No. It pays to field a sorry team.
I don't know if it's a great idea for the NFL, but what you've described is kind of the opposite of what the lottery system does. The lottery reduces the incentive to tank the season for a top draft pick, because instead of the worst team having a 100% chance of drafting first overall, they'd only have a 25% chance (or whatever, depending on the exact rules). And improving from last-place to second-to-last would only reduce the team's chances of drafting first overall by about 5%, instead of giving them no chance whatsoever. Compared to the NFL system, a lottery would do a
better job of encouraging sorry teams to try and win games instead of punishing them for it, which is Tucker's point.
However, there are a number of reasons it makes less sense for the NFL than for the NBA, which have nothing to do with your complaint:
(1) NBA teams field 5 starters and around 12 total players, so a single star player represents a far greater proportion of a team's total roster than in any other major sport. You can even build an entire fairly successful franchise around just one player, even if his teammates aren't that good (see LeBron in Cleveland). That makes the top couple of picks extremely valuable, because that one guy -- if he's the right guy -- can make a world of difference. In the NFL, the rosters are more than four times larger, and a single player can almost never carry an entire team on his back, even if he's an all-time great. There's just not a way to turn your franchise completely around by landing the top pick in the NFL draft the way there sometimes is in the NBA.
(2) Similarly, the NFL draft is far far deeper with potential starters than the NBA draft. In the NBA, landing an immediate starter with a pick outside the top 10 or 12 slots, or landing an immediate star outside the top 3 or 4, is very rare. In the NFL, even if you miss out on the top couple of picks you can usually get an immediate starter with any pick in the top 2 or 3
rounds, which means teams are nowhere near as desperate to get into the very top of the first round as they are in the NBA.
(3) The NBA season is much longer than the NFL season, so bad teams play quite a lot of games after they've already been eliminated from playoff contention and have nothing else to play for. With the NFL season being only 16 games long, and with key divisional matchups deliberately reserved for the end of the year, most teams will at least have a
chance to still make the playoffs until much later in the year.
(4) Football is a much bigger draw than basketball right now, such that even lousy NFL teams can usually fill 80% of the seats in a stadium fairly well -- whereas bottom-dwelling NBA teams are often playing in front of half-full arenas. TV viewership follows a similar pattern. That means that even if an NFL team is "tanking," they're still making a decent amount of money for the league. In the NBA, it hurts business a lot more when you stop trying to win, which means it's more in the league's interest to reduce incentives for losing.
In short, the lottery makes sense for the NBA because the incentive to lose is far more powerful, and far more harmful to business, than in the NFL. For its part, the NFL
could probably reduce the "suck for Luck" factor by implementing a similar system, but they probably (and justifiably) don't see that as a big problem right now. And since the NFL Draft is already a huge revenue generator, why fix what doesn't seem to be broken?
