Super Bowl Open Thread: Don’t Call it Tanking Edition

Tanier has a good breakdown of the game — the Bengals are live dogs, but the Rams are better offensively and defensively and it would be a major but not astounding upset if they won. Since this isn’t news, I think this is a point worth emphasizing:

I’ve heard several variations on the “copy the Bengals blueprint” question, including some weird Twitter gibberish last week about how the Bengals are proof that tanking works. (Joe Burrow is magical, you see? So if a team were to lose on purpose to get him, they would automatically vault into the playoffs! That’s how causality works!)

Anyway, sure, copy the Bengals blueprint: finish dead-last, draft a quarterback as good as Burrow, nearly sack him into a wheelchair as a rookie, pick the best receiver prospect since Randy Moss the next year, grab some defensive free agents to build a league-average unit, hope your two divisional powerhouses simultaneously collapse, get hot in the playoffs, hope the conference powerhouse self-destructs when it’s about to take a 28-10 lead, win Super Bowl. An airtight, logical plan.

If anything, the Bengals are further proof that tanking is silly: they went from worst to first in two years by being aggressive in the draft (tankologists would absolutely have drafted a left tackle instead of Chase) and free agency (the Trey Hendrickson and D.J. Reader signings did not really pass the analytics sniff test). Advocating for three-plus-year rebuilding plans is silly when teams like the 2021 Bengals and 2017 Eagles keep turning things around in two. The closest thing to the moral of the Bengals story is that no team should think, “Oh well, Aaron Rodgers is in our division, so let’s just bide our time and conserve resources until we see a window of opportunity.”

Yes, every Walkthrough segment is secretly a commentary on the Vikings.

The Bengals didn’t really “tank,” and certainly not in the multi-year Hinkie/Brown sense — they reached the end of a natural cycle, bottomed out, and then tried to get good immediately rather than deliberately prolong the process to get more picks. The Bengals would give some ammunition to tanking fanatics anyway if Burrow was a transcendent superstar, but in fact as of now the best QB of the 2020 class was drafted #6 overall as the third QB taken.

And this is the problem with the Tanking For the One Indispensable Prospect theory of winning in the NFL. Obviously, Brady going at pick 199 is an outlier the other way, but Rodgers was taken near the end of the first round after several C+ RB prospects, Patrick Mahomes was taken 8 spots after Mitch Trubisky, Russell Wilson was drafted after a punter, etc. And not only was Stafford a trade acquisition, despite being the #1 pick he’s been a solid but distinctly non-elite QB, and yet he’s still better than other recent #1 picks like Goff, Mayfield, and Winston. Tanking (as opposed to just ordinary rebuilding) in the NFL is just dumb.