National Football League

Tank It Or Leave It

Updated Jul. 16, 2021 2:09 p.m. ET

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports columnist

This shouldn’t count as a newsflash but apparently it does: players in the National Football League don’t like losing games.

Circumstances being what they are ... a football player might, at some point in his career, find himself in a spot where he loses, not just a little, but a lot, so much that perhaps he can scarcely remember what winning feels like.

He might get used to losing, might be able to rationalize it in his mind, and might look at the remaining games and suspect that the losing is going to continue for a long time.

But he’ll never like it, never wish for it and, whatever draft strategy his organization has and whatever dreams of quarterbacking saviors the fans are nursing, he’ll never play to lose.

So yeah, when the most shocking of shockers dropped in the lap of the NFL last weekend, it made no sense. No sense to New York Jets fans and fans everywhere else who are glad they’re not New York Jets fans.

No sense to sports bettors and statisticians, who will tell you just how illogical it was that an 0-13 team with nothing to play for (except Trevor Lawrence) lost to the 9-4 Los Angeles Rams, a superior opponent that wanted to win, needed to win and may pay a steep playoff price for failing to win.

But it made sense to Frank Gore, a 16-year veteran who was determined that all those seasons of taking bruising hits wouldn’t result in a winless swan song. When the final moments approached against the Rams, Gore whispered to his quarterback that he was going to find space, wave his arms, catch a ball every Jets fan wanted him to drop and ice the game.

"(Now) I’ll have a good Christmas," Gore said.

For Gore doesn’t live in a Trevor Lawrence world, and nor should he. The college player he cares about most is his son Frank Jr., a freshman running back at Southern Miss, not the presumed future superstar with flowing locks from Clemson.

Sam Darnold, who threw the ball in Gore’s direction, doesn’t live in a Trevor Lawrence world either. Neither does any other player on the team.

This is the thing we have to remember about the NFL. It is insanely difficult to get there and even harder to stick around for more than a year or two. To make it, you not only need talent but a level of commitment and competitiveness that is way above the normal human.

Players on even the worst of teams, like the Jets and the Jacksonville Jaguars, who now top the preliminary draft order and will snag the top pick if they lose their last two, were outstanding in high school and excellent in college. They didn’t get here by accepting that losing is okay. They’re just not wired that way and they just can’t bring themselves to do it, even if their GM (secretly) and their fans (publicly) would wish them to.

And so, when opportunity arises to win a rare game, like it did on Sunday, via a combination of a solid start, a couple of good breaks and a meltdown in form by their opponent, they’re going to try to take it.

The Jets’ losing spawned breathless talk of a "disaster," understandably so. The franchise is now all but certain to miss out on Lawrence, which stings pretty badly when you haven’t had a great quarterback since Joe Namath.

"It is the worst moment in Jets history," FS1’s Nick Wright said on First Things First. "And the Jets are a franchise with mostly bad moments. Find me a worse moment. I dare you. Trevor Lawrence is as can’t miss as can’t miss gets, and you had it all there for the taking, or the tanking."

Yahoo Sports’ Charles Robinson had a gloomy message for Jets supporters. "You are going to remember this game forever," Robinson said. "There are literally people going to go 30-40 years thinking about this."

Maybe it is all that. Maybe it is the disaster of all disasters. But it is not the players’ disaster. It is a disaster made by poor decision making and bad coaching and just a whole lot of disfunction.

"When you think about it from a player’s perspective you want to go out there and win every single game," former All-Pro running back Brian Westbrook said. "Do you think Sam Darnold wants to give up his starting position in the NFL? Absolutely not. Do you think Frank Gore wants to go out on 0-16? Absolutely not."

In the NFL, a front office can asset-strip its roster to the barest of bones and immediately put its team at a competitive disadvantage each time it steps onto the field.

A fanbase can openly and actively root for failure; hoping, wishing, perhaps even praying for a ceaseless litany of defeats. Heck, a defensive coordinator can even call one of the worst plays in NFL history just when it looks as if a win is about to happen and break his players’ hearts in the process.

What you can’t do, as we have seen over the past week, is kill competitive spirit - and there is something to love deeply about that.

You can plan for a tank, talk about a tank, prepare for a tank and dream about what better times may lay ahead once you eventually pull it off. But you can’t bank on a tank.

Players will always want to show what they can do and, at this time of the campaign, perhaps show they are worthy of a 2021 job. Thus, we saw another head-scratcher on Monday night, as the 2-9-1 Cincinnati Bengals sunk the Pittsburgh Steelers, who were just a couple of weeks removed from being 11-0.

Perhaps we need to take a look at how we see things. For when we casually say the Bengals had nothing to play for, it isn’t quite right.

Let’s take one example, Bengals QB Ryan Finley. As third-choice, Finley was making his fourth career start and must have wondered if he would ever get another shot. Guys with that mindset aren’t worried too much about playing it safe and casting an eye to the offseason.

So, on the multiple keep options that he had and accepted, Finley was going to run hard towards one of the better defenses in the NFL and take whatever licks were coming his way.

The same attitude could be found for any number of other Bengals players. It showed and it made enough of a difference to seal victory. Even with the win, the Bengals are probably going to stick in the No. 3 draft spot no matter what, but … whatever.

Draft picks are for general managers to worry about and yes, for fans to talk about, given that they provide entertainment and hope where there otherwise appears to be none. The job of the players is to worry about the now, and that’s what the Jets and Bengals did.

In doing so, they offered further evidence of how the NFL is so weirdly and utterly unpredictable. Player effort notwithstanding, there is not a shred of sense or logic to either of those two huge upsets. They shouldn’t have happened.

And … they absolutely should. Because they are the ultimate reminder – not just that that’s why they play the games, but that’s why you watch them.