So many sports fans discussed the madness of the NBA lottery of 2025 that there is an increased speculation about whether the NFL would ever get its own lottery.
That would be my personal hell.
Earlier this week, the NBA Draft Lottery was confronted with many conspiracy theories. The Dallas Mavericks that make the number 1 overall choice and the rights to make Duke Star Cooper Flagg safe – only a few months after trading Luka Doncic – seemed a bit too handy for sports fans.
The Mavericks had less than 2% chance to win the lottery and will now have the opportunity to combine Flagg with Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis.
This has the teams that were actually bad, really badly sewn – the Utah Jazz, Charlotte Hornets and Washington Wizards – who lost most of the matches but will set up outside the top three in June. These three teams are now confronted with a tough battle in their reconstruction, after they have missed the opportunity to set up a generation talent because of a bad lottery happiness.
The NBA Draft Lottery was established to discourage tanks. The message was simple: do not deliberately lose games, because there is no guarantee that you will receive a top choice.
The NFL does not have the same guardrails. The worst team gets the number 1 general design choice. And so it should stay, despite some National experts who insist on a lottery.
If we are honest with ourselves, some NFL organizations are just poverty. The NFL design has become their super bowl. For a weekend every year during the low season, fans of those teams have hope. An NBA-style Treek lottery would kill that.
Imagine the 1–31 Cleveland Browns. In 2016 they won only one competition. That deserved them future Hall of Fame Defensive End Myles Garrett with the number 1 general choice, but their selection was still terrible. In 2017, the Browns Winless went, so the number 1 general choice for the second consecutive season was secured. That terrible piece enabled them to set Baker Mayfield, whose Cleveland hoped they would be their franchise quarterback.
If that was the NBA, there is no guarantee that the browns would have had those choices. The lottery could have worked in their favor – but there is also a chance that they could have hindered the fifth or sixth pick and missed those superstar players.
There is also a little more torture of being bad in the NFL than being bad in the NBA. The NFL is a long season, but you only get one game a week – a chance to win every week. In the NBA? You have opportunities every night. It makes the victories in football so much sweeter and the losses that are much more painful.
So if you are bad – and I mean really bad – the only thing to hang your hat is the NFL concept. At the end of December, because your team is already completely missing in the images “In The Hunt” that are shown on TV during PlayOFF conversations, Football Fans find comfort in reading Mock concepts and debating about the greatest position of emergency for the following season.
An NFL Lottery would ruin the magic of sucking in football. Sometimes teams deliberately lose, and that is a pity. But sometimes these teams are just That Bad – and the design is the only way to save them from themselves.
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