FanPost

Does it make sense for the Bears to tank?

The Bears are not a playoff team. The Bears are not a good team. The Bears are not even an average team, as their record painfully illustrates. I want the Bears to be a strong playoff team sooner rather than later, which leads to the question "Are the Bears likely to be better in the long run if they tank?" Lets look at the data.

Every April we hear evaluators talk about players in terms of basements and ceilings, and I find basements and ceilings to be a helpful way to approach the tanking question. Lets first look at basements based on pick position, or the likelihood that a player will not be a bust. In 2012 datascope analytics looked at this, and the charts here show the results. Using a pro-football-reference.com player evaluation score of 5 or less as the metric for a bust, they found that a #32 pick has almost a 20% chance of being a bust, a #16 pick has a 10% chance of being a bust, and a #1 pick has less than a 5% chance of being a bust. The correlation between higher draft pick and higher bust likelihood is very strong in the early rounds, though by the beginning of round 3 we see that moving back half a round only increases the bust likelihood by 8%. Now that we've seen that tanking makes lots of sense if you want to minimize the chances of drafting a draft bust, lets see if diving makes sense if you want to draft a high ceiling player.

Pro Bowl appearances are a decent way to quantify high ceiling players. CBSSports has crunched the numbers on the correlation between draft position in round 1 and Pro Bowl appearances over the last 12 years, and the results can be found as the green line in the third chart here. We see that there are some oddities, like that draft positions 3, 11, 12, and 24 have produced more Pro Bowl players than any of the other draft spots. Still, if we ignore the outliers and get past the first 3 draft positions which produce lots of Pro Bowlers, we see that draft positions 4 through 16 are all about equally likely to produce a pro bowler, and there have been about 12 or 13 appearances at each of the spots. Again, I am ignoring anomolies, and drawing a trend line when I say this. After pick 16 things tail off, and all picks are equally likely to produce a pro bowl player at about 5 appearances from each of the spots within this range. This metric suggests that tanking to get pro bowl players doesn't make much sense in round 1 unless you are tanking to get into a top 3 spot, or you are tanking to get into the top half of the draft. It also suggests that teams picking in slots 4-7 would be wise to drop back to slots 13-16 in exchange for more draft picks, as long as they were sure the players they would acquire are not busts.

The question I was trying to answer at the beginning was whether the Bears should try to tank. As with most things, the data is mixed. A team should absolutely tank if it wants to reduce the likelihood of drafting busts and instead acquire the highest number of average or better players. On the other hand, if the Bears need to acquire Pro Bowl players in the draft then tanking is pointless, unless they can make it into a top 3 spot. As I've written before, the Bears are thin due to years of Angelo having the worst drafts in the league. Because the Bears are in a position where they have lots of holes to plug rather than a need for a single difference maker I am hoping the Bears go 5-11, and come back with sufficient talent next year.

This Fanpost was written by a Windy City Gridiron member and does not necessarily reflect the ideas or opinions of its staff or community.