After World War I, European leaders gathered to discuss repayment terms. After all, they reasoned, the Germans had caused a pretty serious economic headache by dragging the continent into war, and they needed to pay everybody back. And since Germany was now on the hook for a lot of cash, sie Deutsch went about creating it. The solution? Fire up the printers! Problem is, the Germans printed so much currency that the basic tenet of economics—scarcity creates value—was lost. The joke (or reality) was that someone would park a wheelbarrow full of money outside the store then return to find the money on the ground in a pile, the wheelbarrow stolen.
Now you know how the Detroit Lions feel.
The NFL has gone to the charitable trouble of skipping a lottery altogether, simply handing the team with the worst record the No. 1 pick in the draft. Unfortunately, it's a currency that nobody wants. Picking first only gives you the right to play a higher stakes game of roulette. Late in the first round it's paintballs and rubber pellets. The Lions are waking up with Deer Hunter fever dreams. That's because regardless of who they pick in this crap-shoot process, they'll be making that player in nearly every case the highest paid player at his position in the whole league before he ever plays a down. While at the combine, I heard Jim Schwartz, the new Lions head coach, refer to the pick derisively more than once. He called it $5,000 blackjack. I just wonder what he said yesterday as he watched Denver swoop in for an unprecedented deal with Chicago for Jay Cutler, a guy the Lions coveted.
I would guess it involved a $5,000 adjective.
Bottom line: if the No. 1 pick is so unattractive as a currency that it's poison as a trading chip, then the No. 1 pick isn't a reward at all. It's not stimulus. It's the opposite. It's a burden. It's so much committed cash that it requires a wheelbarrow. Nobody wants to take it all off your hands, regardless of how much it might be worth someday if they simply store it away.
We've heard whispers of what the Lions were offering, but we know for a fact the Broncos were scared to take on that pick. In other sports it would have meant a lot. Can you imagine swapping for the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft? The implications are enormous. You most likely will get a guy that could change the face of your franchise for a decade. And the funny thing is, not only are you certain to get a great talent, the slotted rookie payment system makes negotiations a snap. Not so here. In the NFL, not only might that guy by Alex Smith or Tim Couch, you'll pay him more than any other player on your team. It's built right in.
Ultimately, in it's next CBA, the league and players union will need to find a way to balance the ideals of rewarding high draft picks, but not making owning the rights to those picks such a loathesome ordeal. They need to find a pricing point that doesn't make the currency more valuable as a fire-starter. They need to find a way to avoid the reality that perhaps the smartest thing written about the Lions strategy for this draft was by former player Ross Tucker on SI.com when he wrote that Detroit, who'd be content with any of the three or four consensus top players, should just forfeit the pick and fall a few places. In that event, they'd get a guy they wanted anyway and save about $2 million bucks for each pick they relinquished.
If only Cutler was still there on draft day. Imagine the Lions forfeiting pick after pick, perhaps falling down to where the player value and the price actually started to make sense. Say it was at about the No. 10 pick, where New England last year landed Jerod Mayo, the future defensive Rookie of the Year.
"Interested yet?" Schwartz and Detroit GM Martin Mayhew could ask Denver brass?
"Now we're talking," Denver would say. "Give us that and next year's and we're done."
And at that point Detroit could make the trade for the player they've coveted all along.
Instead, today they're still out there pushing around the No. 1 pick, a rusty wheelbarrow full of money that nobody wants. Including them.
Elsewhere…
The morning after a World Cup qualifier, a drunk Irish fan is found in the toilet of the pub where he watched the match.
Deception! Intrigue! British accents! You've got to love a Formula 1 scandal.
The NBA launches a Chinese reality show.