What happens to 2021 NFL Draft order if 2020 NFL season is canceled?

While the 2020 NFL season appears to still be good to go, there’s still a chance it gets canceled. If it does, what does that mean for the 2021 NFL Draft?

Hopefully, the NFL season is able to go ahead as scheduled, but with the COVID-19 pandemic still sweeping the United States, a decision could be made to cancel the 2020 season.

If that ends up happening, what exactly would happen for next year’s draft?

Eric Edholm of Yahoo! Sports explored three different possibilities.

The first possibility was to keep the draft order the same as the 2020 draft and this seems like a fair solution, as teams wouldn’t have a chance to improve or regress if no season is to be had in 2020. It’d give the Bengals the first pick once again, which would be huge for that franchise.

The second possibility would involve how the NHL conducted their 2005 draft, which consisted of a lottery system. The NHL had to do things this way due to a labor strike and this could be a nice option for the NFL to consider.

Something that stands out is that it gives the teams who didn’t make the playoffs and also didn’t have a top pick more of an opportunity to land a high pick. This would make it more difficult for Cincinnati to have the first overall pick again but would give a team like the Jaguars or Jets a chance to get that top pick instead.

Who benefits if the NFL Draft moves to a lottery system?

But, as Edholm notes in his write-up, doing a lottery system for the NFL Draft would pave way for a team like the Patriots to earn the number one overall pick and we all know how that would go over. Everyone would be insisting it was rigged.

While this would be an interesting way to conduct the 2021 NFL Draft, it would definitely tick some people off. Bad teams could get screwed over and good teams could wind up with a much higher pick than they deserve.

The third possibility and the one that seems the fairest is to go off of the past three seasons and how teams fared during that time. In this scenario, the Giants would hold the number one pick with the Browns, Bengals, Jets, and Cardinals rounding out the top five.

That would be huge for the Browns and Cardinals, two teams hopefully on the rise, to land top five picks despite trending upwards.

With top quarterback prospect Trevor Lawrence looking like a near-lock to go number one overall in 2021, it’s going to be huge in determining who gets that top spot. As mentioned above, the Patriots somehow getting the first pick would raise some eyebrows around the league, especially in a draft with a quarterback this good.

Hopefully, this doesn’t even need to be something we think about, but it’s interesting to ponder how things could play out.