On November 6, Arkansas voters passed a law to legalize sports betting in that state. Brad Kullman is a former pro-sports scout and executive who believes the current “tanking tsunami” gripping major-league sports will make betting a bad bet.

According to Kullman, with an ever-growing number of teams “rebuilding for the future” — translation: not putting the best talent on the field today in order to finish lower in the standings and secure higher draft picks — to wager on the outcome of about half the games in any sport means letting your money ride on a contest in which one of the teams isn’t doing all it can to win. Even worse, in many cases these teams are making roster moves (at the executive level) and lineup decisions (at the coaching level) that subtly increase the teams’ chances of losing.

“This is a fans’-rights issue — and it’s time to say enough is enough,” said Kullman, former general manager of baseball’s Cincinnati Reds. “Not since the dark days of boxing during the Great Depression have we seen so many opponents taking a dive and cheating the paying fans out of a legitimate sports competition. Now to throw gambling on top of this mess just puts fans in jeopardy of being duped out of even more money.

Kull said that if leagues are serious when they say the integrity of their games is paramount, they need to fix the system that rewards losing — before it begins to adversely affect any more betting fans. And fixing the system means fixing the drafts and the misguided notions surrounding them.

In his recent book, Losing (To Win): How Incentivized Losing Undermines the Integrity of Our Major Professional Sports Leagues, Kullman details the evolution of the reverse-standings draft, a broken welfare system that rewards the teams who manage to lose the most games with top draft picks. With a draft history across all big four major-league sports, Kullman explains how the modern-day tanking environment is not only unnecessary, but can also be easily transformed into one that is more exciting for all concerned.

“It makes no sense that the worst thing a team can do in today’s major league game is to give its best, but fall just short of the playoffs,” Kullman explains. “Such a performance is effectively penalized by receiving mediocre draft picks, while finishing dead last is unwittingly celebrated and rewarded with the top pick in the draft.

“By implementing an integrity-based draft that awards top picks to the highest finishing non-playoff teams, every team will once again be motivated to put their best foot forward every time they take the field.  Fans, players and teams themselves will all benefit from this elementary solution that puts the ‘compete’ back in major league sports competition.

“Think of the league wide excitement down the stretch as even non-playoff teams are fighting for draft position rather than the past practice of half-heartedly playing out the string.”