At a time when tanking has become a regular talking point for the NBA, the NFL’s approach typically goes like this: See no tanking, hear no tanking, speak no tanking.
Commissioner Roger Goodell was required to break from that habit on Tuesday, when he was asked about tanking at the press conference that capped the league’s annual meeting.
“We obviously keep a keen focus on it, but we don’t see any evidence of that,” Goodell told reporters, via Omar Kelly of the Miami Herald.
He then pivoted to touting the competitive nature of the league, with “players and coaches who want to win, and they’re out there playing their hearts out.”
But the issue isn’t whether the players and (for the most part) coaches want to win. Tanking can happen when owners and executives who make a business decision about the cost of finishing, say, 3-14 instead of 4-13, and the benefit of landing higher in the draft order.
Late in a lost season, a team can legitimately decide to evaluate younger players, or (as the Raiders did in 2025) shut down key players who had been playing with injuries.
Tanking doesn’t happen often in the NFL, in large part because the season is short enough to minimize the number of games during which a bad team is dog paddling through the final legs of a lost season. But it has happened.
The best example of blatant tanking came in 2014, when the Buccaneers removed a large chunk of their starters to start the second half of a Week 17 game against the Saints. At halftime, the Buccaneers led 20-7. The Saints won the game, 23-20.
“Heck, they lost a game on purpose to us at the end of the season prior with [head coach] Lovie Smith,” then-Saints coach Sean Payton said in 2020. “They forced Lovie [Smith] to take his starters out of the game so they could get the one spot to draft Jameis [Winston].”
Payton explained the dynamic during a subsequent visit to PFT Live. The Buccaneers put down the sword to clinch the Jameis pick by removing their best players. The players who were inserted into the game were trying to win. They weren’t good enough to fend off the Saints.
During that same appearance, Payton also mentioned the Eagles’ decision to replace quarterback Jalen Hurts with Nate Sudfeld in a Week 17 loss to Washington, which didn’t give Philadelphia the first overall pick but bumped them higher in the draft order for 2021.
“Nate has been here four years and I felt he deserved an opportunity to get some snaps,” Pederson said after that game.
The value of having a higher pick in the draft is indisputable. In most years, teams sacrifice significant assets to move higher. For the teams that are out of the playoff conversation, the easier — and cheaper — way to move higher is to lose meaningless games.
Still, the first rule of Tank Club is you do not talk about Tank Club. On Tuesday, Goodell had no choice, given the direct question he was asked. In answering the question, however, he flatly denied the existence of Tank Club.
It may not have many members. It may not have annual meetings. But it exists. And, for the most part, the NFL has been able to conceal it.
Why do you think there’s no draft lottery in the NFL? If the NFL had one, it would become yet another money-for-nothing offseason tentpole, with massive ratings for a prime-time game show aimed at fueling hope for failing teams.
But the mere existence of a lottery becomes an acknowledgement of the temptation to tank. As evidenced by Goodell’s response to Tuesday’s question, the league will never do that.
Even if it’s hiding in plain sight.