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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/GreenWandElf on 2026-01-03 07:31:00+00:00.
Over the last month I have been rooting for the Vikings to lose.
Not because I’m a Packers fan or because I despise Norwegian immigrants for some reason, but because I am currently afflicted with Vikings fandom, the Vikings are out of playoff contention, and I selfishly want a better draft pick.
My team has disappointed me by somehow winning every single meaningless game we’ve played so far. They will in all likelihood end the season with an impressive feat, going from being 4-8 to 9-8. Somehow a winning record for this season. Barring them losing this next game to *checks notes* Packers star QB Clayton Tune vs Brian Flores (lord have mercy), they will have won just the right amount of games to have the lowest draft pick possible while also missing the playoffs.
Likely many of you have experienced the strange phenomenon of rooting for your favorite team to lose games once or twice before. Or if you’re the Jets, many times before.
On the other hand, there are fans who just want them to win, like my dad. He ignores the draft every year, and only afterwards asks me who the Vikings picked and what I think of the players they selected. He wants the Vikings to win every single game, draft be damned. I admire his simple philosophy, but I intellectually struggle to agree with him.
If there’s no hope for the playoffs, a better draft pick is just better right?
…or is it?
There’s a simple way to discover how a draft pick impacts a team’s odds of winning the following years. Simply gather data on past NFL seasons, record where a team picks in the draft, and follow their future record!
A couple notes. I did not adjust for when a team did not have their draft pick, like when the Panthers traded what turned out to be the 1st overall pick. I only cared about draft position, regardless of draft capital. The vast majority of the time NFL teams will have their pick, or will trade that pick after they know its true worth, recuperating the value elsewhere.
This analysis is obviously not going to tell you anything about whether the reason a team improved or didn’t was only based on a specific draft pick, but when aggregating all draft positions and all teams it could tell us something meaningful about whether it is *generally* better to be good enough to win a couple more games, or bad enough to get a better rookie for the future.
I looked at drafts from 2000 to 2025, but quickly narrowed my focus to 2011 to 2025. This is because 2011 is when the rookie wage scale came into effect. Prior to 2011, my research shows the better your draft pick, the worse you did the following years, full stop.
But post-2011, an interesting yet somewhat expected pattern began to emerge… a U-shaped curve. Tanking works!
I can already hear the haters pointing out that this only factors in average future draft position. If the 18th overall team continued to just miss the playoffs at number 18 every year, this chart would indicate that’s the best possible spot, even though we all know this would be a purgatory of the worst sort.
So, I also did another analysis, this time focusing on when a team made the top 14. (Since 2020 this means the team made the playoffs, prior to 2020 those teams would have made the playoffs in the current format)
The top pick here isn’t quite so good, but it’s still on par with winning the Superbowl
But I hear the haters yet again in my ear, “u/GreenWandElf, making the playoffs is nothing! I don’t want my team to make the playoffs and go 1-and-done every year!”
I would say, “That’s a fair point, haters.” So let’s try only looking at the top 8 teams. The teams that either did so good they earned a bye, or won in the wild card round. Only the most entitled Patriots or Chiefs fan would say that is not at least a somewhat successful season.
The #1 pick strikes again! This time with #2 along for the ride.
But look! A very similar U-type pattern with even more aggressive curves at the #1 and #2 spots. This is good. It shows that different methods of analysis that are asking the same question get similar results. We are definitely onto something.
Finally, I would like to dig a little deeper into specific years. This means there’s a lot less data per pick, but I’m interested. How do teams at specific draft positions do the year after?
Damn, well it’s not looking good for tanking the following season at least. But if the top picks looked so good with the full 3 years of data…
Time for year 2. Prepare yourself.
I had to expand the top end of the chart for this one! While again, this is a smaller sample size by 3x, this confirms my priors. Once a team gets a 1st overall pick, the first year they are trash, but the next year their (presumably much improved rookie QB) on average takes them to the playoffs!
How about the 3rd?
The top 5 draft picks all join in the fun!
I’m not going to keep going, because every year I increase, I lose a year of data, and I don’t want this post to go on forever. This last chart just includes 11 points of data per dot, from 2011-2022. Not really a great sample size.
So, what did I learn today? Having a top-2 draft pick is amazing. Having a 6-11 draft pick is possibly the worst thing that could happen to your team, maybe second to losing a Micah Parsons. And past draft pick #11, the more wins the better for your team’s future success.
Moral of the story, I guess my dad was right. If your team could get a top-5 draft pick, root for the tank! But in my case, even if the Vikings hadn’t won a game after 4-8 we would only be like 8th in the draft order.
Thanks for reading!
Edit: After proof-reading, I realized the Y axis says “Average Wins”, when it really should say “Average NFL rank” or “Chance to be top-14/top-8.” The average team does not get 16 wins lol.