NFL Open Thread: the Luck of tanking edition

The Jets pulled off one of the biggest upsets in NFL history least week, which led to predictable waves of complaints that this is actually a disaster for the Jets because TANKING for the One Indispensable Player in the next draft is how you win. One weird thing about this, as Kevin Clark observes, is that two division rivals have put together high-quality programs without any of that bullshit:

Kelce’s comments get to the heart of the matter of all franchise building. A pure, winless tank is the most direct route to a good player. But probably, more often than not, it’s a bad way to eventually build a good football team.

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This debate reminded me of a conversation I had last December with the people who run the Miami Dolphins. The 2019 Dolphins were so widely assumed to be tanking that, when they started to win games, The Miami Herald had to report that their owner, Stephen Ross, was “not angry, or devastated” about back-to-back November wins. Ross told an associate, according to The Herald, that he liked finding out he had a good coach. The next month, toward the end of a lost season, I asked Brian Flores what it was like to coach a team that everyone outside the building—from media to fans to the rest of the league—thought was looking toward the draft and not concerned about the results on the field. Flores said he understood why people would think that. “But at the same time, to think that these games are meaningless, to me it’s crazy,” he said. “If you think it’s meaningless then you can go down there and run down on a kickoff if you think it’s no big deal.” We spoke before the Dolphins were about to play in what was, on the surface, one of the most depressing games in history—a Week 16 clash with the 1-13 Cincinnati Bengals, the worst team in football. At the time, both teams looked like they were hurtling toward lost seasons, but Miami’s turned out to be a productive one. And that’s the point.

This is a year we learned about team building because teams weren’t supposed to get better this season because of shortened training camp, no in-person offseason activities and limited practice time. It’s true that a lot of good teams stayed good and bad teams stayed bad, but the Dolphins and Browns got dramatically better anyway. The Colts built on a solid roster to get back to the playoffs after a down season last year. The Bills, who made a giant leap last year and another one this year, might make the Super Bowl. All of these teams had the same general vibe: young talent, augmented by smart, manageable veteran contracts and badass coaching staffs.

I’ll get into this more in another post, but it’s worth noting that most of this year’s contenders aren’t built around One Indispensable QB taken with the #1 pick, and the ones that hew closest to the model (the Rams and the Browns) have the shakiest QB situations: Goff is an outright liability, and while Mayfield is decent 1)you hardly need a #1 overall pick to get essentially league-average production, and 2)the Browns would be in a stronger position had they just drafted DeShaun Watson rather than dicking around for another year because losing is the new winning or something.

Especially strange are the claims that winning was a disaster for the Jets that call Lawrence the best QB prospect than Andrew Luck. What’s weird about citing Luck as an exhibit in One Indispensable QB Theory should be obvious:

• Luck was forced into an early retirement because the poorly run organization that drafted him never put any kind of infrastructure around him.
• The Colts in Luck’s tenure topped out at “win the worst division in the league and then get the living shit stomped out of them in the conference finals.” Just a decade ago the Jets went just as far twice with Rex Ryan and Mark Sanchez for Chrissakes.
• The best QB in Luck’s draft class was drafted in the 3rd round, several slots after a replacement-level punter.

Sure, all things being equal I’d rather have Lawrence than the win. But if the Jets build a good organization they don’t need Trevor Lawrence specifically to win, and if they don’t they’re not winning anything even if they get Lawrence. And one thing Jets fans have learned in what would be two wins if not for Gregggggggg Williams is that they have a core of good young players — Becton, Williams, Maye, possibly Mims — who haven’t quit after two years of Adam Gase. That’s far from trivial.