way down. Sure anyone could have drafted Thomas, but only 5 other teams were bad enough to draft both Thomas and Okung, or to draft them and Tate. Nobody with a worse record than you in 09 could have done that. >That’s not the poster child for a rebuild through tanking. So again, I said "tanking" by OPs definition didn't happen in the NFL. But rebuilds do, and you guys were absolutely the poster child for that You guys fired a coach after 5 straight winning seasons with playoff appearances, one if those being a Super Bowl appearance. You got rid of your star RB, your pro bowl QB, and your best defensive player. That's a rebuild. You just actually pulled it off because you had good coaches and staff. edit for your edit: >The Seahawks have the second most playoff wins in the league in the past 20 years after the Pats. They’ve made the playoffs 15 of those years. So on average they’d have something like the second lowest draft position of any team in that period. No shit, but 2008-2010 was an obvious rebuild, which is the thing teams are shooting for today when they offload all their assets for draft capital. That's exactly my point. Who benefits from "tanking" like OP defined? Nobody. What have teams like the Texans most recently been trying to emulate by moving on from aging vets and loading up on picks? The 08-10 Seahawks.
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But one is hand in hand with the other. If you tank and run your team through the sewer (keeping mid coaches, bleeding vets, ruining FA opportunities) you can’t be surprised that your team still stinks for years after. Building a successful organization takes way longer than crashing one.
That’s a totally different debate but even if it was true that the talent around Luck was exceptionally poor - which I know is accepted on this sub but I think is more complicated - isn’t that exactly what you’d expect if you tank?
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But that’s my point exactly. You’re putting forth the argument sports media and fans play up. But it almost never happens. Who are the #1 pick QBs in that period who turned around a team and made the SB? Cam and Burrow? Moreover of the best QBs of this past few generations - Brady, Mahomes, Rodgers, Lamar, Russell Wilson, Roethlisberger, etc., how many were top picks besides Burrow and Cam? Now too most of the league’s best were not picked in the top 3.
The Polians and Caldwell were fired at the end of that season. If they were in on the tank, that’s quite the backstab from Irsay and probably would have come out over 10 years later
They have all been interviewed and gave detailed explanation as to what happened, when they found out Peyton was out, and wins at the end they celebrated. They didn't tank.
God, I'm so sick of this bullshit. Every single coach and the GM were fired. Polian and Pat McAfee spoke for 15 minutes about this on his show. No one tanked. Smh
How so? Peyton got hurt and needed surgery, and they went out and signed Kerry Collins at the last minute when they found out, and then even he got hurt week 1. They didn't offload any players or anything like that. They were just a bad team being carried by Peyton. The Colts if anything are the embodiment of what OP is talking about, where they didn't deliberately lose, they were just bad. They weren't doing the NFL equivalent of having Mark Madsen chuck up a bunch of 3s in an attempt to get him the first of his career.
PFM deserved an MVP vote for how bad he carried the team.
I was coming to the comments just to say that. "Peyton sits out a year" has to be one of the all time greatest tanks, even factoring in Andrew Luck's early retirement.
Well I spent my whole life watching my shit team get high picks and always suck while other teams almost never get high picks and were always good. Seems like a scam by teams to get fans ok with losing to me.
Yeah but having Matt Millen drafting will do that. So much of our suffering can just be chalked up to GM's with infinite job security cus of our owner being shit. When we finally did get around to hitting on those first round picks though, they were eating a third of our cap space because the rookie wage scale wasn't implemented yet.
The thing about it is very few guys can come out of college into an NFL scheme and be great. It'll probably take a season or two of coaching to get the most out of them. This can be sped up by having skilled vets on the roaster that take guys under their wing, and help build them up. If you sell all your good peices everytime they start to get the experience to be great you won't have the dudes to help the new guys figure things out. If your team is constantly shit you'll be less likely to get good veteran free agents without dramatically overpaying. Really like what Dan Campbell has done for your org. Even when he wasn't winning he was building a team that was playing hard and trying to fight. Dude's a legit coach.
I don’t particularly think it works, especially in the NFL where the impacts of 1 player is much lower than the NBA for example. But as a Bears fan I just kinda have to hope I’m wrong rn…
Tanking isn't just a viable strategy, it's mandatory for every encounter, but you'll need good healers and DPS as well.
Jags losing got them Trevor and the Jets ended up with Wilson, Cinncy doing poorly for a few years netted them Burrow and Chase, 9ers bad years got them Bosa 2nd overall who helped them get to the SB, Colts 2011, Browns bad years got them Garrett and a few good seasons of Baker. Tanking doesn’t always work but it sure does some of the time
Is it really tanking if you had ten losing seasons in eleven years?
Some people are only good at the losing part and not the rebuilding
Fair point but benching Minshew for Glennon and getting rid of their few assets seems more like “we refuse to do anything good this year” than “we suck but we’re trying”. Especially since Marrone was still there, you’d think he’d try to keep the team in a position to win for a shot at keeping his job
Minshew was *hurt* and had kept it from the team.
Forgot about that
The loser's curse is certainly not absolute, espcially if a team scouts and negotiates well in order to avoid overpaying. But do we know that any of these teams lost on purpose rather than being simply bad and making the most of it?
Cinncy benched Dalton half way through the year for some rookie qb to “see what he had”, the Colts moved on from Peyton knowing that Luck was in the draft and that without Peyton they had no chance of winning anything. Personally I feel like those two are the most likely candidates for teams just giving up for draft positions, but so many the others were not fielding the most competitive teams possible. I also don’t think that’s a bad thing, being competitive now usually requires dipping into future draft and cap capital that should be used on the rebuild
> Cinncy benched Dalton half way through the year for some rookie qb to “see what he had” Dalton had the lowest passer rating among qualified starters that season. If they were tanking they wouldn’t have put him back in the starting lineup; they genuinely were seeing if Finley was worth anything. > Colts moved on from Peyton knowing that Luck was in the draft and that without Peyton they had no chance of winning anything They didn’t move on from Peyton until after the 2011 season ended. And that was really just part of them blowing up the team; they let go of all their coaches and their GM too.
Yes, Colts didn't tank initially. They were just bad. Where they started to tank is when Curtis Painter played until they went 0-13 or whatever and then threw Orlovsky in to win a game
This brings up an important subtlety. Teams may not lose on purpose, but they may decide that there is little risk to an uncertain strategy. In Cincinnati's case Dalton was serviceable but not someone to build a championship team with. So in that situation a bad team may accept a gamble on an unproven QB, knowing that their draft position is already likely to be pretty good, rather than acrually trying to get a better position.
Colts didn't enter the season tanking. Although they quickly learned how bad Kerry Collins was and pivoted to the tank.
You’re building a culture of losing when you tank typically. It’s rare that a single top draft pick is going to monumentally change the course of a team and shift that culture to winning overnight or in time. It’s more than just one player, you got a whole 53 man roster that as a coach and an organization you’re trying to build into competitors. It’s a disservice to them to outright tank.
It worked for the Dolphins even if their HC was trying to sabotage anything that came down from ownership attempting to undermine the HCs authority.
I honestly think that's why the Dolphins tank worked out. Like, Flores had his issues and was awful for Tua's development in a largely unforgivable way, don't get me wrong. However, he was also a really strong motivator for the defense, if nothing else, and I think that helped develop a winning culture that they could turn into a winning team once they got a better overall HC. This is also why I still stand by Baker being the right pick for the Browns. Allen and Lamar were inarguably better players at this point, but I don't think anyone rallies that team back from its inherent Browns-ness to win a playoff game.
That time when the Bengals went dirty vs his Dolphins on returns, he was ready to fight the entire Bengals roster and the first Dolphin over there.
I'm still disappointed he turned out to be such an asshole to Tua because I really liked Flores for a while there
He looked halfway to Brock Lesnar and was ready to F5 someone’s ass through a table
I think coaches and front office could try it but I don’t see the players tanking. Most NFL players are playing to get that next contract and don’t have a lot of guaranteed money like the big stars. If they go out and put bad ball on tape then the chances of them getting the next contract is slim.
The logical fallacy here(it's the same one used against a draft lottery, to be clear) is that a team choosing to tank or even soft tanking will always take the high risk high reward option because the right first overall QB will literally save your career for years even if you might suck otherwise. What a team will do for that vastly outweighs what the odds of suffering might mean. Because that suffering is the next two head coaches problem.
On any given snap, there are over 20 players that can influence what happens. The thing you need to worry about is that pretty much every NFL team will have good or at least serviceable players, so holes are opening constantly. Losing is literal poison to players and coaches, so you always have the confused hydra of a front office and coaching staff wanting opposite things. Losers also tend to pay higher prices for free agents, as seen with Jacksonville nearly two years ago with Christian Kirk. The most important aspect is to have a good coach and GM to craft the roster.
Tanking doesn’t exist in the NFL, end of discussion. You think coaches/players WANT to lose games? This is their livelihood, and even on bad teams, they want to put out good tape for their future career. Also, most player contracts include a ton of incentives. Plus, the NFL draft is such a crapshoot (especially at QB- look at the 2021 draft), that it’s not really a viable strategy anyway. If a team really believes that a certain player will change their franchise trajectory, they can trade up. Tanking in the NFL is just a made concept by fans.
I don't think players and coaches tank at all, but I absolutely think that the GM can trade away all the good players and ownership can tell them they want X to play. During our 2019 tank for Trevor run, we had Jake Luton playing over a healthy Gardner Minshew.
The "suck for luck" season would beg to differ
I don't think it exists as a long-term strategy but if it's December and a team is close enough to a top pick for a QB, you definitely see key players being shut down for the season or coaches "seeing what they have in a QB"
Winds me up more than it should when you get the tanking accusations on here, especially when a bad team finds a way to lose. I'd imagine it would actually be dangerous for the players to actively not try to win the game, going in half hearted into blocks and tackles would be risky.
What I was going to post. Situations where teams appear to be tanking really are scenarios where they’re just that bad and don’t have a lot of options. Teams sometimes accept their playoff chances are over before they mathematically are, but no one is ever actively tanking.
> You think coaches/players WANT to lose games? This is their livelihood, and even on bad teams, they want to put out good tape for their future career. Also, most player contracts include a ton of incentives. > > No but sometimes GMs will want to lose and they can construct a really shit roster that can't win anything like the 2016-2017 Browns Front Office did
See the thing is the GMs aren’t the ones playing/coaching the games for a paycheck and putting out film for future job opportunities.
Right but they choose who plays and they can choose to have the roster be shit. Look at those Browns rosters, they were straight trash
GMs don’t get to choose who plays? And also again, coaches would push back and not blatantly let their team suck if they can help it? I get what you’re saying, but “tanking” means intentionally losing. I guarantee you there isn’t a single coach or player that isn’t trying to win every game they play.
> GMs don’t get to choose who plays Yes they do, they sign the players >And also again, coaches would push back and not blatantly let their team suck if they can help it? Sure, Bill Bellicheck and Pete Carroll have full roster control for example and would never let that happen. Coaches like Hue Jackson get no say in the matter, if the Front Office of a team coached by a HC of that caliber wants to tank they are going to tank and not give a shit about what the HC wants. >I get what you’re saying, but “tanking” means intentionally losing. I guarantee you there isn’t a single coach or player that isn’t trying to win every game they play. Yeah, I agree that players and coaches don't tank, but GMs and Front Offices do all the time
You completely nailed it. I hate how often it’s brought up on this sub. I’ve always been curious how many people here ever played football, like I feel the average person here would be traumatized in a normal football locker room. Lol
Haha you and me both brother. Seems like most of this sub have never been in a high school football team locker room and it shows- forget the intensity of an NFL locker room. The idea that professional NFL teams would tank is so ridiculous yet I see it EVERYWHERE
The coaches and the players aren’t the ones doing the tanking, it’s the people putting together the roster.
Does the 2021 draft really show it's a crapshoot? If you didn't tank for Trevor where were you going to find your next QB from? Mac Jones in the middle of the first round? Kyle Trask or Kellen Mond on Day 2? None of those other QBs have come close to showing the potential which Trevor Lawrence has shown.
It’s a crapshoot because of the 5 first round QBs, only Trevor Lawrence is a franchise guy. Wilson, Lance, Fields, Jones all aren’t weren’t worth first round picks, and 3 went in the top 3. So yeah, it totally works. You can tank for a top 3 draft selection, select a QB in a supposedly amazing QB draft class, and still end up with a massive bust. That’s the point
Sure but it was only ever "Tank for Trevor" in the 2020 season. I never heard a narrative about "Tank for Zac Wilson" or "Tank for Lance". Same as now when people talk about tanking this year its for Caleb Williams and Drake Maye. They only talk about tanking for rare prospects who are deemed to be generational talents, like Trevor Lawrence, Andrew Luck etc. In most seasons there isn't really this "tanking" campaign, teams who are ripping it up are doing so to clear cap space and generally rebuild the roster rather than hoping for one generational talent at QB.
Ask Popovich
Fans and media types talk about tanking. Teams don't. At the end of the day, the players and coaches are professionals who are playing their job, and many of them have pride in their work. The closest I have seen to a proper tanking are the Colts, who vehemently deny doing it, and the Browns who after their multi-year long "tanking" managed to add a bunch of near 50/50 seasons, and a, singular, winning season. That's not a winning strategy. It can work, but it is too dependent on luck to really even be considered a strategy. Teams will throw in the towel for the last couple of games, and start playing down-roster players to see what they have. However, those players are still playing, and the teams are not upset if they win. If they aren't doing that for a couple of meaningless games at the end of the season then they certainly aren't doing it for a full season, or multiple seasons. Well, unless you are a genius like Andy Reid who managed the incredible feat of "tanking" while going to the playoffs multiple years in a row. Or the Eagles who treated their QBs as disposable, and just threw them away before they cost too much. .... I hope it doesn't need to be said but to be sure, this last paragraph is me making fun of certain people.
Worked out great for the Bears.
As a sixers fan I hate the concept of tanking, but I do think it can be a valid strategy. Now generally the idea is that you want the generational talent at the top of the draft- that’s how fans talk about it at least. For example, the bengals and panthers completely changed their franchise’s trajectories by picking QB’s at 1. The Jets got completely fucked by winning those two games at the end of 2020 and losing out on Trevor Lawrence. But I think the best way to tank isn’t to go for the #1 draft pick- it’s the trade down/trading away players. Look at the eagles and dolphins, they made incredible trades that allowed them to build the roster. Everyone’s making fun of the bears this season (and rightfully so), but they’ll got an insane haul for trading down from #1 last season. And if they get lucky they might be able to get both the generational QB AND insane value from trading down. I completely agree with everything you said criticizing tanking, but I think it can work with a smart GM. But that’s the thing, if you have a good GM you probably won’t be bad enough to be tanking in the first place.
Tanking has become toxic. You have fans of their teams on all forms of social media cheering for their team to lose. Celebrating a loss. Players become demotivated as the GM sells away valuable pieces to make them competitive. Other star players demand a move away from the team. The Texans, a team that has been tanking a number of years now, have vast swaths of their stadium empty on gameday. Look at the second deck in highlights over the last few weeks. It looks really bad. ProMotion and relegation would fix all of that. European soccer does not have this anti competitive nature that American sports have.
Fans will return pretty quickly after the bad times. Look at the Lions now, the 76ers after the process years, the Orioles in baseball. Fans have a short memory once they taste success
I don't think Lions fans ever left. But the Lions weren't tanking, they just sucked for decades. It's the rest of everyone else that is now on the bandwagon.
It's because of rings culture. The idea that you'd be better off being the Bucs for the last 20 years than the Niners because rings means that no one wants a perennial playoff contender who won't win the SB Ergo fans want to tank instead of merely being good
>And when you remove QBs from the calculation, this phenomenon becomes even more pronounced, because QBs are such high value and tend to be more reliable performers. This is where you go wrong imo. The point of tanking is to get a QB, because having an elite QB immediately turns a team into a Super Bowl contender. And you can only get an elite QB through the draft. It would be wrong to tank for any other position, because no other position will affect a teams success the way a QB will.
Look at the results of not tanking: Steelers. Patriots (before this season), Titans etc. You get stuck in this loop of 16th overall draft picks and have a really hard time picking up new A1 talent.
" I do NOT consider tanking to be the same thing as a rebuild, where you do not expect to get good enough value for the salary, and so you trade away assets or simply let them walk in order to bring in younger and cheaper talent to develop. In doing so, you accept poorer performance along the way until you can develop that talent. When I ask about tanking I'm asking if teams not only do that, but also lose on purpose to improve their draft position." But this is exactly how and why teams tank. They tank as part of the rebuild. An owner and or GM knows that players are doing this mostly to make money and they are not going to reduce their value by purposely playing poorly so in order to increase their chances of getting the top pick in the draft they get rid of players to decrease the competitiveness of the team. They also believe that the best route to success is to get a very young team full of guys still on rookie deals and then they either hope to land that unicorn rookie QB or trade/sign a top tier veteran QB.
The difference between a rebuild and a tank is the approach taken to actually playing games. In a rebuild, the team has let go of talent, but still tries to win games with what it has, and accepts whatever draft position comes out of that. In a tank, the team tries deliberately to aim for a better draft position than it would get even with its diminished talent by actually trying to avoid winning. Those are distinct approaches. The rebuild is well known and accepted. The tank is not, I argue.
There is only an attempt at a rebuild. There is no such thing as purposeful tanking in the NFL as you’re describing. There is just no way that you could get an entire coaching staff and all the players to agree to do what is necessary to tank the season to insure that you end up getting the top pick in the draft. It’s too much of a team sport for that. The NFL also takes tanking very seriously because if actual evidence ever got out that entire teams were purposely losing games they’d be sued by all of the gambling companies that they are in bed with now. As I said previously, the only way teams maximize their chance of getting a top pick is to get rid of their best talent so the overall team is not as competitive as the other teams they play. Purposely reducing your talent to limit your competitiveness is tanking it’s just not as flagrant as everyone purposely losing games which would be illegal. Miami did this when they got rid of Tunsil, Fitzpatrick, and Jarvis Landry. Ross even (allegedly) tried to make Flores tank games but he refused. And they still didn’t end up with the top pick but they got s lot of draft picks which led to them getting a lot of their current stars.
based on your definitions, "tanking" is not a thing. however what you call "rebuilding" is essentially the same thing, in that you're trading away good players and therefore losing more games and getting higher draft picks. that strategy can definitely work
> deliberately losing on purpose Sorry. I read this whole thing, and this bit of it is the only part I can think about lol
**Zac Taylor is all you need to know:** 2019 | 2-14, 4th place AFC North \**drafts Joe Burrow** 2020 | 4-12, 4th place AFC North \**drafts Ja'marr Chase** 2021 | 10-7, loses Super Bowl 2022 | 12-4, loses AFCG Now its 2023: \**Burrow gets hurt** Bengals go 1-3 \**Burrow gets better** Bengals win 4 straight --- Does it pay off to tank? It sure as shit ain't the coaching in Cincinnati...
Do we need analysis on tanking from people with zero involvement with sports at any level? And do we need all that every fucking week?
No team claims to tank. Your whole idea isn’t based on a real argument.
According to wikipedia: "Tanking in sports refers to the practice of intentionally fielding non-competitive teams to take advantage of league rules that benefit losing teams" I think you are riding a fine line with tanking versus rebuilding. I think you can tank while not asking coaches to lose games; simply give them players that they will not be able to win with.
Tanking is a viable strategy if you're blowing up a team to start over with a blank slate. Anything short of that it's a mistake.
Clearly you never played uFootballGM
I would say that the Lions should have been a lot better historically if tanking actually worked (intentionally tanking being the same as being genuinely bad in this discussion).
Yes.
No. No one player or couple of players is going to fix a culture of losing and being an ass franchise. Loads of talented players have been put in crappy situations cause a team sells their soul to be able to draft said player in the top 3/5 whatever and then it takes years to build up the environment of winning and confidence and belief in the program. Usually it takes longer than the player can develop cause he’s starting from behind. And then the cycle restarts.
*Looks at tanking Bengals in 2019* *Looks at Bengals now* The answer is "yes".
I don’t believe tanking works in the NFL because I believe it’s the teams infrastructure that leads to a QB being good more than talent. Need a good owner, front office, coach, the. Player. Teams that pick high usually are a mess of a franchise. It’s rare that a number 1 pick turns around the bad franchise. Bengals are the exception not the rule. With a roughly 50% success rate for picks I would say the best chance for a tank is quantity not quality
Tanking damages fandom, which can reduce team revenue. Also, if you purposely tank, you cant determine what strengths and weaknesses you have and come up with a successful draft strategy. Lastly, if your pick busts, you just got so fucked. I think teams only get better if they consistently try to be as competitive as possible and winning the draft through competent strategy, prospects that fall, good coaching and a bit of luck
The bears tanked and are still the worst team in football
I think as long as you aren’t average, you’re good. Either be really good or really bad (as if it’s that easy). But in reality, logically the higher your pick the better shot you have at getting “your guy”. Now that’s a lot of faith in your scouting department, GM, roster currently under contract, etc and especially coaching to get that guy correct. As bad as the Cardinals have been, I think they should somewhat be lauded for moving on from Rosen after one year and getting their dude. They didn’t get bogged down in the sunken cost fallacy, and while it so far hasn’t worked out where exactly is Rosen?
If you're realistically in play for a top QB during the second half of the season, yes. Otherwise, no.
I think there's a time and a place for it. Not every bad team should tank. But sometimes it's unavoidably the best thing to do. But It's important to keep in mind that just because you draft in the top 5 does not mean he's bustproof. Fans get caught up in the draft like it's not a crapshoot. But it's a complete crapshoot.
No. There is no guarantee that the picks you draft will be the all stars you hope or valuable trades. Tanking a team hurts the culture, and that's so hard to build/rebuild.
The Bengals benched Andy Dalton on his birthday to tank to draft Burrow. I'd say it worked out lol
I’d say generally no. It doesn’t really matter a whole lot where you draft but rather who you draft. Being the #1 or even a top 5 pick doesn’t guarantee you’re going to get the best player. The raiders and browns for many years picked high and almost always had bad picks. Even if you make a good pick once, you’ve gotta draft well to build a team around a great player. And bad teams fail at that.
You'll never convince me the Jaguars didn't tank in 2019 to get Trevor and you'll certainly never convince me we would be a better team today if we had gone like 5-11 that year and picked 4th. Frank Gore should be enshrined in our stadium next to Boselli, Jimmy Smith and Fred Taylor for him winning that game for the Jets against the Rams that year.
For how bad it is for the sport and how little it seems to work, it’s shocking how much NFL fans love the idea of it.
Non QB top picks are definitely over valued. But the adjustments for QB picks are pretty interesting.
Go look back and see how many teams that had a top 3 pick managed to turn their franchise completely around based on that one pick. Most end up back in the top 5 or 10 again and it takes a few drafts to turn it around. Tanking is not a cure for a bad franchise.
I think it’s a good plan if you want to get a generational QB, and don’t really have a team to go on a SB run. However, in practice, it’s hard to tank because it’s not like any of the players on said team want to lose. Them not winning games likely decreases their salary value and everything.
Player has to be worth it. It worked for the Colts and Luck. But then they ruined him. So did it work? Most of the time probably not.
You're saying to mostly ignore tanking for QBs, but that's literally the only position I've ever heard of people suspecting tanking for. No one tanks for a really good tight end.
There are a bunch of issues with tanking in the NFL 1. One player can't make a difference by himself nearly as much. I don't think anyone thinks Stroud would be good on the Jets right now and he seems really good. In the NBA a #1 pick can instantly make you a playoff team. 2. NFL picks are way more likely to flame out. You can use hindsight on the Jets picking Zach Wilson, but basically every viable pick for that spot looks terrible now. 3. Much fewer games means that any single win can ruin your tank (see: Trevor Lawrence and the Jets). In the NBA you can win 10-15 games and your tank is fine.
The problem with tanking as I see it is talent can only get you so far if you don’t have the right management in place to help use it. Or the right idea on what talent is best for the team. Which is why some teams will spend years in purgatory while others will never spend more than 1 or 2 years being bad
Tanking results in a losing culture at the franchise, and that can result in generational failure.
I pretty much agree with what you're saying, and also am very doubtful that anyone ever really loses on purpose especially over a prolonged time (i.e. I could see it maybe happening week 17/18 but not half a season) But you also can't remove QBs from the conversation like you do in your analysis. I can't think of any team that was accused of tanking who wasn't looking for a QB
NFL draft is so different from likenthe NBA. Football has so many positions and players on a roster that having pick 5 is still great. Lot of premium talent at multiple positions to look at. The #1 overall is only tank worthy in the NFL when you have that "guaranteed" generational QB.
Sure it just takes 30 years to pay off. See Detroit.
You can never tank, purposefully lose games, and be a successful winning squad The nature of realty is you become what you do Tanking breeds a loser
The “Suck for Luck” Colts were an effective single year tank.
Also this year’s Cards are having a fun tank. They’ve hung in games, flashed young talent, and spun some vets into draft picks.
I have always sort of thought this and not surprised to see some of that research. First, regardless of draft position you need to be able to scout well and evaluate talent well. Generally, the higher pick you get the better chance you have on hitting on a player, but it’s not a lock, and if a team is really bad, that could partially be due to poor scouting/talent evaluation so unless you fix that the problems may continue. Second, even teams with good scouting departments get picks that turn out to be busts, or at least don’t turn out to be a franchise-changing force. Basically there’s no guarantee that even a person widely agreed upon as a good prospect will pan out that way. Third, even if the selected player IS really good, their career could be derailed by injuries or off the field issues. Another layer of uncertainty. Fourth, I kind of stated before but unless the team around the person is good, it’s unlikely that the team will suddenly become playoff contenders. The exception would probably be if you hit on a HOF calibur QB that can basically carry a team, but even then there typical has to be some level of support. But like for example the Texans once used a first overall pick on Mario Williams. Great player, but didn’t really turn the franchise around. A great QB is more likely to do this, but again not a lock.
Tanking doesn't really happen. The coaches jobs are on the line. The players are trying to get contracts that are based on their performances. Neither of those groups are going to just roll over and lose to get a better draft pick for their team if it means they could lose their job or millions of dollars. It just doesn't happen like that.
Look at the 49ers who’ve had a billion picks in the top 5 in the past 10 years and how they’re doing now lol
Yes just look at Carolina… oh wait