A Lot Of Words About Why I don’t Root For Tanking
The Giants have won two games in a row. If you went into any Giants fan spaces over the last two weeks, you’d have to go in wearing body armor. Are you happy the Giants won or not? Do you want the team to lose? That’s the question driving everyone to war. Do you root for your team to tank?
Me? I do not root for a tank. I have never rooted for a tank. I likely will never root for a tank. I never want to somehow find myself twisted into a position where I am actively rooting for my team to lose. That’s fuck’n dumb! I want the Giants to win every game they play by 50 points. Some people might see my high Giants pessimism and be confused by that statement, but pessimism in fandom isn’t rooting for your team to lose. It’s wanting your team to win, but not believing they will. I do not have much faith in the Giants, but I will always root for them to win, and I will always enjoy it when they do.
People who are rooting for a tank, who I call Tankers, certainly do not see it as rooting against their team. They view it as rooting for the team, in the long run. I don’t really agree with it. Because this long game is hinged entirely upon unknowns and hypotheticals. One of the things you notice when you get into arguments with Tankers is when the team wins, they talk as if the picks you are no longer in position to get were automatically going to change the franchise. “Oh, you’re happy they won this meaningless game?” they say, suggesting you are some simpleton who doesn’t understand wider contexts. “I hope you enjoy next year when we still suck ass then and some other team has their franchise QB”, they say confidently, as if they exist in an alternate reality where this has already happened.
This has always been the fundamental flaw to me in rooting for a tank. When you root for a tank, when you reach the point where you are actively upset and angry that the team was successful at their jobs, you’ve essentially traded any enjoyment you may get for what’s in the box. And the box might just have more pain. You are working yourself up over hypotheticals. You are building a mythical fantasy in your head of that pick working out and changing everything for the better. You’re daydreaming, and getting mad when reality isn’t allowing that dream to come true. The team winning a game becomes an antagonist in the future you’ve convinced yourself will happen if you picked higher.
The draft is a wildcard. A crapshoot. Absolutely nothing is guaranteed. I saw Jets fans gloat and laugh when the Giants picked Saquon Barkley and allowed them to get Sam Darnold. Barkley, even with his injuries, has been a franchise player, and if the Giants sign him this offseason, he will likely outlast two top 3 Jets QB choices in 5 years. The best QBs of that draft were taken at #7 (and he took at least 2 years of development to become good), and pick #32. I watched the Giants “lose” the Chase Young bowl to Washington and get an all-pro tackle out of it while Chase Young is now a 49er and has spent half his career on IR. I watched Texans fans become absolutely livid last year at losing the tank job and end up with the best rookie QB we’ve seen in years who immediately transformed the franchise.
I watched the Bears become elated that Justin Fields fell to #10 and then watched them misuse, abuse, and squander him in the years since, to the point where he may never be good. Getting that higher pick certainly gives you a better chance at that guy who could help change your franchise around. The Jaguars and Bengals are certainly happy. But it is not a guarantee. It is never a guarantee. It’s just a chance. He could bust, the team could completely fail around him anyway, any number of things can prevent this from working out. And a team who picks below you could stumble into the guy you should have picked anyway and then you’re mad for a different reason.
The draft is a consolation prize. A way to make you feel better about the future when your team sucks ass. You watch your team stink it up all year and think to yourself, well at least we can draft a top guy! But it’s not something you actively root for. You are just trading whatever enjoyment you actually can get out of this year for some far-off potential future nobody knows.
The past two wins, while likely pushing the Giants out of top 2 QB prospect range, have also been the most joy I’ve had all year and I don’t want to exchange that joy for anger and bitterness about some hypothetical future. Tommy DeVito has become a brief, fleeting legend. A tiny speck of joy that shines so brightly. When these Tankers scream that these wins are meaningless, they aren’t. They aren’t to Tommy. They aren’t to coaches who are trying to keep things from falling apart. They aren’t to the players who played in it, who will remember those moments for the rest of their lives. They aren’t to the fans among us who feel happy when the team wins and are enjoying the ride, no matter how silly. No win is meaningless. But it becomes meaningless if you view your entire fandom through this specific lens. This weird min/max winning potential stock investment kinda lens. There is so much more value to sports than just maxing out winning.
I think a lot of these Tankers are too deep in. They are taking football far too personally and seriously. This is a game we watch for entertainment, and if you’ve reached a point where you are actively angry that the team did the thing they are supposed to do, maybe it’s time to take a step back and ask yourself why you need this so badly. Why your team winning brings you anguish. It’s not like being a successful franchise just results in sunshine and rainbows. Once you are good, the losses hurt even more, and the pressure begins to mount to a point where you just feel relief after a win instead of pleasure. Last year the Giants were supposed to suck and instead they gave us nothing but glory. Last year was an absolute pleasure, one of my favorite seasons being a Giants fan, because there was no pressure. No expectations. Just good vibes. Fuck, last year may have hurt the Giants in the long run more than this year will. We now owe Daniel Jones a billion dollars.
The older I get, the more the seasons and games blend together, and the less the team being consistently successful feels like it really matters. I got to witness likely the greatest Giants win in history in 2007 and even now things still feel kinda like gravy. I remember individual wins from all of these bad years in the past decade, and I remember enjoying them. The losses mostly fade away. Even with how dismal the franchise has been I’m still left with mostly good memories. Those “meaningless victories”. I choose to relish those wins, each and every one of them, for the wins they are and the joy they give me. I want the team to be great, but I will never root for losses every week and trade what happiness I am given for what’s in the box. Players dont tank. Coaches dont tank.
Fuck Tanking. Go for the win every time. Figure out the rest when the time comes.
This is one of your best comics I’ve read in all the years I’ve been reading your stuff. While I 100% agree with everything you said in the blog post, the comic also expressed things that words cannot
This is why you trade for somebody else’s pick, so you can root for them to lose. Stop winning Broncos, we need that 2nd rounder as early as possible!
100% agree. What’s tanking though?
“Tanking” means to lose intentionally. Why lose intentionally? In the NFL, there is a draft to pick first-year players out of college. Some of these first-year players are very highly valued as future star players. To make things fair, the NFL lets the teams that lost the most games in the previous season have the first opportunity to pick these future stars.
Teams rarely admit outright to losing intentionally. This is probably true in most cases. At the very least, the players surely don’t like to lose because it hurts their leverage when they need to negotiate their own salaries. In addition, if a team openly admitted to tanking, the owners could potentially be fined a lot of money for cheapening the quality of the on-field product and, in so doing, reducing the value of the other teams in the league.
Nonetheless, if a team performs poorly enough, fans like to claim that they are “tanking”, at least in the sense that the executives in charge are forgoing an investment in today’s team in an attempt to get a better team tomorrow. “Tanking” to this plausibly-deniable extent, while being coy about admitting to it, is probably true for a lot of the owners of bad teams in the NFL.
Dave’s point here is that rooting for the “tank” is stupid because winning now feels good 100% guaranteed, whereas losing now to pick slightly earlier in the draft has a 5% chance of feeling good later. After all, the dirty secret is that we simply cannot reliably evaluate which first-year players will be stars, at least not to the extent that losing 2-3 extra games to pick 5-10 spots earlier is going to yield a big expected long-term gain.
Well said, Dave!
In 2003, the Giants suffered one of their worst playoff losses in history, when the 9ers came back from 24 pts down. The game ended with the Giants trying for the winning FG. They botched it and a mistaken penalty was directed against Big Blue, game over. The NFL apologized later and said the Giants should have had another attempt at a kick.
For a solid couple of years, I was fuming over that game. How can you be up 24 pts in the late 3rd quarter and blow it, and then finally pull your head out of your rear to win at the end… but the refs take it all away. And all you have to show is an empty apology from the NFL. “WHOOPSIE!” I’d rather they just said nothing and doubled down on their original call.
After 2007, I stopped caring about that game, because if the Giants had won, Fassel probably isn’t fired the following year (RIP Jim). No Coughlin, we wouldn’t have been in position for Eli, and I’d have been denied the pleasure of the unbeatable “point and laugh” whenever the Brady stans in my life come at me.
On a related note, I think this is the final evolution of THE TANKER. #neverforget
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5B1xRKWAAkQqof.jpg
As a Buffalo sports fan, we’ve seen this argument far too often over the last few decades (Jauron’s Bills had sparked the debate, and Sabres fans have to keep coming back to it.)
One of the things most Tankers ignore is that the team performing so poorly that tanking is an option, are not built from a vacuum. Assuming that the front office could use the draft picks to the best possible advantage is assuming that the current team is terrible because of the players (the same players the FO decided to go with that year) and not an issue of management/scouting/coaching/etc.
Almost every team that has played terrible has players who can be good, if not great The Bills saw this constantly through the drought where the biggest issues were always those of poor choices (i.e. The entire Rob Johnson Debacle, taking E.J. Manuel in the 1st; letting future HOF players like Jason Peters, Marshawn Lynch, Stephon Gillmore walk away in free agency).
It’s so true. There are so many players who languish on bad teams, or have to deal with bad coaching. Justin Jefferson sat out the first three or four games of his career because Mike Zimmer was adamant about not starting rookies. Sometimes I feel like the player itself is one of the least-important parts of the equation. The hype around Trevor Lawrence was rapidly deflating while he was being coached by that doofus Urban Meyer. Bad seasons can happen to anyone, but good organizations will generally be able to weather a few bad years here and there.
I think it helps that DeVito is just a likeable kid.
I remember duckmania and the 2019 steelers, and it was great. We enjoyed rooting for Duck Hodges and his noodle arm, even if it was never going to take us to a ring.
I agree with a lot of what you said here. I also kind of understand why a lot of people gravitate towards tanking. It boils down to finding a reason to invest in the team.
I think most Tankers have subscribed to the mindset of wanting their team to either be be really, really good or really, really bad with absolutely no in between. They’ve likely observed a lot of teams, including their own, constantly finding themselves somewhere in the middle. Teams that are never good enough to actually make a legitimate run for a championship but also good enough to never get an ultra high value pick. I get the mindset. Being mediocre blows. You’re never going to get excited for the future because you know the ceiling is an early playoff exit at best (if you even think you’ll make it) and you can’t get excited for the draft because you’re picking in the middle of the first round and likely don’t care enough about college ball to consider who will be the best available at that pick. You feel like you’re just stuck in limbo.
I think those conditions create a very unique form of pessimism. If you’re always in the race, you have something to be legitimately excited for. If you’re extremely bad, you can shrug and look forward to having your pick at one of the best players in the upcoming draft. When you’re consistently mediocre, you get neither of those things, and you have to choose between being hopelessly optimistic to an almost delusional degree or uncaring. What I’m getting at here is that Tankers still want to feel something, but they don’t want to be homers. So it’s easier to just root for losses and be mad on the occasions that you win, because at least then you’re still feeling something about your team. There’s a reason to still be invested in the product on the field, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.
For some fans, that investment is found in enjoying the small victories. The unknown QB prospect having his 15 minutes of fame. The old vet having one last big game before they call it career. Etc. Etc. For Tankers, that investment is in the hope of future success. I think everyone is aware that the draft is a crapshoot. But that doesn’t mean you can’t put hope in what a high pick can bring you. It’s still something to invest in and it provides that reason some people need to still watch games. Investment is what makes watching sports entertaining.
I’ll be honest, my team blows right now. This season has sucked absolute shit. But it’s been a lot easier for me to stomach that knowing that they’ll likely have their pick at one of the top QBs in the draft. I’ll never actively root for losses, but I’ve reached the point where I’m totally fine with losing out if it means getting that pick. Is that a bad mindset? Yeah. But it still provides me a reason to keep caring, even if it’s only a tiny bit. I think that’s where most Tankers stand, though the more vocal ones are likely a lot more aggressive about it.
I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.
The sad reality is that tanking seldom works in the NFL. Most high pick QBs don’t turn out to be HoFs. And most teams with the #1 pick are often run so poorly that it doesn’t matter who they draft (or they’ll draft the wrong guy because they can’t evaluate talent). The only time I rooted for a tank job was back in 2018 with the Niners. When Jimmy G got hurt in the KC game, we knew the season was over. That being said, we also knew that Nick Bosa was in the next draft, and we had a team that had potential (just missing a QB to injury) and a coaching staff that seemed to know what the hell it was doing. It was a perfect storm where we all just collectively said “Let’s just write this season off and try to get a generational talent in the draft.” And sure enough we did, and we had an amazing season that was just one Jimmy G deep ball to Emmanuel Sanders away from ending perfectly.
Exactly. Football has too many moving parts for any one player to reverse the fortunes of a franchise. Even in the examples of teams “getting their guy”, they still needed to make other moves to make the ship run. The Bengals were still putrid even after they drafted Burrow, and it wasn’t until the drafted Jamarr Chase and made other quality signings on defense that helped boost them to contending status. Same can be said of the Jaguars with Lawrence and other successful rebuilds. One pick can’t change everything, though it can help a lot.
That said, I get why fans will call for a tank at times because depending on the situation it’s totally needed, like the Niners in 2018 as you mentioned. Sometimes punting away a season can pay off. If you lose some very important pieces early (especially the QB), why not try to hit a home run in the next draft? You’re already out of it.
Your last paragraph is exactly the mindset I was getting at with the idea of the draft as a consolation prize. That’s fine. Im not all that bothered by losses either when the team sucks and I like getting a higher pick. But there’s a difference with being alright with the result and being actively angry about it and thinking about how losing is the proper strategy.
You’d be surprised how many fans I got into fights with this past week about it though who were actively angry about it. Some guy saw my Giants hat while I was walking my dog and was like “Go Giants! Wish they didn’t win this weekend though”. I cannot endorse that mindset.
Yeah I completely understand that. I’ve seen fans of my own team get abnormally angry at anyone suggesting that they actually try to win games instead of punting the season away. I understand preferring if the team loses, but being genuinely angry about it is very extreme. I think Tankers have to realize that no one in this league is ever going to try to lose. Players will play to win. Coaches will coach to win. The teams at the top of the draft board aren’t there because they want to be there, they’re there because they aren’t talented enough to avoid it.
I get the frustration of watching a crappy season play out, but, in my opinion, fans should just try to find the value in the guys they have. Evaluate who is worth keeping and root for those guys to continue to show out and prove their worth for next season. If they win, great, they’re showing potential. If they lose, great, they’re trending towards getting a guy that can fill some of those holes.
Like I said, I get where Tankers are coming from. I just think the way they go about presenting their message is wrong. If you want the team to lose, cool, but you should never get mad at other fans for continuing to root for wins. That’s literally the point of being a fan.
This.
Plus people can’t expect last season to be the end of the rebuild, that’s another thing. Kind of made me wonder how the internet forum would be like during the 1983 disaster under Parcell’s first year as the head coach.
I basically came here to say this exactly but you said it better I could.
I get the tankers, I really do. Sometimes it’s all you can hope for with a horrible team.
For me personally, I still like to see my team win. I’m a Colts fan and the “Suck for Luck” meme came true and we got Luck who was awesome (until they ruined him and I will NEVER forgive them for that because he was SO much fun to watch).
I still was happy when they won their 2 games that years. I’m never going to root for my team to lose.
I honestly don’t even start paying attention to the draft until AFTER the season. I’m too engaged in football in general to care.
I also – exactly as you said – do not follow college so I have no idea who would be drafted first (Caleb Williams or Michael Penix I guess?)
Anyway, lots of words here to just say: You said it so well 🙂
I appreciate it. I’ve had some thoughts on this subject for a while and I get both sides of the aisle. I don’t have an issue with Tankers so long as they aren’t trying to dictate how other fans choose to fan.
Jalen Hurts was a 2nd round pick (and miles better than Carson Wentz, who had been drafted #2 overall). Dak was a 3rd, as was Chef Russ. Drew Brees was a 2nd. (Wow, looking at the draft, he was the 1st pick of the 2nd round… and only the *2nd* QB taken, behind Mike Vick, who of course was #1 overall. Only the 2022 draft was worse in recent memory, with Kenny Pick’em taken at #20, and then nothing else until… Ridder in the 3rd round.)
While a Top-10 pick certainly can help, it’s not like any QB drafted below that will stink. Most likely, anything below a 3rd-round is probably going to be nothing more than a backup (Brady and Purdy are the exceptions), but still, that’s a lot of draft positions to find someone.
This is where I stand on it. You draft where you draft. If you really like a guy, you can always move up or down with enough capital, but it doesn’t really matter. There will always be guys you wish you franchise took who flourish in other places (I know a lot of Vikings fans who reeeeaaaaaallly wanted Antoine Winfield Jr who has been generally pretty good in Tampa). But you’ll also always draft guys who had no business going as late as they did (Danielle Hunter was a 3rd round pick FFS). This ALWAYS happens. Sometimes you draft poorly, but it’s rarely because you were two spots lower than you wanted.
Also, as a fan of a team which had perhaps the most infamous, public tank job in history (the Philadelphia 76ers and “The Process”)…. it’s not fun in the slightest. It sucks. And it *especially* sucks if the team then decides that one year of tanking wasn’t enough to get what they wanted, so they do it again the next year.
You don’t want that. Trust me.
YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!
Dave, this is perfect! I’m saving this comic for every sour fan I have to deal with when my teams win. My motto has always been:
If you can’t celebrate your team winning, YOU SHOULDN’T BE WATCHING PROFESSIONAL SPORTS!
Tankers need to touch grass. Football is about stories, good AND bad. In the midst of one of the most miserable Vikings seasons in recent memory in 2011, Jared Allen was going for the Sack record. Yeah, the team sucked, but watching my favorite player make history was awesome! If the only thing that matters is winning the Super Bowl, then why would anyone be a fan of any team outside of DAL, NE, SF, PIT, etc?
Also, if your sports ego is so fragile that you need to hold onto the Schrodinger’s Box that is the NFL Draft, that’s fine. Keep it to yourself. Don’t bring your pissy, smarmy negativity around the rest of us that just want to get through our 3+ hour chunk of time with a good story and hopefully a win.
“Oh, so you’re okay with being mediocre for the foreseeable future”
Sure. I don’t know? I don’t care? Drake Maye and Caleb Williams could be Trubisky and Darnold 2.0. Maybe the Jayden Daniels will be like Lamar Jackson and end up getting drafted at the end of the 1st round and knock it out of the park? Maybe CJ Stroud comes back to earth and is terrible like Kyler Murray? If we really like a guy, we can trade picks to get him. It’s that simple.
I will never root for my team to lose unless that game is the one thing that would assure the #1 overall pick….even then it’s more of a consolation prize than anything.
I dunno, I feel like after seeing everyone else on the planet earth enjoy rooting against the Patriots for the past 20 years, I figured this season I’d give it a try too…
You know what? Valid. Go off, king
Great write up Dave. You summed up the situation well and covered so much of my frustration with these tankers. I don’t understand why they even watch the games if they want the team to lose. Then actively getting angry at fans who are happy their team won. Which is the whole point of playing the game, to win and have fun doing it!
I root for the Giants to win every game, but like Dave, I expect them to lose most of them.
I think either way is fine, it’s just about finding some way to wring some joy out of being a fan of a bad team–as long as you don’t spoil the fun for someone else.
As a long-suffering Jaguars fan, obsessing over the draft is what got me through most of the nearly three decades of the team’s existence. And when they were inevitably out of contention by Halloween, it made it more enjoyable to watch college football and think about which players might be a good fit to solve some of the Jaguars’ problems.
But you’re right that even then, there’s the risk of even more disappointment if your team doesn’t pick the player you want them to, or they do and he turns out to be a bust. And sometimes luck is better than a higher pick, like the Cowboys having to “settle” for Dak after missing out on Paxton Lynch and then Connor Cook, or the Texans losing the #1 pick on a meaningless win but then lucking into Stroud instead of Young. I had very complicated rooting interests before the Lawrence draft because I did want them to get the 1st pick, but if they weren’t in position for that I wanted them to win enough to not get #2 since I didn’t trust them to not take Zach Wilson in that spot when my second favorite QB was Fields.
But the ups and downs, both in games and the draft, are part of what makes it fun to be a fan. There is no light without the dark.
Completely agree. 31 teams every year don’t win the SB. More than half don’t even make the playoffs. I don’t understand the idea of rooting for failure just so you can have a worse than a coin flip odds of being a good team at some point in the future. Because guess what: when you lose in the playoffs you’ll just be unhappy again and say it doesn’t matter unless you make the Super Bowl. Then if you lose the super bowl you’ll say just making it didn’t matter either.
Football is a game. It is entertainment. Winning is more fun than losing. It sucks to watch your team lose, especially when you’re a fan of a bad team. But why would you CHOOSE to be unhappy when your bad team wins?
We got away with our semi-tank, having borked out of it to end 5-11, but that’s only because nobody else wanted Tua, he slipped to 5th, and we’ve built on him with Hill & Waddle.
Gonna go against the grain here and say I don’t have a problem with rooting for tanking, and this is gonna be a long spiel.
First off, let’s call it like it is; the #1 solution to fix your franchise in the long run is to get a QB. Seldom does a good qb make themselves available in free agency or even via trade. If you want relevancy, eventually you need a good qb and the draft is the only reliably accessible way to try to do that. How did all the best teams right now get their QBs? Through the draft. Mahomes, hurts, dak, allen, and more were all gotten through the draft. The draft gives people hope for the future. The rams getting stafford was the exception, not the rule.
Now, I understand that lots of those qbs were not taken #1 overall. Some in history actually did work out, like cam newton, andrew luck before he got hurt, etc, but sometimes you can get lucky and get one lower in the draft. So from that perspective you don’t *need* the top pick. But having the top pick if nothing else gives you the most options as a franchise to pick who you believe in the most. It is just luck mostly, but there is some educated guessing there, enough to not make it so that you can just say “Nah I don’t need the top pick I’ll just grab my guy at #14” or w/e with any reliability. The #1 pick is just *better* than anything below it. Even if sometimes those lower picks work out more, factually the #1 pick gives you the most options. If nothing else you can do what the bears did and leverage it to a desperate team and get a whole host of assets to further assist a rebuild.
I also understand the mindset of feeling like you’re trading your happiness for what’s in the box, but just as you said that it’s just a consolation prize, I see it from the opposite standpoint: getting a win in a meaningless season where you aren’t going to the playoffs is the consolation prize. The giants won, great! How does that help? I don’t think it does. It’s not going to make players better, it doesn’t change the fact the team is well below .500 and will finish the season that way, it doesn’t make them a vastly more preferable free agent destination…I just don’t think it gives you anything to look forward to, it makes you happy right now but doens’t fix any of the underlying issues. The ultimate goal of the season is to win the super bowl. If you are incapable of doing so, then the next best thing imo is better situating yourself to win it down the line. The win doesn’t accomplish that all; a better draft pick, while not guaranteed to do so, still has a better chance than the alternative, which is sign a bunch of dudes in FA and hope they turn it around. If they even have the space to do so.
In short, I just kinda see the win as the short term “make me feel good” option without actually helping you get closer to the ultimate objective of a super bowl. I’m certainly not going to judge someone for being happy at a win, but I don’t think it’s really objectively wrong for people to want a bad team to lose more either.
A different way to summarize: If you are someone who would rather take the small victories now, hey that’s fine. It’s not for me. I would rather deal with the pain now if it gives me a glimmer of hope of fixing the issues more permanently. For me, the inherent value of a win comes from the increasing possibility that the team is good and will make the playoffs and will win the whole thing. If there is no chance of that happening, the win loses its value for me.
Yet if they ends up drafting a bust anyway it means nothing in the end. Plus there weren’t that many QBs worth tanking, especially that crybaby Caleb.
As a Broncos fan, this season has been a rollercoaster. We had mid expectations going in, where we were so beaten down after last season that we weren’t expecting much even with Payton signing on. Then we reached our nadir, the Dolphins putting 70 points on us, the worst moment in franchise history. After that, it was like “fuck yeah, let’s go for Caleb or Drake”, then we won against the Bears, which was like a bit of salve on that epic burn before our bi-annual heartbreaking loss to the Chiefs. Caleb Williams here we come!
Then we beat the Packers. Uh oh, now we’re picking sixth.
Then we finally beat the Chiefs for the first time in 8 years. Then the Bills. And the Vikings.
And now the Browns, where we outsmarted the best defense in NFL. We’re on a five game win streak. We’re sniffing at the fucking playoffs! The defense we all thought was the worst defense ever turns out just need some key players to come off IR (Baron Browning and PJ Locke) and to jettison some dead weight (Frank Clark and Randy Gregory) and suddenly we’re back in it. Vance Joseph was a pariah in Colorado two months ago and now he’s the second coming of Wade Phillips.
So yeah, rooting for a tank is very fucking stupid, because you never know when your team is gonna go on a hot streak and surprise you.
Amen!
Most of next years players are on the team now no matter how bad it is.
If you want a better team next year then you want those guys to keep getting better.
Even elite QB picks are a crap shoot anyway.
Trubisky after Garret at #2 and Mahomes at #10
Mayfield #1 Lamar Jackson #32
just win baby.
Always remember that Joe Montana was a 3rd round pick.
Tanking only works when it’s a 100% overhaul – GM, Coach, Player Control people, most players. Tanking is a to-the-framing remodel. If you half-arse that and leave it only partially done it will just fall apart again. The Giants are not going to do that right now – the ownership isn’t changing, the GM isn’t changing, the coach isn’t likely to change. The QB change won’t revive the whole system. What they should do is find a player who is not happy and trade their high pick for a tested QB who can manage the game. DJ is not the answer – but he could be part of a solution in a package with a draft pick and other players.
I definitely agree here. Fixating on draft picks to save a franchise is far too narrow of a perspective. Like you said, no one draft pick is going to make a big difference. Good teams take a while to build, and these Tankers don’t want to wait. They just want to have “one easy trick” to be winners, and their own impatience is only making their suffering worse.
I grew up in the 90s as a Saints fan. Sure, we’d have some good defenses, but our offense was always a mixed bag. There were definitely seasons where it felt like a slog just to see the Saints get a 6-10 or 8-8 or just lose in first round of the playoffs.
But then 2009 happened, and it was glorious, even to only have it once. That interception by Tracy Porter was magical. I don’t know if the Saints have ever really regained that height in the years since, but that’s fine. I got one, and that’s enough.
Different sport, but exhibit A for not embracing tanking would be the Edmonton Oilers. Great players are never guaranteed to fix your crap organization.
It’s also why I stopped playing fantasy games as well.
You should consider doing a comic for that massive setback the Giants had in 1983. I wonder how many thought 1981 was the end of the rebuild until that happened.
Also where LT filled in for injured Harry Carson as a middle linebacker.
Possibly your best comic yet Dave.