Page 51 - Sports Illustrated for Kids Magazine (December 2019)

“That was the BIG OVERSIGHT the Browns made,” says longtime Cleveland star Joe Thomas. “You
can’t understand the true pain and human toll that losing has on your fans, your players, and your coaches.”
paths out of mediocrity without embarking
on a roster overhaul, as two recent Super
Bowl teams have done. (The Rams went
4–12 before improving seven wins in coach
Sean McVay’s first season and making the
Super Bowl in his second, while the Eagles
rose from back-to-back losing seasons to
Super Bowl champions.) If the Dolphins
are following the lead of the Browns, who
followed the lead of success stories from
Major League Baseball—where Cleveland’s
chief strategy officer Paul DePodesta spent
two decades as a scout, then an executive—
that raises the question of whether tank-
ing strategies in other sports translate to
the NFL.
“That was the big oversight that the Browns made
when they went with their strategy,” says Joe Thomas,
the Browns’ former left tackle, who retired after the
winless 2017 season. “I don’t think you can understand
the true pain and the human toll that losing in the NFL
has on your organization, your fans, and your players
and coaches, because there’s only 16 games and they’re
16 violent games. Whereas in baseball if you lose, oh
well, you play tomorrow night.”
After the Patriots’ game, when the defense was on the
field for more than 36 minutes, linebacker Jerome Baker
explained, “Days like this, you’ve gotta start recovery now.”
During the 1–31 stretch in Cleveland, Thomas noticed how
the extra minutes the defense was on the field accrued to
a couple extra games over the course of the year. “Physi-
cally, it is so much harder if you’re a linebacker playing in
a game that is a blowout in the other team’s favor,” says
Thomas, “because you just have a battering ram coming at
you 30 times in the second half.”
N 2016, Akira Motomura, an associate professor of
I economics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts,
published an article in the Journal of Sports Economics
studying the success of tanking in the NBA over an
18-year period. He was surprised at the results of the statisti-
cal analysis, which showed that having more and higher
draft picks did not correlate with a team’s improvement over
a four-year period. What did help, he found, was having
better pickers. “Just getting more picks and accumulating
GREG NELSON higher picks by being bad doesn’t seem to help by itself as a
strategy, unless you make good use of those picks,” says
T
FIRS T O WORS T
After being part of Motomura. “It’s not a strategy that
four Super Bowl
is necessarily superior to making
championship teams
in New England, smart trades, doing player develop-
Flores has his work cut ment [well], and getting good free
out for him in Miami. agents.” The 2019 NBA champion
Toronto Raptors were built around
a core of savvy free-agent and trade acquisitions; only one
of their playoff rotation players (Pascal Siakam) was a Rap-
tors first-round pick. The dominant franchise of the 2010s,
the Golden State Warriors, was built without ever selecting
in the top five of the NBA draft.
After the Dolphins traded Tunsil and Stills, Flores was the
lone member of the organization put in front of the media to
explain the move. Two weeks later, when they moved Minkah
Fitzpatrick, the team sent out Grier, perhaps a recognition of
the fact that the person trying to motivate the locker room
shouldn’t be the one explaining the teardown.
At that press conference, Grier described himself in “lock-
step” with Flores. When Ross set the team on this path, he
gave Grier control of football operations and also changed
the organization’s power structure, with Flores reporting SPORTS ILLUSTRATED •
to Grier instead of the owner.
Back in the locker room, Baker, still recovering from the
game in his locker stall, said they need to stay together—this
physically taxing game leaves them no choice. OCTOBER 7, 2019
“All I know is I get paid to do a job,” he says. “Whoever
is out there with me, I expect the same. If somebody else is
worrying about the future, I have to focus on now. Hopefully, 51
±
I am there in the future.”