Why NFL Teams "Suck for Luck" and How We Can Stop It

Teams are sucking for Luck.

No, this isn’t some bachelorette party t-shirt game, though I’d be totally down with that. No, “Suck for Luck” is the working moniker for the futility of the NFL’s weaker teams, supposedly inspired by the chance to pick first in the NFL’s upcoming college player draft in April.

If you’ve been camping out in front of a skyscraper over the last two months, I’ll explain.

The “Suck,” specifically, is the poor play of a handful of NFL teams, none of who seem particularly keen on improving for the rest of the year. As we reach the halfway point of the season, eight of the league’s 32 teams have two wins or fewer. That’s ineptitude to which you could set your watch. But in one of the rare instances where the NFL rewards failure, the worst team of the season gets the first pick the following year, an impressive consolation prize when one considers who that first overall pick would certainly be.

That would be Andrew Luck. The redshirt junior quarterback is a quarterback, and he is really good. Some people are calling him the best draft prospect since Elway. Our own Matt Miller says Luck is already the best quarterback he’s ever seen, college or pro. Surely, Luck could benefit any awful NFL team, and even a few good ones. Unfortunately for Luck, he’ll probably find himself courted by the league’s worst teams this spring.

Lots of teams are, presumably, sucking for Luck, or possibly just sucking out of the circumstance that they’re bad teams. Who knows for sure? That said, it’s not necessarily an awful thing.

“Suck for Luck” is adding drama to the seasons of teams that don’t really deserve it, and one could argue that the average fan checking up on the woeful Colts, Rams and Dolphins teams is a good thing. It’s not like we’re pulling fantasy players from those squads, with the obvious exception of Steven Jackson, who arguably knocked his Rams out of the Suck for Luck Chase with his 159 rushing yards against the Saints in Week 8.

The NFL draft has no lottery system. The worst team from this season will pick first in April’s draft. That’s cut and dried, unlike other sports. In the NBA and NHL, every team that misses the playoffs has their draft order determined at random using a weighted ping-pong ball drawing. It’s just like one of those affairs that you see right before Jeopardy!, but with a lot more paperwork.

Only the four worst teams in hockey can snag the first overall pick.

In basketball, any team can win the No. 1 draft slot, but the worst-performing team from the previous year has the best chance in doing so. And we won’t even get into baseball, a sport with something like 14 drafts, each specific to college players, Rule 5 players, household pets and prehistoric vegetation, and so forth.

The NFL’s relatively simple draft system helps carry out the league’s mission of parody parity: Bad teams are provided better opportunities at improvement at the expense of good teams. It’s not necessarily fair for the players coming into the league, who have no chance to shop their talents among multiple teams, as most other people can in their respective job markets. And so occasionally, we have a situation like Eli Manning had in 2004.

Manning was set to be drafted by the San Diego Chargers, a team for which he plainly refused to play. They drafted him anyway, and later that day traded him to the Giants. It’s a rare instance of a player exercising clout against the system and succeeding, and it’s a card that few players that aren’t No. 1 picks have any chance of playing.

The league should consider alternatives. I’m sure it has before Suck for Luck became all the rage, but the league should spruce up its system while it can, in the deliberate knee-jerk reactionary way for which Roger Goodell’s NFL has become famous. Since I know how busy the guy is, I’ve suggested a few alternatives below to make his life a little easier:

Alternative No. 1: Power to the ping-pong balls

Do what every other league in sports does and give every team that missed the playoffs a handful of ping-pong balls and hold a draft lottery. I know ping-pong balls and football don’t exactly mesh together, so maybe we could use those little helmets that come out of those 50-cent vending machines instead. Those things are great. What’s the most money you’ve ever put into one of those? I did $4 once, but then I got the Browns helmet twice. Ruined my whole day.

Alternative No. 2: Playoff for the pick

The NBA considered doing something similar a few years ago, proposing that teams with the best record in the last 12 regular-season games or so would pick first in the following year’s draft. This didn’t work, because in basketball, nobody likes to put effort forth into anything. Why do you think those guys are still in a lockout? The players and owners both hate working too hard at anything.

Could the NFL conceivably have a four-team playoff to determine which would win the No. 1 overall choice? Not likely. The NFL hates giving away football for free; plus, I suspect each of those games would play out exactly like that Ravens-Jaguars Monday night game from a couple weeks ago. Forget I said anything.

Alternative No. 3: Free Agency exodus

Allow every college player to enter the league as a free agent. Teams could use the new rookie wage scale as a sort of cap for signing players out of college. The downside for the league here would be that bidding wars would ensue for unproven talent, and that kind of spending was what the league tried so hard to root out in its last collective bargaining agreement. Which leads us to...

Alternative No. 4: Do nothing

The only reason I included this (which isn’t an alternative at all) was so I could come back to this in five months and say “See? SEE! The NFL followed one of my suggestions!” Of course, I would never do that...for too long.

My only gripe regarding “Suck for Luck,” and the league’s draft system in general, is that teams should not be inclined to throw away entire seasons just to land a single prospect. That talent should be made more available for whichever team wants it the most, and done so without damaging the season currently being played.

If any league can make this happen, it’s the NFL, a league renown for getting on top of its PR problems. Surely, there’s some measure they can take to keep teams from tampering with the top of its draft order.

Of course, there’s always the chance that Luck could stay in Palo Alto for his senior year. Hmmm. For one NFL team, that would really suck.