Drafts are bad. When I first started this newsletter, I planned to write a whole long thing about why they are bad – and maybe one day I still will – but it always proved deceptively hard to write.
For one, it just seems so self-evident that any argument becomes silly. Obviously there’s a reason people don’t get hired this way in any other world besides professional sports. Imagine if you wanted to be a teacher at your local high school, but the day you got your degree, someone showed up and told you you had to move to Cincinnati and work there because their school system had been deemed the worst in the country, and that gave them the right to select any new teacher they wanted. It’s such a ridiculous hypothetical that there’s not much else to even say.
But another problem is that everyone loves the drafts — heck, even I kind of like them. Tonight, millions of people will tune in to watch the first round of the NFL Draft. In June, millions of people will watch the NBA Draft. Heck, the NBA even gets millions of people to watch the draft lottery — fans love drafts so much that they will watch a whole separate show, weeks earlier, that merely determines the order of the draft. These are huge sources of revenue for the leagues. So even if you could somehow convince the folks in charge that drafts are bad, you’d still need to give them a way to ditch the drafts without sacrificing these cash cows.
Even aside from all the money involved, the drafts are FUN. Every year they provide a source of off-season excitement, not to mention hope for beleaguered fanbases. You don’t want to be the curmudgeon arguing against them, even if they are anti-labor. Because for all their flaws, they do address important things, namely standardized pay, competitive balance, and incorporating new talent into the league.
I joked above about teachers being drafted by school districts, but it’s not as if the way non-athletes actually get hired is so great. I touched on this a little last year, but sometimes criticisms of the drafts drift into right-wing talking points about the freedom of contracts, imagining a world where employees and employers negotiate on equal footing and amicably arrive at free and fair wages. But this is nonsense. In real life, people entering the workforce face all kinds of struggles in getting hired and negotiating their first salary. By standardizing the process in a collectively bargained fashion, drafts actually do streamline the process.
By the same token, it is reasonable for leagues to prioritize a goal like competitive balance over the individual desires of incoming stars. Maybe everyone wants to play for the Chiefs and 49ers and Lakers and Celtics, but it’s not ideal for the league if all the talent is in the same places year after year.
So then what gives? If the draft addresses reasonable goals, and everyone loves it, then why am I against it?
Well, first of all, the competitive balance goals can be addressed in many other ways: salary caps, revenue sharing, simply limiting the number of roster spots, etc. Not only is the draft a bad way to achieve competitive balance, but it comes with at least one obvious downside: tanking. If you give higher draft picks to teams with worse records, then you create an incentive for teams to lose games, which has consumed basically every pro sports league in the US in recent years. Tanking for a higher draft spot is hard to even criticize because it’s so obviously rational in many cases — high draft picks are just too valuable.
Which leads to the OTHER major downside of drafts: the exclusivity. Once a team drafts a player, that’s it — barring a trade, the player has no choice but to play for that team. Some players threaten to hold out, refusing to play until they can go somewhere else, but there’s a real stigma attached to such a move, and it requires players to be willing to forgo some of the limited years they have for their athletic careers.
This creates a huge power imbalance over such an important decision in a player’s career. We talk so much about draft busts and steals, but often these determinations are really about players finding situations that did or did not work for them. Think of how Robert Griffin III’s career would have been different if he’d been drafted by a team that didn’t rush him back from an injury, or how Steph Curry’s career would have gone if he’d been drafted by the Timberwolves. These decisions are so important that the players should have SOME say in them, even if that say is slightly checked by concerns about competitive balance.
So what to do instead? How do we balance the goals and excitement of the draft with a respect for the autonomy of young players?
My proposal: We keep the draft BUT we invert it. Instead of teams selecting players, we let players select the teams. I see it working something like this…
The players who enter the draft would be put in some kind of mostly random order. It doesn’t have to be totally random — probably there should be tiers based on how highly rated a prospect is. But since the choice is ultimately up to the player anyway, the order isn’t that important.
The teams would all get some preset amount of Rookie Slots to pay out to new players, similar to how the MLB bonus pool currently works. Each Slot is the equivalent of the lowest rookie base salary. So let’s say the average team gets 24 Slots. I figured this as 10 for the first round, 4 for the second, 3 for the third, 2 each for the fourth, fifth, and sixth, 1 for the seventh, but teams don’t have to use them in any particular way. The Slots also don’t have to be allocated equally – you could give worse teams more money in the name of competitive balance. But every team would go in with a pre-set, known number of Slots that corresponded to how much they could spend on rookie contracts.
When the first player is “on the clock,” all interested teams make their bids. Then the player has 10-15 minutes to go over the bids and decide which to “accept.” Obviously you can’t expect players and teams to finalize deals in that window, but once a bid is “accepted,” that player and the team have an exclusive negotiating window to reach a deal.
Teams could bid however many Rookie Slots they have on whatever player is “on the clock,” but once you run out, then you’re out. So if you’re desperate for a quarterback, you can overbid for one, but then you have fewer left to bid on other players. Or teams could trade allotted Slots the way they currently trade picks.
Let’s do a hypothetical example. In tonight’s draft, Bryce Young will, barring some unexpected development, go #1 to the Carolina Panthers. And maybe he’s fine with that. But in my Flipped Draft, once Roger Goodell did his intros, it would be Young* who is “on the clock.” All the teams that were interested in Young would have 15 minutes to submit a bid. If the Panthers were really serious, they could bid 20 of their 24 slots on Young (or all 24 if they want!), recognizing that leaves them with fewer options for other rookies. After all, the Panthers ALREADY made a big investment in getting Young when they traded up for the #1 pick – it’s just that none of that investment went to Young himself.
*Actually, it probably wouldn’t be Young, since the order would be either random or alphabetical or something, but let’s just pretend for the hypothetical that he happened to go first.
And Young could take that deal, meaning he’d get a salary ~20x what the rookie minimum is, provided he and his agents could work out a full deal with the Panthers. But let’s say Young really doesn’t want to play for the Panthers. Let’s say he’s nervous about coach Frank Reich’s reported preference for bigger quarterbacks, and he knows that if he’s going to succeed at the NFL level, he needs to go somewhere set up for an undersized quarterback. And maybe he’s even willing to take less money to do that. So maybe instead of accepting Carolina’s bid of 20, he’ll take Seattle’s bid of 16, figuring he’ll make less in the short term but be better set up for his career in the long term.
Or maybe Young gets ANOTHER bid for 20 Slots, this one from the Atlanta Falcons. And maybe Young likes Atlanta — it’s SEC country, after all. Maybe he likes the idea of playing in a dome, and would rather be in the NFC (where he can avoid playing Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow and Josh Allen every postseason for a decade), so he decides to take that offer.
Either way, HE gets to make the choice. Then teams that lost out get their Slots back, and whichever team he picked gets to negotiate a contract with him, with a base salary determined by the Slots bid. Then we go to the next pick…
This would preserve the televised spectacle of the Draft, while keeping alive the hope of fans excited about new players. If anything it would mean MORE fans have a shot, since now every team goes in with a chance to bid on every player. It also preserves flexibility for GMs, who could trade Slots the same way they now trade picks. But, crucially, the ultimate choice would belong to the players. It’s far too important a decision to be left to the owners…