U.S. ignores lessons of NFL draft rules at its own peril

The NFL draft offers a few college football players the opportunity to fulfill their dreams. It offers us fans the opportunity to speculate, to cheer and to condemn. But it offers everyone something more: a lesson in American grand strategy.

The general managers who make the picks are knowledgeable and highly paid. They work hard. Yet they often get it wrong. For every Peyton Manning, there's a Ryan Leaf. Even the experts have a lot of trouble predicting the future.

That's why stock pickers have such a tough time beating the market. Most years, an index fund beats a majority of the pickers. It's why the track record of foreign policy experts is poor; one scholar found that the experts have trouble beating a dart board.

This feels unsatisfactory: It seems wrong that the world isn't easier to figure out. Policy wonks argue that the problem is that the machinery of government is badly organized. Professors argue that, if students studied the right things, they'd do better later in life.

Machinery matters, and so does studying. The fact is, though, that predicting the future is just hard. But if you want to have a strategy, you have to think about what might happen -- and what you want to happen. So how can you strategize if you don't believe you can predict?

Well, the NFL draft is all about strategy. The league is brutally competitive. Resources are limited; you have only so many picks and so much money. The draft is your best chance to acquire talent at less than its real cost. If you mess it up, you're likely to lose.

One popular approach is to trade for the highest possible draft pick and acquire the highest-rated player. And no doubt, high picks return more value on average than lower ones. But picking the right player is devilishly hard: Remember Ryan Leaf.

The other approach is to do what Patriots coach Bill Belichick has done so effectively. Pile up draft picks, accumulate as much potential talent as possible, assess it for as long as you can, and then make your choice. Instead of trading up to grab a player, trade down to grab options.

This is an anti-expert strategy. It doesn't rely on beating the market; you can't do that reliably. It's about giving yourself as many chances to be right as possible. It's about buying lots of lottery tickets, not betting on a single lucky number.

And it's about flexible, incremental improvement, year by year. The Patriots won the Super Bowl this year because of Tom Brady (draft pick No. 199) and Malcolm Butler (undrafted). No strategy wins all the time, but not going for the long ball works better than the alternative.

How does this apply to the United States? Remember Dwight Eisenhower's advice in his farewell address at the height of the Cold War: Don't believe that there's a magic solution to tough problems. Play the long game, stay flexible, and -- over time -- our system will beat the Soviet one.

That's good strategy, in the draft and for the United States -- whether on economics or geopolitics. Relying on centralized, top-down control is like relying on experts -- it's seductive, but it doesn't work.

Over the long run, we win if we stay flexible, free and decentralized, and we let the market find as many solutions as possible. That's the grand strategy embodied in the Constitution: limit the federal government to doing what it absolutely has to do, and let the states, towns and -- above all -- the people do the rest.

As our history shows, it's a winning strategy. And like NFL teams, we ignore it at our peril.