Why the right decision is seldom well-received in the NFL
In their penultimate game of the 2020 season, Philadelphia Eagles’ (now former) head coach Doug Pederson made a decision that nearly sparked a revolt amongst the Eagles’ roster, cost the New York Giants a playoff spot, and left the NFL community at large in a state of moral panic. The decision under trial was the choice to bench emerging star and potential franchise quarterback Jalen Hurts in favour of backup Nate Sudfeld, during a close Week 17 matchup with Washington. Granted, Hurts was having trouble completing passes and it’s commonplace for teams to evaluate talent on their roster in a meaningless matchup but Hurts accounted for two rushing touchdowns himself, and Sudfeld is by no means an integral piece of the team’s future. Despite Doug Pederson’s post-game attempts to cloak his decision as an example of his trademark unconventional play calling, his decision re-ignited the ever-cyclical discourse around tanking in football.
To the untrained eye tanking is difficult to catch, as it seldom involves explicit communication from coach to player to perform poorly. Rather it often boils down to personnel decisions, whether it be through deadline trades that jettison quality talent away for future assets, or in this instance, intentionally fielding a suboptimal lineup. To better understand why a team may engage in a seemingly irrational practice, game theory provides the perfect lens through which to examine the structural advantages that losing in the NFL provides.
In the zero-sum game that is football, most teams have a dominant strategy (a decision that will provide the greatest utility) of winning from week to week in hopes of obtaining a playoff spot. As a result, teams tend to expend every resource possible and make the requisite personnel decisions that will enable them to succeed. Once a team is eliminated from playoff contention outside of providing some short-term solace to its fans and stakeholders, the utility derived from winning the remaining games in a schedule is marginal at best. Losing in this context however, can potentially yield a franchise-altering talent via the draft. The NFL Draft is the great equalizer, a mechanism designed to ensure competitive balance through rewarding the league’s worst team in the previous season, with the first selection of the best available college talent. The draft’s reverse order of standings format therefore creates a perverse incentive to lose as many games as possible, which teams can exploit through tanking.
For the Eagles, their Week 17 matchup was a game theorist’s fever dream: a situation of perfect information. They were eliminated from playoff contention the week prior, and their opponent Washington, as well as everyone else in the NFC East, sought a Week 17 win to advance to the playoffs. With a loss, the Eagles would improve their draft position from 9th to 6th overall, a draft slot that has yielded fortune-altering talents such as Justin Herbert, Quenton Nelson and Jamal Adams in recent years. Knowing with absolute certainty what their opponent’s dominant strategy was and the clear and substantial long-term yields that a loss would bring, it made too much sense for the Eagles to find a way to squander the game away.
If tanking is such a strategically sound strategy that portends towards long-term success for teams at the lower rungs of the NFL, then why the hate? If you’re an adherent to the Al Michaels/Cris Collinsworth school of thought, then losing is unacceptable in any circumstance!
In a sport as adversarial as football, conceding any ground to your opponent is seen as an affront to the sport’s moral fabric. This culture that the NFL produces is central to its entertainment value however, for a league with numerous “-gates”, a lack of transparency with respect to CTE, and consistent mismanagement of domestic violence issues, there are far greater indictments on the league’s moral fabric than tanking.
What has been established through the dominant tide of NFL history is that tanking requires a great deal of coordination from parties that have competing interests. Coaches are often oriented towards winning in the short term, as their tenure within an organization and their likelihood of receiving employment elsewhere is heavily contingent upon their win-loss records. The same can be said for players, whose contracts are for the most part not guaranteed and incentive-laden, their longevity in the NFL is predicated upon their immediate success. The executives that run an NFL team however, tend to have a modicum of job security and can afford to sacrifice winning in the interim if it leads to long-term prosperity. This explains why the New York Jets, a fundamentally inept and talent-deprived team with every incentive to tank, won two inconsequential games after being eliminated from the playoffs and cost themselves the first pick in the upcoming draft.
Despite the clear advantages that tanking provides, the moral uproar regarding the sanctity of the game from those of Joe Judge’s ilk is disproportionate to how frequently it occurs and is misdirected. Doug Pederson’s decision, which was likely encouraged by Eagles GM Howie Roseman who gave Pederson the belief that he would retain his job for the 2021 season, is a clear indictment on the NFL and its blind hope that the “competitive spirit” ethos it perpetuates will win out. If flying in the face of PR and unabashedly putting your team at disadvantage becomes the norm in a post-“Process” universe, then it’s on the league to restructure how it rewards underperforming teams in the future.