Throughout the sports community, there have been major debates about teams “tanking” in order to position themselves for the best player coming out of college.

This notion has been seen mostly in the NBA; however, it has been coming into discussion more and more in the NFL. This year, the conversation has been surrounding my favorite team: the New York Jets. Are they really tanking? Or is their roster just so young and raw that they do not have the experience or talent yet to compete and win games consistently in the NFL? I’m going to go with the latter.

I am not just saying that because they are my favorite team, but because they simply are a very young football team. As a fan of the team, I know they are not going to win many games, but I really do not believe in the notion of a professional football team losing games on purpose for one specific player. I mean, people within the organization are fighting to keep their jobs, so they are not worried about what players are coming out of next year's draft; all they care about is doing their job, and that job is to give 110 percent to win football games. In my opinion, there is no way an organization can sit there and actually admit that they are tanking and losing games on purpose.

When the notion of tanking comes forth, many analysts enjoy to argue the fact that the team “roster purged” in the offseason, which means that the team got rid of every valuable player in return for someone worse or younger. There is no arguing that the Jets did not roster purge because they did; however, those moves were necessary for sustaining success in the future as well as the present. Many of the players they gave up were past their prime and were trending in the opposite direction. To me, there is nothing wrong with going out and getting younger players that are not proven yet because they will play with a chip on their shoulder. In the future, they will have experience that they would not have received if playing for a so-called “contender.” The truth of the matter is that the NFL is a weird league.

We are two weeks into the season, and the Super Bowl contenders start the year 0-2 while teams that were not supposed to be any good are 2-0 or 1-1. For example, the Jets' cross-town rival, the New York Giants, are 0-2 with a star- studded roster. The Jets, who are perceived to be tanking, have scored more points in their first two games of the year. The Jets' quarterback, an old Journeyman, Josh McCown, has not only more touchdowns than Eli Manning but also more rushing yards than the Giants number one running back. Are the Giants tanking? No--and yet, they have played worse than the Jets, the team supposed to be tanking. This point proves that there is really no way to prove a team is tanking because people do not understand what is going on in the locker room.

The players on the field are going to go out there and do their job in an attempt to make a name for themselves to better mortgage their future. There is a famous saying in the NFL which is “any given Sunday”--and that saying is beyond true. Nobody knows what the outcome will be on that field on Sunday. That is why you play the games, because anything can happen in the NFL and that is also why the notation of “tanking” or as Jets fans like to say this year “Suck For Sam”(a five-star QB from the University of Southern California who will be in the draft this year), must be eliminated from the NFL because it could not be further from the truth.