Every fan has done it. You have watched this team for years, so you cannot stop now. Teams do it too, and that is where it gets expensive. Economists have spent three decades asking whether front offices keep playing guys because of what they already paid for them. The answer is a fight.
The Case That It’s Real
In 1995, Barry Staw and Ha Hoang published “Sunk Costs in the NBA: Why Draft Order Affects Playing Time and Survival in Professional Basketball” in Administrative Science Quarterly. The title is the claim: the higher a team drafts a player, the longer he gets to stay on the floor and in the league, and the study set out to show that the investment itself was doing some of the talking.
The NFL has its own version. A study in the Journal of Sports Economics looked at players picked near the cutoff between the first and second rounds. First-round picks were no more productive, but they received a pay premium, and they started significantly more games. A 10 percent increase in salary cap value was associated with about 2.7 more games started.
The Case That It Isn’t
Daniel Leeds, Michael Leeds and Akira Motomura went back to the NBA question with a regression discontinuity design, comparing lottery or first-round picks with otherwise similar players drafted later. They found that draft round or lottery status had little or no impact on playing time, which supports the old view that professionals ignore sunk costs.
What to Take From the Fight
Two honest readings. Either front offices play favorites with money they have already spent, or the effect depends on the league, the era and how you measure it. The research does not settle it, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something.
The useful test is simple: would you make this same decision if you were starting from today? If the only reason is what you have already put in, that is the fallacy, whether you are a general manager holding a lottery pick or a fan with a season-ticket habit.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.