A change is needed to stop "tanking"

After the former Dolphins’ head coach Brian Flores accused Stephen Ross, the Miami Dolphins owner, of offering him a $100,000 bonus per game to lose, the issue of “tanking” must be addressed by sports franchises. I’m not sure when tanking became an acceptable practice. Still, if owners have begun offering coaches compensation for the practice, which is illegal, it is time to remove the incentive to lose.

For those not familiar with the term, “tanking” is when a team decides it is in their best interest to lose games to secure a better draft pick for next season. Some teams will do this for several years in a row with the hopes of collecting top draft picks to rebuild a team.

The practice had become so problematic in the NBA that it changed how they do the weighted lottery draft six times to discourage tanking. Each time they gave the team with the worst record a smaller and smaller chance to get the first pick, and yet tanking has continued.

It’s time to give EVERY team an equal chance to get the first pick. My system would work like a traditional lottery. Using the NFL as an example, the thirty-two teams have a ping pong ball with their logo put into a machine used for lotteries. The balls bounce around, and one is pulled. That team gets the coveted first pick. The team on the next ball receives the second pick. This goes on and on until all the balls are selected. That is the order the teams get to pick in the upcoming draft.

Now, I suppose if this were televised, they could go in reverse order (lowest pick to highest pick) to make it more exciting to watch, but you get the idea. A week after the Super Bowl, the NFL could have a one-hour program where they go through the process of picking the balls. Analysts could speculate about what player(s) a team might be able to pick based on their draft position, and Las Vegas would find ways you could bet on it.

I won’t go deep into the math, but this gives every team an equal 3.125% chance of getting the first pick. The odds of getting a pick in the top five of the draft is (5*3.125) = 15.625%. The odds of a top ten pick (10* 3.125) = 31.25%, and the odds of picking in the top half or bottom half of the draft would be 50%.

Pick/ Percentage Change

1 pick..........3.125%

1-5.............15.625

1-10............31.25

1-16.............50

17-32...........50

After many drafts, each team’s “pick” location would average out to somewhere in the middle of the draft. Compared to the existing system, it would reward the teams with the best records in the league by significantly improving their chances of getting an earlier pick. For teams that finish in the middle of the league, the position wouldn’t change much, and the teams performing at the bottom of the league would no longer have an incentive for tanking.