So many sports fans were discussing the craziness of the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery that there’s increased speculation about whether the NFL would ever pull off a draft lottery of its own.
That would be my personal hell.
Earlier this week, the NBA Draft Lottery was met with many conspiracy theories. The Dallas Mavericks securing the No. 1 overall pick and the rights to draft Duke star Cooper Flagg—just months after trading Luka Doncic—seemed a little too convenient for sports fans.
The Mavericks had less than a 2% chance of winning the lottery and will now have the possibility of pairing Flagg with Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis.
This really screwed over the teams that were actually bad—the Utah Jazz, Charlotte Hornets and Washington Wizards—who lost the most games but will draft outside of the top three this June. These three teams now face an uphill battle in their rebuilds, having missed out on the opportunity to draft a generational talent due to bad draft lottery luck.
The NBA Draft Lottery was created to discourage tanking. The message was simple: do not purposely lose games, because there is no guarantee you’ll receive a top pick.
The NFL does not have those same guardrails. The worst team gets the No. 1 overall draft choice. And that’s how it should remain, despite some national pundits pushing for a lottery.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, some NFL organizations are just poverty. The NFL Draft has become their Super Bowl. For one weekend every year throughout the offseason, fans of those teams have hope. An NBA-style draft lottery would kill that.
Imagine the 1–31 Cleveland Browns. In 2016, they won just one game. That earned them future Hall of Fame defensive end Myles Garrett with the No. 1 overall pick, but their roster was still terrible. In 2017, the Browns went winless, securing the No. 1 overall pick for the second consecutive season. That terrible stretch allowed them to draft Baker Mayfield, who Cleveland hoped would become their franchise quarterback.
If that were the NBA, there’s no guarantee the Browns would have had those picks. The lottery could have worked in their favor—but there’s also a chance they could have wound up with the fifth or sixth pick and missed out on those superstar players.
There’s also something more torturous about being bad in the NFL than being bad in the NBA. The NFL is a long season, but you only get one game per week—one chance every week to get a win. In the NBA? You have chances every night. It makes the wins in football that much sweeter and the losses that much more painful.
So when you’re bad—and I mean really bad—the one thing to hang your hat on is the NFL Draft. In late December, as your team is already completely missing from the “in the hunt” graphics that are shown on TV during playoff talks, football fans find solace in reading mock drafts and debating the biggest position of need for the next season.
An NFL Draft Lottery would ruin the magic of sucking in football. Sometimes teams purposely lose, and that’s unfortunate. But sometimes these teams are just that bad—and the draft is the only way to save them from themselves.
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