At this writing, the Saints are 300-1 to win Super Bowl LX — the longest price on the board.
But what if they decide to tank the entire 2025 so that they can draft New Orleans native Arch Manning, the grandson of Archie Manning (and nephew of both Peyton Manning and Eli Manning), who just happened to play for the Saints for more than a decade?
This is why the NFL owners need to step in and nip this in the bud; and they can do that on October 21 and 22, when they meet in — where else? — New York City.
The NFL adamantly refuses to implement a draft lottery, like the NBA has had, and so successfully, since 1985 (MLB and the NHL also have highly complicated lotteries — unlike the NBA's, which is totally straightforward).
A future NFL lottery could be conducted by awarding chances to each of the previous season's non-playoff teams, using the following metric:
(Mike Tomlin could end up with the best of both worlds: the Steelers could finish 9-8, miss the playoffs, and end up with Arch Manning!)
If two or more teams finish with the same record, the procedures outlined on page 33 of the 2024 NFL Record & Fact Book (the 2025 edition has not yet been released), instead of strength of schedule, which is grossly unfair because it doubly penalizes a team for having played a difficult schedule the previous season.
For the first tie-breaker — head-to-head — it should be applicable so long as every team involved in the tie has had at least one opportunity to have played at least one of the others; e.g., if four teams finish 7-10 and Team D did not play Teams A, B, or C, then head-to-head cannot be applied; and of course with the the new overtime rules that will be making their debut this season, there will be far fewer four, five, or even six-way ties because considerably more games are going to end in a tie.
The lottery should ideally identify the first five picks in the draft, meaning that the team that finishes with the league's worst overall record is guaranteed to receive no later than the sixth overall pick.
A tanking scandal would utterly desecrate the integrity of the NFL and its hallowed shield — and a lottery in the NFL could be nationally televised by ESPN or NFL.com, yielding humongous ratings.
That's why a picogram (with all due respect to Jon Jones!) of prevention is worth a ton of cure.
Leave a Comment