When the Raiders completed a sweep of the Broncos on Sunday with a 22-16 win in overtime — during which Russell Wilson never got to step onto the field because Las Vegas won the hallowed coin toss, which the league cannot bring itself to let go of — at Denver on Sunday, it gave every NFL team at least three wins.
Every team but one, that is — as the Texans to fell to 1-8-1 earlier in the day when they lost to the 6-5, last-place (!) Washington Commanders, 23-10.
(And the Jets go the Commanders one better: they're 6-4 and last in the AFC East after losing for the 14th consecutive time to the Patriots, 10-3 — a result that left both teams with that record, but New England has beaten the Jets twice in 2022.)
How can a league that (in everything but name) stripped one of its member clubs of a first-round draft choice for tanking games concomitantly reward another team for tanking, with no caveats attached thereto?
Isn't that hypocritical — maybe just a little around the edges?
Ideally, a lottery should be implemented — and since Major League Baseball's new lottery makes the six worst of its 18 non-playoff teams eligible for the number one pick, the NFL making the six worst of its 18 non-playoff teams eligible for its far more valuable number one pick couldn't possibly be more logical.
And if the NFL can't bring itself to join MLB, the NBA, and the NHL and go to a lottery system, the least it can do is adopt the policy the NBA used before they went to their lottery in 1985: a coin toss can be held between the team finishing with the worst record in the AFC and the team finishing with the worst record in the NFC, with the winner therein getting the first pick in the draft and the loser the second pick. If the outcome of a coin toss can carry so much weight in deciding the winner of a game that goes into overtime, then why not?
(A tantalizing variant of this would be to use the Super Bowl as the "coin toss": if the AFC champion wins the Super Bowl, the team finishing with the worst record in the NFC gets the first pick and the team finishing with the worst record in the AFC the second pick, while if the NFC champion wins the Super Bowl, the team finishing with the worst record in the AFC gets the first pick and the team finishing with the worst record in the NFC the second pick. The major virtue of doing this is that it helps foster competitive balance between the two conferences).
Any ties for participation in the coin toss would be broken using the same tie-breaking procedures that are used to determine wild card playoff berths and playoff seeds.
In addition to giving fans, and even more so, season-ticket holders, a greater assurance that their team is actually trying to win, getting rid of an obvious incentive for some teams to tank games would bolster the integrity of the battles for division titles, playoff berths, and playoff seeds: four of Houston's next five games are against obvious playoff contenders (and the remaining game is at home against the Browns, in which Deshaun Watson will return to the scene of the crime so to speak).
Maybe next year, with Bryce Young at quarterback — one source gives the Texans a 62% chance of landing the top pick in the 2023 draft at this writing — the Texans will be a playoff contender in December or even January. Wouldn't they expect the same consideration from a non-contending team that is playing a team they're battling for a playoff spot?
If the NFL finally comes to its senses and adopts a lottery, it should be kept as simple as possible, by giving the team finishing with the worst record 18 chances at getting the top pick, the second-worst team, 17 chances, and so on down to the non-playoff team that finished with the best record, which gets one chance (this applying to the first round only; from the second round onward, teams continue to draft in the reverse order of the previous season's standings).
When it comes to preserving the integrity of the game, a gram of prevention is worth a ton of cure.
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