Unfamiliar feelings.
To many British sports fans, the concept of wanting your favourite team to lose is a foreign one.
Whether it is football, rugby, cricket or even netball. There is no consolation for losing.
Then there is American sports, where relegation does not exist and losing is rewarded with better draft picks.
A system that can lead to fans actively rooting for their team to lose games, rather than win them.
The NFL’s worst kept secret
As mentioned, losing in the NFL is rewarded with higher draft picks. The worse your record, the better your draft pick. And the higher your draft pick, the better chance of getting the top prospects.
This leads to tanking – purposely losing for better draft picks – something which is frowned upon on at face value, but encouraged behind the scenes.
Almost every team in the NFL is guilty of it, and some have even based their team building philosophy around it in the past – I am looking at you Cleveland.
Walking the tight (tank) rope
Purposely losing games in the NFL is not as easy as it sounds. Players are playing for more than just a win, which makes them getting on board with losing on purpose much harder.
The NFL itself also tries to discourage tanking, that is one of the biggest factors in why the league has a minimum salary cap – the minimum amount of money a team is allowed to spend on their roster each season.
Teams that want to tank gave to get creative, and some are better at doing it than others.
The Cleveland Browns are one of those teams.
Kings of tanking
During the mid 2010s, the Browns essentially made tanking their team philosophy. They paid bonuses for stock piling draft picks and intentionally field bad rosters.
The results? Back-to-back number one overall picks in 2016 and 2017.
So when the Browns were staring at a lost season in 2024, it became quite apparent that they would likely not be too concerned about winning many more games the rest of the way.
And that is what they did. They benched their starting quarterback for an inexperienced player who had shown no signs of being able to win games in the NFL. Something they hoped he would continue.
The result? The second overall pick in the 2025 draft. If you are going to lose in the NFL, lose properly.
One Response
This article shows that there’s a sliver lining amongst the shambles of a season, gives the fans something to potentially look forward to in the future.