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Idea: The #NFL 
should determine the draft order based only on record in games played before a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. (Thread)
should determine the draft order based only on record in games played before a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. (Thread)
So as someone who has studied and taught game theory for two decades, I think the way the NFL determines draft order is absurd. It's not even close to acceptable to anyone who understands incentives and strategic competition in that it assumes all teams tried their best and...
then tries to balance the playing field by rewarding higher picks to worse teams. In the competitive equilibrium, there is obviously tanking which adds random noise to actually competitive races for playoff spots. In a league with...
so few games (and hence each carrying a lot of weight for both draft and playoff purposes), this system is sure to result in nights like last night in Philly. A clearly better (though surely not perfect) system would be to determine...
the order based only on record in games played before a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. There would still be some form of tanking in the way rosters are constructed and so on, but bad teams...
would not have any draft-related incentive to lose late in the year. Randomizing the order with some form of lottery would also dampen the incentive, though it would not completely eliminate it from the final weeks like my suggestion would.
(You could also combine the two ideas and use pre-elimination record as well as a lottery amongst the bottom three or five teams, for example.) If the league doesn’t want games like last night, then they also can’t celebrate how every market is interested and tunes in...
for December games because their team is either in the playoff race or the draft pick race. Constructing a system to induce that dual interest and then complaining about one negatively impacting the other is hypocritical at best.
I’d love to hear others thoughts on this. @SheilKapadia @Bo_Wulf @ZBerm @JimmyKempski @BrandonGowton @lawlornfl @BleedingGreen
Here's how draft order would have been calculated this season under such a system. Notice how different the order would have been had teams not been rewarded for losing and punished for winning after they were out of it.
