If you thought that the Dallas Mavericks finding themselves in position to pick Duke University superstar Cooper Flagg atop the NBA draft this Wednesday night is nuts – and it was a miraculous turn of events given the Mavs, a year removed from an NBA Finals appearance, only had a 1.8% shot to obtain the coveted selection in last month’s pre-draft lottery – can you imagine if the NFL enabled similar scenarios for its annual draft?
Seriously, consider the mayhem – in sports bars, on the internet and social media, within league circles – if the Dallas Cowboys had another good-but-not-great season in 2025 yet subsequently learned they’d won the NFL’s first draft lottery and secured first dibs on University of Texas quarterback Arch Manning, the next presumed prince from the league’s most royal bloodline, in 2026.
The debates would rage for weeks. Should Dallas keep the pick or try to trade it for a Herschel Walker-level return? What might they do with incumbent quarterback Dak Prescott? Would Manning’s grandfather, Archie, even allow it to transpire? Or might he try to steer Arch to, say, the hometown New Orleans Saints two decades after ensuring his son, Eli, would never play a down for the then-San Diego Chargers?
And was this whole thing completely rigged? The NFL media corps would just instantly redline into complete overdrive.
Naturally, such a tectonic outcome would presume a seismic change – geology is neat, folks – to the traditional mechanics of the NFL draft, which I’ve tried to toy with before. Presently, the 18 teams that fail to make the playoffs in a given season are slotted atop the draft order, the club with the worst record picking first and the one with the most wins parked in the 18th spot (strength of schedule breaks ties).
The current system is sensible but does have flaws.
Just reference Week 18 of last season, when the Buffalo Bills, locked in as the second seed of the AFC playoff field, all but threw a game in Foxborough to a New England Patriots squad that entered the weekend with a 3-13 record and spent most of the day playing rookie QB Joe Milton in his NFL debut. Yet the Pats won a getaway game for both clubs 23-16 … and instead of picking first in the 2025 draft, they slid to fourth.
Remember the 2011 Indianapolis Colts? A franchise coming off nine consecutive playoff appearances didn’t have injured quarterback Peyton Manning that season – inarguably a devastating setback … and apparently enough to suddenly render Indy the worst team in the league, one rewarded with the opportunity to draft Andrew Luck in 2012 and replace Manning permanently (for all the good it did). I’m not accusing those Colts of anything, just pointing out the remarkable circumstances surrounding what was otherwise a dominant operation − apparently predicated on one singularly sublime player.
Adding some type of lottery mechanism to the NFL draft could neutralize any appearance of chicanery between the lines – not to mention the likelihood of yet another layer of explosive interest during the weeks and months following the Super Bowl.
“It’s a really interesting idea,” Mike Tannenbaum, an ESPN analyst who was formerly the general manager of the New York Jets and later the executive vice president of football operations for the Miami Dolphins, told USA TODAY Sports.
“From a fan perspective, it’s a lot of fun – it would make for really fun offseason conversations.”
Yes, Mike, that’s virtually irrefutable – from the occasional chaos that would ensue after a lottery, to the likelihood more players and picks would be traded. Yet the chance it comes to fruition seems rather remote, particularly in a league typically open to incremental changes but rarely massive ones, and here are three reasons why:
Tanking doesn’t seem to be an NFL problem
The NBA implemented its lottery in 1985 to curb the notion its teams were purposefully losing games in order to position themselves for top draft picks and prospects. However tanking rarely arises as a concern in the NFL, and the reasons are multiple.
NFL players rarely last more than four seasons. Good luck asking one to put a bad year on film – effectively any player’s football résumé.
Putting five substandard players on a hardcourt, especially in a game so reliant on superstars, is going to lead to poor results in basketball. It’s near impossible for an NFL team to field 22 bad players simultaneously, aside from any necessary coordination they’d need to lose intentionally.
Tanking in the NFL would almost unquestionably have to be an organizational decision – and one that would undermine any coaching staff and/or front office trying to imbue or maintain a winning culture. Not only that, football coaches rarely survive 3-14 seasons that result in premier draft picks. The Arizona Cardinals fired Steve Wilks after one season – he went 3-13 – before drafting Kyler Murray No. 1 in 2019. In their lone season under Lovie Smith, the Houston Texans won a seemingly meaningless regular-season finale in Indianapolis 32-31 with a touchdown and two-point conversion in the final minute – no tanking there – which cost them the No. 1 pick and Smith his job. (Houston still wound up with QB C.J. Stroud in the 2023 draft.) The Chicago Bears took Caleb Williams as the apparent prize of the 2024 draft, yet coach Matt Eberflus didn’t even survive Williams’ rookie season.
If tanking means playing less than your best, then ask any football player about one of the likeliest ways to get injured. He’ll probably tell you the risk is inversely proportional to the effort expended – it’s among the reasons why most veterans don’t want to go through the motions and play half-speed in preseason contests.
Even if NFL teams could successfully lose as a means to an end, think about the players many fan bases in recent years have urged their teams to tank for: Reggie Bush, Trevor Lawrence, Tua Tagovailoa, Luck and Williams, among others. Bush helped the Saints win a Super Bowl, but he was hardly the second coming of Gale Sayers. Luck’s promising career was scuttled by injuries while the man he perhaps should have never replaced, Peyton Manning, led the Denver Broncos to two Super Bowls. Lawrence, Tagovailoa and Williams are all in the early stages of their careers, but you’d mistake none of them for John Elway. And did anyone ever suggest tanking for Joe Montana or Tom Brady or even Patrick Mahomes? Football is … just different.
“I was part of the National Football League for almost 30 years,” former Oakland Raiders CEO Amy Trask, now an analyst for CBS Sports, told USA TODAY Sports. “In all those years, I never ever knew, knew of or observed any player who had any interest whatsoever in tanking. Never, ever, ever.
“Players in the National Football League take the field to win. And irrespective of any discussions that are going on in the ether, they step on that field, and they play to win. I don’t think anyone should be concerned about that in the NFL.”
Go back to Week 17 of last season, when the seemingly lifeless New York Giants beat the heavily favored Colts 45-33 – Indianapolis was chasing a wild-card berth but had no answers for Giants backup Drew Lock, who threw four touchdown passes. Ultimately, the Colts would barely miss the postseason. Meanwhile, the win directly cost the Giants the No. 1 pick of the 2025 draft.
“There are too many variables in our sport,” says Tannenbaum. “Teams are going to be competitive. Backup players that get chances – that opportunity could (extend) their career.”
Parity is paramount in the NFL
The league loves the notion that almost every season begins with nearly every fan base believing their team has a legitimate shot at the Super Bowl – and those hopes are elevated by the fact that teams routinely go from last place to first year over year while the playoff field annually undergoes significant changes.
“The league is designed on the concept of parity,” says Trask. “If you institute something of this nature (a lottery), you’ve got to factor in the prioritization of parity.”
And a lottery would undoubtedly interject an X factor that would compromise that.
Despite last season’s controversial trade of Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers, the Mavericks – with Flagg aboard and assuming injuries don’t derail them again – will very likely contend for another NBA championship next season. It takes you back to when the Orlando Magic Powerballed the 1993 lottery, the year after they won the Shaquille O’Neal sweepstakes, and thrust their championship window wide open.
Giving a solid team like the Cowboys the opportunity to draft a prospect like Arch Manning – or the ability to incite a bidding war for him – could certainly upset the competitive balance the NFL strives so hard to maintain.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see it is my sense,” Tannenbaum says of an NFL lottery, noting it would take the approval of 75% of the league’s ownership to install.
“I don’t think the owners would ever want to see the team that just lost out on making the playoffs getting the franchise quarterback. Like, the hope of the NFL world is if you have a terrible season, you’re lined up and ready to get Andrew Luck, Trevor Lawrence, whomever.”
Transparency beats conspiracy
The Giants and Patriots knew what was at stake last season, when their late-season victories damaged their draft positions. So did everyone else given the top of the draft order evolves for all to see over the final weeks of the season. And maybe that’s the way it should be.
Ever since the first NBA draft lottery in 1985, when the New York Knicks won that year’s can’t-miss savior (Georgetown center Patrick Ewing), the league has been routinely accused of fishy outcomes. Even LeBron James, the No. 1 pick in 2003 – yes, that was the year the Akron, Ohio, wunderkind was drafted by his local team, the Cleveland Cavaliers – was one of many NBA players this year hinting at a conspiracy theory after the lottery, when highly touted Flagg, who made a name for himself in practices against Team USA’s 2024 Olympics squad, fell into the Mavs’ laps.
If Arch Manning does indeed blossom into the franchise-altering prospect many forecast him to be and headlines the 2026 or ’27 NFL draft, it’s probably for the best that the preceding season effectively determines his destination. Because even though the NFL would surely strive to be at least as aboveboard as the NBA has always claimed to be with its lottery security, many would cry foul regardless – whether Manning went to the Cowboys, or one of his uncles’ teams, or the Saints, or maybe, most deliciously, the Chargers, whose fans are owed a Manning more than two decades after being snubbed by Archie and Eli.
And just imagine if the announcement came as the capstone of, say, the annual scouting combine, when so many casual fans have had their first exposure to that year’s draft market.
“There are certainly positives associated with doing (a lottery),” admits Trask. “It would just enlarge the conversation.”
Alas, for now, an NFL draft lottery is probably a solution in search of a problem.