Tanking is bad. Winning is good. Winning Culture is best.

Losing games at the professional level is bad. You’d think we’d all know that given the severity with which we treat the outcome of every youth game we watch. But, as sports fans, we’ve got this all upside-down.

I was at the Giants-Bears game this past weekend. It was probably the most exciting, albeit bizarre, Giants games I’ve ever attended. The G-Men pulled out an overtime win over a near-definite playoff team after blowing a 10-point 4^th quarter lead. Each team had a passing touchdown from a non-quarterback, Chicago had a defensive lineman rush for a touchdown a la The Fridge. The Giants had a defensive touchdown. The Giants kicker set a franchise record for longest field goal. Saquan Barkley hurdled a guy. It was big play after big play all day long.

During the 4^th quarter of the game, I heard the fans in front of me talking about how much better it would have been if the Giants lost. The same two fans had a conversation earlier in the game about their kid’s youth football team being terrible because of a 3-6 record. So, to make sure we have this straight, they paid to attend a professional game that they wanted their favorite team to lose so they could potentially get a better draft pick who could potentially help their team in the future, yet they’re fed up with the local Pop Warner coach because his team was 3-6.

At the professional level, sports fans crave the opportunity to develop. At the youth level, we want results. I know this might sound crazy to some of you who want to trust the process, but I think it you had some patience to allow the youth coach to develop skills in younger players, you’d be less likely to have professional players who still need to “develop.”

Tanking is wrong. It’s against everything we should be teaching kids. Losing does not lead to winning. Learning winning habit and reinforcing winning behaviors leads to winning. Sure, some of the best players of all time were first overall picks like LeBron James, Peyton Manning and Alex Rodriguez, but how about guys like Eric Fisher, Anthony Bennett and Mark Appel? Those three were first overall picks in the past decade, and I bet most sports fans don’t even recognize their names.

The 76ers told us tanking and unloading talent to be a champion some day in the future is the “process.” Let’s take a quick look at what the process has accomplished now that Philly says the process is complete.  The 76ers currently sit in 3^rd place in the Eastern Conference, which is the NBA’s version of junior varsity. They finished 3^rd in the east last year after four seasons of being one of the worst teams in basketball including a 2015-16 season that was one of the worst seasons in the history of the game. Upper deck seats were selling for $0.11 on the secondary market that year. Eleven Cents!

So that’s the current result of tanking: third place in a sub-par conference. Is that really the goal? Let’s go through 4-5 abysmal seasons so you can be better-than-average for a few years?

Maybe I’m the idiot here, but I want my pro teams to try to win every damn game and I want to get rid of every player who’s not on board with winning culture.  If that guy was coached well as a kid and his development was nurtured back when improvement meant everything and final scores meant nothing, He’d know exactly how to play like a winner. Unfortunately, some guys grow up in a backwards sports culture.

What is winning culture? Simply defined, it's doing your job well. It's doing exactly what's asked of you to the best of your ability, then finding out how you can do it even better next time. That's how teams like the Patriots contend for a title every year. The players are not required to be All-World talent. They're required to do exactly what's asked of them to the best of their ability, and continue to improve on that. That will never go out of favor with coaches, and that will never not be the best path to athletic success.

Winning is contagious. So is losing. Lose on purpose and you are a loser. Attempt to win by instilling winning habits and committing to winning efforts and you’re a winner. Simple as that.