It all comes down to wasting stars on bad teams. That's the underlying problem. Maybe there should be some negative/positive weight on draft picks based on how

It all comes down to wasting stars on bad teams. That's the underlying problem. Maybe there should be some negative/positive weight on draft picks based on how "moribund" a franchise is over time. Calculate a running average of the pick quality and project a statistical estimate of how good your team should be. If it sucks over a long time (I'm talking a rolling 10 year average and as a somewhat fan of the Detroit Lions... yeah) then the team shouldn't get the cream of the crop, they should lose 5-10 positions in the first round. And that's the real rub: at some point bad franchises aren't bad luck, bad players, bad coaches, or even bad GMs. They are failures because of ownership which is far more entrenched. Relegation in soccer is really the only mechanism for this. I also think there should be an exclusive "national signing day" for pro football where each team gets 1 player a year they can sign regardless of their draft position in the first round (assuming they can get a player wants to sign with them) and they forgo their first round pick. That would counteract tanking in the NFL because the really good players will avoid the crap teams. Of course there is a pay scale in the first round so they would take less money... Baseball has strange levels of collusion among the owners, I think from generations of labor strife, which the NFL has avoided for some reason. College athletics are kind of a multi-tier league like the article. And I'm not talking D-I/II/III. There are the Power5, and then even within the Power5, there are established powerhouses. Preferential placement, games that change in importance and estimation in the "rankings". Of course college doesn't have the draft, which this entire proposal revolves around: preventing tanking for the draft. College has forced 4-6 year turnover that prevents decade-plus star careers from overtilting the advantage and seems to be a sufficient "chaos monkey"... although the 4 team CFP in football seems to have concentrated power in only a couple schools. Is this "good"? Eh. It does make name brands. It makes for lazy reporters in an otherwise cacophonous landscape of a 100-odd schools who only follow five or ten schools.