I agree with this. You can't punish an owner for his desire to reset the franchise, in light of having spent Hundreds of Millions of dollars on salaries to not win with any consistency. He has a right to start over or start fresh. You can't punish a team or franchise for trading off players for valuable draft capital. Especially if said team is getting above average returns for players they trade off. As much as I understand the case being made by jdavidwanny it would have to be more than just a hunch. The tank mantra as I understand it, came about after Ross fired Gase and Tannenbaum. As for Ross' post season press conference, he spoke of a reset and starting over. If the league had an issue they would have contacted Miami and the public would know it by now. The only way I see Miami getting in any kind of trouble is if they are caught using the word "TANK"!!!You’d have to know the NFL bylaws to know whether the league can punish a team for tanking. You’d have to think that the FO did their due diligence there, so I kind of doubt it.
And I mean, I don’t know how you could set a standard that actually works so that teams know what to do to not be penalized for it. If there’s no salary floor, you can’t force teams to spend big in free agency. If you permit teams to trade draft picks, there’s nothing forcing a team to turn down a huge haul of picks for a great player.