Losing good for Hawks? Mike Holmgren says no tanks

The Seahawks don't have much left to lose this season.

Well, not much aside from draft position, that is.

The Seahawks are 2-11, tied with St. Louis and Kansas City for the third-worst record in the NFL. Only Detroit and Cincinnati have won fewer games than Seattle, and with ailing stars like Matt Hasselbeck and Walter Jones, perhaps the Seahawks would end up with as high a draft pick as possible.

That's the thinking of some fans as Seattle faces that most frightening of prospects to their hopes of a top-three selection: a winnable game Sunday in St. Louis.

The first tiebreaker in draft order is strength of schedule, but the idea of playing for draft position is an idea coach Mike Holmgren wouldn't entertain. He did, however, answer the question.

"I know other sports at times have been criticized for that and sometimes it's pretty obvious," Holmgren said. "I don't think football is viewed that way.

"I've never done it and we wouldn't do it."

It's common enough in sports that there's even a verb to describe it: tanking. The NBA implemented a draft lottery to reduce the incentive for dropping games to rise in the draft order. The Mariners couldn't figure out how to do it right at the end of the season, when they won their final three games and thereby lost a chance to hold the first overall pick, which they could have used to select San Diego State pitcher Stephen Strasburg.

In the NFL, there are two things — neither of them insignificant — that stand in the way of any thought that the best thing for the Seahawks would be the highest-possible draft pick.

Holmgren would rather have his mustache removed with needle-nose pliers than have a team play at anything but maximum RPMs. He is unequivocal that holding players back is no way to operate a team.

"If a player is healthy he should play," Holmgren said. "In fairness to his teammates, first of all. It's a team sport. We talk about team unity and battling for each other, all that kind of stuff. As soon as you start doing things like that — if a guy can play — you're not being true to your word."

The second argument against skidding to the finish line is recent history.

In the previous four seasons, struggling teams that floundered to the finish — thereby improving their draft position — did worse the following season than those that finished with better records over the final three games.

Look at the years from 2004 to 2006, when there were 21 teams that had nine or more losses after Week 14. That constitutes the pool of teams "contending" for the better draft picks. Of those 21 teams, five went 0-3 over the final three weeks. Those five averaged six wins the next season. Compare that to the six teams that went 2-1 over the final three games, thereby finishing with a worst draft position. They averaged 8.5 victories the following season.

No team has been better at "improving" its draft position over the past three years than the Raiders. They've lost their final three games each of the past three seasons and picked in the top seven every time. Of course, no team has been so consistently dismal as the Raiders have been recently.

The trend seems counterintuitive. Seems that a bad team would be helped by the better player it could choose in the draft, but here's where the differences between basketball and football stand out.

In the NBA, one player can become the foundation for a winner, and the draft tends to have a steeper drop-off in talent after the first few spots. In 2003, it was LeBron James and everyone else. Two years ago, Greg Oden and Kevin Durant were a cut above.

A football team has so many moving parts, it's harder for a single player to change the course of an entire franchise. Not only that, but the difference in impact between the third pick in the NFL draft and the seventh is not as large as the gap between those picks in the NBA.

"Conventional wisdom is that if you draft in the top five or 10 picks in the [NFL] draft you're going to get a really great player," Holmgren said.

Now, sometimes the difference in draft spots is everything. The 1993 draft in which Drew Bledsoe and Rick Mirer were selected first and second is one example. The 1998 draft with Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf is another.

But recent history says that late-season losses bring their own price. Seattle's coach says it's a strategy that simply isn't feasible.

"The game is so physical, the game is so different," Holmgren said. "You go into any game without really giving your best effort, you run the risk of really hurting yourself. It's not like you're shooting free throws or something."

Danny O'Neil: 206-464-2364 or doneil@seattletimes.com