How To Kill Draft Lotteries Without Encouraging Tanking
Plus: the tush push, Pete Rose, and Eddie Vedder.
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be sure to free some whales this week.
I got a great response to last week's survey about draft lotteries. I'm glad so many of you also spend time thinking about this—it means we're all in the right place. We'll start off with drafts and tanking, then move on to the tush push, and end with a couple baseball topics.
Locker Room Links
- The NBA will either have a first-time champion or the Knicks (who haven't won in more than 50 years).
- "If the Mets Are No Longer Underdogs, Are They Still the Mets?"
- Dick's Sporting Goods is buying Foot Locker.
- There's a reason state legislators aren't in charge of college football scheduling.
- Gov. Mike Kehoe (R–Mo.) wants the state to pay for up to 50 percent of future (large) stadium construction or renovation projects, even though Kansas City voters just last year rejected a sales tax hike to fund stadiums.
- RIP, P00P.
- Elsewhere in Reason: "Are the News Media in Their Onion Era?"
- If, like me, you skipped the Preakness Stakes because Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty wasn't participating (or because it's silly for the state government to own Pimlico), you can watch the whole race here. I won't spoil it, but there's some excitement on the homestretch:
You don't want to miss a second of the ENTIRE 150th Preakness Stakes. ???? #Preakness150 pic.twitter.com/lkqqfkk4yh
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) May 17, 2025
Abolish the Lottos
A slight majority of Free Agent readers don't like draft lotteries (or at least a majority of the ones who took two minutes to do the survey—thank you!). A quarter said they like them and about one-fifth said they don't care.
As for draft lottery alternatives, keeping it simple and just reversing league standings (as the NFL does) was the main preference, with 43 percent. Another quarter of you said they'd prefer to get rid of the draft altogether (I'm a big fan of abolishing the draft), with one reader commenting that it's "like if the law student who graduates top of the class at Harvard was sent to the worst law firm in Utah." As for the bolder lottery alternatives, the "Gold Plan" got slightly more support than "The Wheel." Shoutout to the fun "other" responses who invented their own systems.
The results were a good reminder that as much as I love a complicated system that involves a lot of moving parts and strategy, the general public usually prefers simplicity. So how do leagues keep a simple draft system (like the NFL's draft order) while making sure teams don't tank?
Don't miss sports coverage from Jason Russell and Reason.
It's easy: money.
I don't think players and coaches tank, as I wrote last week. There are contracts on the line, and you don't get to the best league in your sport unless you're so competitive that you hate losing. But if you want to give them a reason to win, give them money for winning. Even a small fraction of their annual salary will be motivation enough.
You can quibble with the details, but the idea is to give each player on the teams that miss the playoffs something like $10,000 for each win late in the season—maybe it's each win after playoff elimination, or each win in the last month of the season. The math varies depending on how you do it, but it might cost a league like the NBA or NHL a few million dollars a season. Just fork over a fraction of the new money those leagues have coming in from gambling partnerships and national TV deals.
Give teams money not to tank. It's as simple as that.
As for the reader who responded to the survey with "How are drafts not illegal?", it's because drafts are enshrined in collective bargaining agreements between players unions and leagues, and those agreements are exempt from antitrust law. That doesn't answer the question of "Should drafts be illegal?", an interesting query for another day.
Pushin' Tush
Why should you get a flag for an innovative quarterback sneak tactic someone else noticed?
NFL owners could vote this week to ban the tush push, famously mastered by the Philadelphia Eagles over the last couple seasons. The Green Bay Packers (who?) in March proposed a rule that says offensive players can't "immediately at the snap, push or throw his body against a teammate, who was lined up directly behind the snapper and received the snap, to aid him in an attempt to gain yardage."
Like the Packers, the proposed rule change is garbage.
First of all, the language lacks clarity which has coaches confused. "New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel asked whether the quarterback could be pushed behind the guard," Sports Illustrated's Albert Breer wrote. "Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh asked whether the guards could be pushed by extra linemen on the field to create a similar effect to the quarterback being pushed. Those weren't addressed here." Nor was the definition of "immediate." More confusion and subjectivity in rules are not going to instill confidence in NFL referees.
Every team in the league can do what the Eagles do. Other teams could sign players that can pull this off. I've heard complaints that it's "impossible to stop." No, it's not—it had an 82 percent success rate last season. That's a lot, but teams can study the other 18 percent and see what worked for defenses. If you don't want the Eagles to use it, don't let them get into short-yardage situations.
And just so no one thinks my colleague Natalie Dowzicky hijacked this section of the newsletter, I still think the Lions were the best team in the league last year.
Put Pete In
"Bad things usually happen when politicians stick their noses into the business of baseball," as my colleague Matt Welch wrote in the June 2025 issue of Reason. "George W. Bush's antipathy to steroid-inflated sluggers gave us congressional show trials and invasive drug-testing legislation for high school athletes. Joe Biden's hyperbolic shaming of Georgia's mild election reform of 2021 needlessly pressured the MLB to move its annual All-Star Game out of Atlanta. Generations of political ribbon-cutters have squandered billions of taxpayer dollars on private owners' stadium facilities."
Then President Donald Trump opened up his big mouth and called on "baseball" to "get off its fat, lazy ass, and elect Pete Rose, even though far too late, into the Baseball Hall of Fame!" Lo and behold, "baseball" just might, now that Rose has been (posthumously) reinstated by Commissioner Rob Manfred (though the road to the Hall of Fame for Rose is still long and complicated).
I've always thought Rose should be memorialized in Cooperstown, ever since I was young and learned about the "Hit King" from my dad. Detractors will say this would open the door for steroid users like Barry Bonds to get in, but that's not necessarily the case. Rose's nefarious actions, as far as we know, never affected the game on the field, while steroids pretty clearly helped boost their user's stats.
"We love our baseball characters, warts and all," Welch concluded. Put Pete in.
More Rock, More Roll
Did you know baseball has rivalry trophies? Not as many as college football (do Penn State and Minnesota really need a rivalry trophy?) but a few. They don't seem to be promoted very well, which is a shame.
The MLB should do everything it can to make some of its 162 regular season games (an insane number!) matter a little more. Players should lift the trophy on the field in a shower of confetti. Spray a little beer in the locker room. Put the trophy on the concourse and let fans take photos with it. (Metaphorically) throw it in the other franchise's face.
The Padres and Mariners played this weekend in the first of six games in their regular season series that will count toward the Vedder Cup, named after Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, who lived in both San Diego and Seattle (though he also lived in the Chicago area and, awkwardly for this cup, is a huge Cubs fan). With a trophy on the line, the games in theory meant a little more than the other 156 games in the regular season.
Someone should have informed the Padres, though—they got swept.
Replay of the Week
May is a fantastic month to watch soccer, and this week provided plenty of drama. A cup upset, giving a team their first-ever major trophy. A legend scored his 200th goal in his 500th and final game for his team. Fans said goodbye to a 132-year-old stadium. One team won their last eight games of the season to win the league, while that league's juggernaut squandered a huge lead in the standings.
But the best clip of them all goes to this goal by 17-year-old Lamine Yamal to clinch the league title for Barcelona, the stuff you dream about as a kid.
LAMINE YAMAL WITH A WORLDIE FROM OUTSIDE THE BOX TO GIVE BARCELONA THE LEAD!!! IT HAD TO BE HIM! ????
THEY ARE LALIGA CHAMPIONS AS IT STANDS! ???? pic.twitter.com/cfawR9AMhB
— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) May 15, 2025
That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game(?) of the weekend, the best day of the year in motorsports, and possibly the last time these three major races all fall on the same day: Formula 1's Monaco Grand Prix (9 a.m. Eastern, ABC), IndyCar's Indianapolis 500 (12:45 p.m., FOX), and NASCAR's Coca-Cola 600 (6 p.m., FOX).
