Don’t Rule Out NFL Adopting a Draft Lottery

The NBA Draft Lottery happened. Other sports have lotteries. The NFL does not. Rich asked a former league insider whether the NFL could ever adopt one.

The answer was carefully open.

"I don't think anything's off limits ever if it makes it better," the insider said.

Rich pushed it further. Brockman jumped in with the anti-tanking argument.

"The argument would eliminate tanking," Brockman said.

Rich did not dispute that the NFL has it.

"There are teams openly wanting to lose," Rich said. "Now, you can't tell guys to go out and, you know, miss a tackle, miss a throw. But rosters are constructed in a certain way where they're not exactly trying to win."

He kept the pressure on.

"You could pull players from. Like somebody's hurt. That, as you know, created a big to-do with Maxx Crosby in the offseason," Rich said.

The insider said the conversation has not been one he remembers having inside the league.

"I don't remember a concern about this, and I haven't been there in close to a year, so maybe they're talking about it now," the insider said. "But I will say the NFL is never hesitant to make a change if it's going to make the game on the field better."

His standing position is that the system would respond.

"If this was an issue, knowing Roger and the owners like I do, they would address it and get on it," the insider said.

He laid out his actual skepticism on the lottery itself.

"I don't know why they would go to just go to a lottery for the sake of going to a lottery," he said.

The historical NFL fix for similar end-of-season motivation problems was the divisional-games schedule.

"I remember when we were worried about teams not playing hard if they didn't have stakes to play like week 16 or 17," he said. "That's one reason why you have so many divisional games in December."

The Chiefs sitting starters in Week 18 a few years ago with the bye locked up was the rare example he reached for. And in his telling, that is the exception, not the pattern.

The pushback he kept coming back to was players themselves.

"I remember talking to one player who remained nameless who was on a team that remained nameless that wasn't very good," he said. "It was like week 16, and I said, what's the motivation? He says, listen, everything's on film. I'm always playing for a job, whether a job here or the free agent market. And I don't care if we won two games or 12 games, I'm going to play as hard as I can."

The conclusion was that the players police the effort the league might worry about.

"I think players, if they're out there, they play," he said. "I don't think that's ever really been an issue."