One More Such Victory, and the Jets Are Undone.

The phrase “Pyrrhic victory” is one of the few pieces of classical history that survives in everyday speech, and it survives because the idea behind it is genuinely useful. Pyrrhus of Epirus, one of the finest field commanders of the ancient world, fought the Roman Republic twice on Italian soil and beat them both times. The second win, at Asculum in 279 BC, was so expensive — his veteran infantry and the officers he could not replace were gutted — that the victory itself doomed his campaign. Plutarch records the line that made him immortal: another win like that, and there would be no army left to win with.

Sports produce this shape more often than the language of sports admits, because sports treat a win as an unalloyed good. The scoreboard does not have a column for what the win cost. Usually there is no cost; usually a win is just a win. But there is one structural feature of American professional sports that turns the back end of a losing season into a perfect Pyrrhic-victory machine: the draft rewards losing. The worse your record, the higher you pick. And in a league with no draft lottery to muddy the incentive — the National Football League — the worst record guarantees the first selection. In that world, a win in a lost season is not free. It can be the most expensive thing a franchise does all year.

The 2020 Jets, and the Two Wins That Did the Damage

The 2020 Jets began the season by losing thirteen straight games. By mid-December they were 0–13, the consensus worst team in football, and aimed squarely at the top of a draft that everyone in the sport had been discussing for a year. The prize was Trevor Lawrence, the Clemson quarterback widely regarded as the best quarterback prospect since Andrew Luck — the kind of player around whom a franchise is rebuilt. The fan shorthand had already been coined: Tank for Trevor.

Then the Jets won. On December 20, 2020, they beat the Los Angeles Rams — a playoff team — 23–20. One week later, on December 27, they beat the Cleveland Browns, who finished 11–5, by a score of 23–16. Two upsets of two playoff teams, in the final three weeks of a season the Jets had no stake in. They finished 2–14. The Jacksonville Jaguars, who lost their last fifteen games to finish 1–15, claimed the worst record in football and, with it, the first overall pick.

Jacksonville drafted Trevor Lawrence. The Jets, picking second, drafted Zach Wilson of BYU.

What a Single Slot Is Worth at the Very Top

How much does moving from the first pick to the second pick actually cost? The oldest answer in the NFL is the Jimmy Johnson trade-value chart, built by the Cowboys in the early 1990s to price draft-pick trades. It assigns each slot a point value, and its defining feature is how steeply it falls at the very top.

Where the Smooth Curve Lies

The draft-value charts — both the old Jimmy Johnson version and the more sophisticated career-value versions — describe the average outcome of a draft slot across decades of picks. On average, the second pick is only slightly worse than the first, and a great deal of recent analytics work has gone into showing that the very top picks are routinely overvalued. If the prize at the top of the 2021 draft had been an average prospect, the Jets’ two wins would have cost them something small and forgettable.

But a franchise quarterback is not an average draft slot. The value of the quarterback position is a step function, not a smooth curve: a team either has a top-tier one or it does not, and the gap between those two states is worth more than any other single advantage in the sport. The smooth curve cannot see the step. That is exactly the kind of place where a column will tell you “the data says pick value is continuous” and be technically correct and substantively wrong — the average hides a discontinuity that matters enormously in the specific case.

Of the five quarterbacks taken in the first round of the 2021 draft, exactly one is still with the team that drafted him: Trevor Lawrence. The other four — Wilson, Trey Lance, Justin Fields, and Mac Jones — have all been traded. The Jets did not merely miss the best player. They drafted into the part of the class that the rest of the league has spent the years since trying to give away.

The Counterfactual, Stated Plainly

It is fair to ask whether this is hindsight. It is not, and the reason is the same Win Probability point from above. At the moment the Jets beat the Rams, two things were already true and known: the wins could not help them in 2020, and Trevor Lawrence was the consensus prize at the top of the draft. The downside was visible in real time — it is why the fan base groaned at a win. A Pyrrhic victory is not defined by hindsight; it is defined by a cost that was foreseeable and incurred anyway. Pyrrhus knew his veterans were irreplaceable while he was spending them. So did anyone watching the Jets in December 2020.

None of this requires believing that teams should lose on purpose, or that players and coaches competing hard in Week 16 did anything wrong — they did the honorable thing, which is precisely what makes the structure tragic rather than scandalous. The incentive is the problem. A league that hands its best young player to its worst team has built a machine that punishes late-season competence. The 2020 Jets are what that machine looks like when it runs in reverse on a team that could not stop itself from winning.

A reader with a candidate for the march — a win that cost a team more than a loss would have, in any sport, at any level — is invited to send it. The best Pyrrhic victories are the ones the box score still records as wins.