Should the NFL have a lottery system for the draft?

I have wondered why the NFL doesn't simply adopt an NBA lottery style system for the draft. As we enter the second half of the season, there are so many teams who are doormats and playing for nothing. You get the sense that the real bottom feeders are playing for draft position, which certainly hurts the INTEGRITY OF THE GAME.

The Colts certainly should not have been able to guarantee themselves Andrew Luck in 2011, and no team should be able to "earn" a franchise quarterback merely by stinking more than anyone else. They are rewarded for their failures and often times rewarded for not trying.

The NBA has the lottery because so often one single player can alter a team in such a meaningful way that it isn't fair to just let teams play to lose in order to acquire him. The NFL should definitely follow suit. An even better rule would be that the worst record is barred from receiving the top pick!

No.

NBA is a different beast. You have 5 starters, and what, 18 players total? Far different from the NFL where you have 22 starts and 53 total players (plus PS).

WhoaDirty said:

No.

NBA is a different beast. You have 5 starters, and what, 18 players total? Far different from the NFL where you have 22 starts and 53 total players (plus PS).

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Most years, this reasoning works. But every few years there's 1 quarterback who is worth vastly more than any other player in the draft, and that temptation surely does pose a risk.

No...you realize guys are out there playing for jobs right? Suck for luck is one of the most overblown stories imo. Polian and the entire coaching staff got canned. If they were tanking why were they on board with it if it was going to get them fired unless Irsay blantly ****ed them over? Why didn't they stick with Painter the entire time instead of the switch to Orlovsky? One of the few times I've seen a team tank is the Bucs bench players at halftime vs the Saints. It rarely ever happens. NFL coaches and execs don't have the security NBA ones do.

I don't like the lottery for ANY of the professional leagues.

As a home team example there is no way that the underperforming and injured Spurs should have been able to draft Tim Duncan over the putrid Celtics.

A draft is also open to manipulation.

Think the balls wouldn't magically allow the Rats to draft 1st with a Luckesque franchise QB available?

ummmm......no

Non, but the order should be reversed. No more rewarding teams for sucking. Super Bowl champ picks first etc. the best teams already have to deal with the cap ramifications of being good, that's enough parity for me.

Oh god no. The NBA lottery is a joke.

archstanton543 said:

Oh god no. The NBA lottery is a joke.

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I wouldn't say that ... the NBA lottery would be better if it was just the worse 6 teams in it.

For the NFL ... they don't need it unlike the NBA the 1st round doesn't totally rule the future.

Sounds like a solution in need of a problem. However, if we are concerned about potential suck for Luck scenarios, here is a simpler solution - snake draft. Still gives bad teams access to the top talent, but balances out the rest of the rounds and I think would create an increase in intriguing trades.

Imagine the Pats consistently having picks 28-32 and 33-37.....

It might be a good idea for a 4 team lottery. What the Colts did when they "sucked for Luck" was truly cheating. A small 4 team lottery would end the advantage for doing that.

However the change that I would propose for the draft order is to create a serpentine draft. I think teams that consistently finish at the top of the league are penalized TOO severely for their excellence. So rather than bad teams picking first in EVERY round, they would pick first in just 4 of them (first, third, fifth, and seventh. On the other 3 rounds (2nd, fourth, sixth) the orders would be revers.

So in this draft the worst team would pick 1st in the first round, but in the 2nd, the team that picked 32nd would pick 1st in that round, etc. So in the 2nd round the team that picked first in the draft, would pick 32nd in the 2nd round and first again in the third. A lot of FF drafts are run this way, so a lot of you might be familiar with what I'm trying to describe. When I've been part of one, it has always seem like the fairest way.
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I have always thought that the 2 lowest teams should have to play off for the number one pick the week before the super bowl. They could call it the toilet bowl.

IcyPatriot said:

I wouldn't say that ... the NBA lottery would be better if it was just the worse 6 teams in it.

For the NFL ... they don't need it unlike the NBA the 1st round doesn't totally rule the future.

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To be fair, it is heavily weighted against the teams at the low end, but I do agree that it needs to be reined in.

Personally, I'm opposed to the idea of a lottery, but I would be in favor of a Toilet Bowl (winner gets #1 draft pick).

[Then again, it might be funnier if it were loser gets #1 draft pick, but only if they score at least, say, 10 points. Otherwise, the #3 team moves up to #1 and the two Toilet Bowl teams drop to #2 and #3. ]

I think having another prime-time ping-pong ball picking extravaganza would be kinda cool.

Not sure what the cut-off for # of teams though. 5? 6?

I agree that there should be a lottery, since openly tanking your entire season should never guarantee you the #1 pick.

That said, I don't see any steam gathering behind this. It's not even a hypothetical; the Colts openly tanked a season a couple years back and nobody cared, because integrity is a buzzword that only matters when you're mad at the Patriots for winning too much.

BradyFTW! said:

I agree that there should be a lottery, since openly tanking your entire season should never guarantee you the #1 pick.

That said, I don't see any steam gathering behind this. It's not even a hypothetical; the Colts openly tanked a season a couple years back and nobody cared, because integrity is a buzzword that only matters when you're mad at the Patriots for winning too much.

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I don't know why people insist on that. I'd love to hear a good argument but, if they were tanking why did everyone get canned and why didn't Painter start the whole season?

I've always toyed around with the idea of an elimination based draft order. They already do it (in a way) for the playoff teams, so why not have the #1 pick go to the first team who was mathematically eliminated from the playoffs? That way, in theory, a team wouldn't tank if they had a shot at the playoffs still, and once they were eliminated, even if they won the rest of their games, that position is locked up so there's no need to tank.

A few provisions that would have to be added:

1) The elimination time would have to go by week, not exact minute. Otherwise a team that plays at 1:00 might get a pick ahead of a team that plays at 4:00, just because they were eliminated earlier. A lottery would then determine the order between any teams eliminated that week.

2) Maybe if you're worried about differences in conference competition eliminating some teams earlier, bracket everything so that the first team eliminated in each conference is put into a lottery for the first and second pick. Then the next teams eliminated from each conference would have a lottery for picks 3 and 4, and so on down the line.

This kills the incentive for tanking in a couple of ways without outright screwing a legitimately bad team by dropping them potentially 6 or more positions.

From what I've seen over the years, the NBA lottery actually encourages tanking by more teams to get more ping pong balls. Lotteries are just a bad idea.