When it comes to moves designed to tank games to secure a higher position in the following spring's NFL draft — the decision made by the Giants to first bench, and then ultimately cut, former first round (sixth overall, 2019) quarterback Daniel Jones and replace him with undrafted 2023 free agent Tommy "Don't Call Me Danny" DeVito (bypassing 2019 second-round pick Drew Lock) — quite literally transcends the genre.
On Sunday against Tampa Bay, DeVito and the Giants were shut out until running back Devin Singletary scored on a one-yard touchdown run with 11:28 left in the game to make the final score what it turned out to be: Bucs 30, Giants 7.
Thanks to some garbage-time "heroics," DeVito completed 21 out of 31 for 189 yards, no touchdowns, but also no interceptions. He was also sacked 4 times for 23 yards' worth of losses — proving once again that he has even less mobility than Lot's wife in the pocket.
That comes out to a highly deceptive (in this case) passer rating of 83.9. His QBR (ESPN's invention) was a cachectic 14.8.
As of this moment, the 2-9 Giants, with a .528 strength of schedule (their remaining games are .529) carry the tiebreaker over the other two 2-9 teams — the Raiders (.540, .515) and the Jaguars (.581, .338). PlayoffStatus.com gives the Giants a 23% chance at landing the top pick.
But should the team with the worst overall record automatically get the number one pick?
In the NBA, they haven't since 1984, the year before that league implemented its draft lottery (prior to that, the teams with the worst record in each conference/division decided the top pick by means of the dreaded coin flip) — which the Knicks won and, as a result, got to select Patrick Ewing. For the first two years, the NBA lottery was a flat lottery — meaning that all seven teams that did not make the playoffs had an equal chance of getting the first pick, and each of the seven had an equal chance of getting the seventh. A "weighted" system replaced this in 1987.
A lottery with limited "weighting" would appear to be the way to go for the NFL going forward — with the team finishing worst overall getting 18 chances to win the number one pick, the second-worst team 17 chances, all the way down to the non-playoff team with the best record, who gets one such chance, with the lottery determining the first five picks.
And if a 10-7 team that didn't make the playoffs in the same year that an 8-9 team did (from winning a very week division) ends up with a latter-day NFL version of Shaquille O'Neal?
That would be poetic justice.
Teams like this year's Giants have no right to play God with other teams' playoff hopes. Surely the other teams battling Tampa Bay for potential playoff spots — the Falcons and Saints, the entire NFC West, the Commanders, etc. — would expect the same consideration from the Giants if the Giants were playing any one of those teams.
One would expect the Mara family — which celebrates their 100th anniversary of owning the team that Chris Berman called "The New York Football Giants" — should be showing more integrity than this.
But apparently not.
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