When looking for the image to go along with the post, I found this gem from “freakorico” on Instagram that nailed pretty much every talking point coming into this game about how the league was rigging the games in favour of the Chiefs with dodgy officiating and whatever other conspiracy you could imagine.
Now that’s funny right there, I don’t care who you are!
Larry the Cable Guy
If that game was rigged in favour of the Chiefs, I have to say the NFL needs to get it’s money back from whoever they were supposedly paying because that was easily the most incompetent attempt at it I’ve ever seen in my life!
Let’s think about that idea for a minute, shall we?
Putting aside the enormous number of people the league would have to involve in such a scheme and the amount of money it would take to encourage them to keep their mouths shut…at the end of the day there are two things that guarantee such a scheme would come to light sooner or later and I’m betting it’s much sooner:
- The time a secret can remain secret is the inverse of the square of the people who are aware of the secret.
- Some dumb bastard who is “in the know” is going to talk about how cool they are to be “on the inside”.
Disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy had at least four years to wager and control the point spread on games he officiated but he was eventually caught as the result of a wider FBI investigation into organised crime and remanded for 15 months for his part in the scheme.
Do you *REALLY* think that a much larger league with much higher annual revenues than Taylor Swift can dream of (and she’s pretty imaginative!) is going to risk rigging the results on such a grand scale knowing the PR disaster that would be?
That’s enough to dissuade the league to try something that stupid even as above the law as they tend to be with their aggressive litigation department who’d probably consider coming after me for mocking their game’s name.
But I’d add an even bigger incentive arguing against the NFL doing something that stupid and that would be the sportsbooks and the dodgy buggers operating and financing them. These people have to have accurate information and a belief in the game being played as being genuine in order to accurately assess the risks to price the odds offered to the punters stumping up the cash at the betting window.
Whilst it’s certainly plausible someone might try fixing matches and juicing the odds to make a big score, big data has done wonders to make that much harder to pull off in secrecy than it was before. The computer algorithms have gotten frighteningly good at detecting odd betting patterns which at the very least leads to suspended betting and more often than not has gotten the people engaged in the match fixing nicked and remanded to the Grey Bar Hotel for trial.
So no, I think the idea that the NFL was rigging things so that they could have a first three-peat in the modern era of American footy was and is laughable on the face of it.
Now, if you were to ask me in the third quarter if someone had paid the Chiefs to throw the game with the utter incompetence and inability to get out of their own way…that would have been the harder argument to refute. I don’t think Mahomes and company are dodgy like that but I was genuinely beginning to wonder if the cavalcade of mistakes I was watching in the only game I’d actually watched all season including the normally deadly accurate Mahomes chucking the ball directly to a nearby Eagles player with no one else round him were a case of a prize fighter being paid by the mob to take a dive.
Sometimes one team is just that good compared to the other. Sometimes the refs blow calls because they’re trying to interpret what they’re seeing in real-time in a matter of seconds. Sometimes a team is just sheer bloody lucky.
For the past couple of years, the Chiefs have been a good side and made the best of their opportunities. I’m sure they’re going to be quite angry at how this game went down and they’re going to be like Jefferson in the game after a completely stoned Spicoli wrecks his car in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”…
Last night, the Eagles were clearly the better team and I don’t see anyone going nuts about the NFL rigging the game in *THEIR* favour, eh? Congratulations and fair dinkum on ’em, eh?
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that whilst I’d have loved for the Chiefs to win (owing to the fact I lived for a year only 30 miles to the northwest at Ft Leavenworth KS) and it’s nice to actually care about the results when most of the time I don’t…last night’s game is the poster child of why I don’t understand the sport and I’m certainly not a fan of it. For many years, the only time I’d know who was actually playing in the game was when I’d turn up at my mate’s place and that was more for good food and better company.
Yeah…happy birthday and many happy returns of the day, Miguel me old china (Cockney rhyming slang there…”china plate” = “mate”). Hanging about for the annual Superb Owl festivities last night was wonderful even if the game was not particularly exciting (OK, OK..it was penny dreadful all round and I truly felt for the presenters who were trying desperately to inject *ANY* enthusiasm into their commentary when that game was over before half time!).
A couple of other observations from the perspective of someone who genuinely doesn’t get this game:
- Apparently the league changed the rules prior to this season that when someone actually uses their foot to propel the non-spherical “ball” (a rare occurrence for American footy) to the other team, the vast majority of players lined up facing each other have to *STAND STILL* until some bloke catches the ball and then decides to either run or take a knee. Who in the name of God thought *THAT* was a good idea? Maybe they were trying to make it easier for the bugger to have some space to run in the direction from which the ball was kicked but to someone who had no idea about that rule…it looked pretty stupid for these guys to be standing their with their thumbs up a rather notorious orifice and I’d imagine they probably felt pretty stupid doing it as well.
- Whilst we’re on the subject of kicking, every now and then someone would punt the ball down field to someone who more often than not would wave his hand in the air as the kicking team is thundering toward him…and then they wouldn’t knock that bugger all the way over Lake Ponchartrain toward Slidell! I was able to determine after asking someone who actually does know something about the sport that this “fair catch” is rather akin to “taking a mark” in Australian rules footy (which I actually do understand and actually enjoy taking in the odd match) where the player cleanly catches an equally absurdly shaped “ball” that’s looks more at home in a rugby match and is thus entitled to an unimpeded free kick (either to another player within 10s or if they’re going for goal they have 30s to boot it) or they can choose to bugger off and start running which makes them fair game for tackling.
- What is it with these quarterbacks falling down to the turf when they decide to run the ball? They’re wearing enough body armour to make a Sherman tank jealous and yet should be nimble enough that if they’re in the clear, they should be hauling ass and dancing round anyone who is coming at them. I get that they’re valuable players but if you’re wearing armour that Aussie footy and rugby players don’t, how about making a better effort? Yeah, not a fan of them taking to the deck unnecessarily.
Finally, usually a highlight is the half-time show and not just because you can occasionally get a salacious wardrobe “malfunction”. If they’ve got decent musicians and some good choreography, the half-time show itself often more interesting and compelling viewing than the game.
Last night’s offering was…underwhelming at best. For the first few minutes, I genuinely wished I was at the UN so I could have a simultaneous translation to English. I have no earthly idea what in the hell this Kendrick Lamar (who I gather is a famous rapper but honestly I’d never heard of him) was saying. Eventually he became more intelligible but at that point, I was more interested in sifting the pictures from Nick’s recent hockey game where he posted a 2-nil shutout (his first as a goalie!) than the performance.
Katie, who I’d returned to Campbell so she could watch this Superb Owl debacle in the auditorium with other students, was much more enthusiastic about the quality of the show. Apparently the key to understanding and appreciating it was that this Kendrick Lamar has a beef with some other rapper named Drake who is suing Lamar who has a song accusing Drake of being a paedophile and there was some sort of teasing of that particular song before it was performed and also there was someone named SZA that she seemed to like.
I had no idea about all that but even if I had…it just wasn’t impressive to me musically, artistically, or on pretty much any other level. When your audience is far more impressed that you’d actually found a 1987 Buick GNX in good condition that still seems operable…yeah, not really getting your vibe.
I wonder if the league is regretting not choosing the other rapper, eh?
Better luck next year…to both that half-time show and the Chiefs. Until then, that’s it for this edition of Superb Owl and I’ll likely be sure to completely ignore the coming season until it’s time to gather once again for good food and better company…and oh, they’ve got the steroid-enhanced humans running into each other again on the telly. 😉