Are all sports rigged? The proof is in the pudding.

[~JC~]

I recently listened to a really great podcast and the guest, Brian Tuohy (bio below), is an author and sports writer targeting sports corruption and conspiracy for some years now.

The details he outlines on his website are worth checking out, especially the excerpts he includes from the late and great Howard Cosell’s book. VERY telling insight into the word of sports.

Podcast: the actual podcast starts around 3:00

Brian’s website:
https://www.thefixisin.net/


Bio:
Brian Tuohy is the author of The Fix Is In: The Showbiz Manipulations of the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NASCAR and Larceny Games: Sports Gambling, Game Fixing, and the FBI. He has been published in Sports Illustrated, Vice Sports, Sports on Earth, and Bleacher Report. Google Books

*I also wanted to include something else I found when I dug deeper on the topic - Someone clipped this from an article on QuorA and posted it. It’s anonymous but echos the same suspicions:

Original article https://www.quora.com/Are-the-NFL-playoffs-or-Super-Bowl-rigged/answers/23056297

“ALL professional sports championships are rigged. And not just rigged by referees (as the controlled opposition wants you to think) but rigged from the top to bottom with the assistance of select players and coaches on each team.

Every Super Bowl you have ever watched has been rigged. Most playoff games and regular season games too. Some superstars are manufactured (such as Cam Newton) and some are repressed if they don’t play along.

Most veteran QBs are in on the fixes, ALL head coaches, most coordinators, and certain players in certain positions (CB, OL, RB, WR, etc.). It’s important to know that not all the players or coaches are in on it, although some may suspect but are not willing to risk their career or earnings over it. Most of the players and lower level coaches are dupes IMO.

This also includes owners and GMs. Some owners are actually a front for corporations, agencies, or secret billionaires who really own the team (Terry Pegula comes to mind). To them it is just an investment. They don’t care if their team wins or loses, as long as the fans show up.

Super Bowl champions have more to do with narratives and giving favors to certain owners than with the play on the field. It’s a racket that has cost working class fans billions of dollars over the decades. It has also cost most players their brains and bodies, despite the outcomes being pre-determined. It also explains how Vegas is always so close to the real spread. Vegas never loses, because they know who’s going to win.

For those looking to do more research and go further down the rabbit hole, try to find out why nearly all of the expansion owners of the 1960’s came out of the Navy. That’s right, the NFL is a military creation. The Navy is the home of intelligence. Football is subconscious military promotion, originating from elite schools such as Harvard and Yale.

NBA fixes every game. The NHL is better IMO but fixes a few regular season games to ensure favored or big market teams advance and fixes all the playoff games that need fixing.

In case you’re wondering, Spygate , Bountygate, and Deflategate never happened. All done for marketing, awareness, and controlled opposition purposes. Done with full consent of all parties. Why would people risk their reputations? Well, you need to start asking who these people really are and if the biographies we are told are actually true.

For those open-minded willing to go down this path, prepare for depression, then enlightenment. The entire world you have been told by newspapers, TV, and media is not what you think it is. In fact, Quora is not what you think it is. And some of the posters who you trust are not who you think they are (including some who answered this question).“

 

[Colonel Valerio]

This is something I have suspected for a while, especially after the Spygate scandal, which was much bigger than let on, and overshadowed by the bounty scandal which had less impact on the outcome.

All profits in the NFL are shared so of course the owners want the biggest draw, doesn’t even matter if their team “wins”. Sports is the opiate of the masses.

 

[B_JMNN]

There was a reason why the lights went out during the San Francisco and Baltimore Super Bowl.

 

[Vytas]

Nba is rigged, but that's the only sport I know enough about to see that...It became rigged coincidently with the rise of sports betting...Maybe it was before too, but not so blatantly. Now every fun knows it's rigged, who cares still fun to watch...

 

[~JC~]

Nba is rigged, but that's the only sport I know enough about to see that...It became rigged coincidently with the rise of sports betting...Maybe it was before too, but not so blatantly. Now every fun knows it's rigged, who cares still fun to watch...

Well now you know if the NBA is rigged, guess what? All sports are rigged. Sports betting has been happening since the dawn of time (think about the early boxing era). You’re right, though. Most sports fans probably don’t care because it is entertaining and a bonding activity for many, but I wouldn’t bet on it

 

[Todd]

I don't have the time to watch the video right now, but I have one question....what is the supposed benefit to rig the games? Who profits from rigging the games? Please don't tell me it's the gambling aspect. Sports books could care less what the outcome actually is because the gambling system itself is rigged and self-adjusted so that no matter the outcome the sports books win. That is why the line is constantly changing. It has nothing to do with knowledge of the teams or predictions of who is going to win. The line moves based on how many people bet either way. They constantly adjust it so the sports betting line is actually a barometer of who the people who are placing bets believe are going to win.

I can't imagine how the owners would benefit, unless they did so every team gets to win so often, but that is obviously not the case. Most of the pro leagues have profit sharing so the financial impact would not be that significant.

 

[Aero]

I don't think every game is rigged. That would take a ton of effort and orchestration. Plus players actually have to be good. Owners can't just build a mediocre team and get carried by the rigging.

 

[~JC~]

I don't have the time to watch the video right now, but I have one question....what is the supposed benefit to rig the games? Who profits from rigging the games? Please don't tell me it's the gambling aspect. Sports books could care less what the outcome actually is because the gambling system itself is rigged and self-adjusted so that no matter the outcome the sports books win. That is why the line is constantly changing. It has nothing to do with knowledge of the teams or predictions of who is going to win. The line moves based on how many people bet either way. They constantly adjust it so the sports betting line is actually a barometer of who the people who are placing bets believe are going to win.

I can't imagine how the owners would benefit, unless they did so every team gets to win so often, but that is obviously not the case. Most of the pro leagues have profit sharing so the financial impact would not be that significant.

The content outlined here might help answer those questions: https://www.thefixisin.net/

In short, they’re basically creating a storyline for the benefit of viewership.

 

[Todd]

The content outlined here might help answer those questions: https://www.thefixisin.net/

Just a cursory glance I see no proof, only speculation. I also did not see anything about how fixing the games benefits the leagues at all.

 

[~JC~]

Just a cursory glance I see no proof, only speculation. I also did not see anything about how fixing the games benefits the leagues at all.

Well I guess that’s it then! lol I mean you if can’t listen to what the dude is saying about it or read the proof he’s outlining on his site, yeah its speculation from that perspective.

Here’s a blurb from the site I found pretty fascinating:
from Howard Cosell’s book
I am writing this book because I am convinced that sports are out of whack in the American society; that the emphasis placed upon sports distorts the real values of life and often produces mass behavior patterns that are downright frightening; and that the frequently touted uplifting benefits of sports have become a murky blur in the morass of hypocrisy and contradiction that I call the Sports Syndrome.

I did not always feel this way...

In the beginning, like most people in America, I had romantic ideas about sports. I found beauty in the contests, and I really believed that the public needed the surcease that spectator sports provided from the daily travail of life. But the past fifteen years have developed vast changes in my thinking and have caused me to reach the conclusion set forth at the top of this prologue.

In that time, I have walked away from professional boxing, and I have come to have grave doubts about amateur boxing. I have walked away from professional football because of family pressures and because I no longer believed morally or ethically in the actions of the National Football League. By doing this, I gave up, literally, millions of dollars, and yet I suffered tremendous vilification in print for my action.

In that time, I came to realize, however reluctantly, that there was an inexorable force working against revelations of truth about sports in America. That force exists in the form of an unholy alliance between the three television networks and the sports print medium. It is the fundamental purpose of both, for their own reasons, to exalt sports, to regale the games, the fights, the races, whatever, to the point where these contests are indoctrinated into the public mind as virtual religious rituals.

Only rarely does one ever read or hear about how sports in the current era inextricably intertwine with the law, the politics, the sociology, the education, and the medical care of society. It is common practice now for sports franchise owners to rip off great cities in financial distress either by franchise removal or threat of franchise removal. I have seen emphasis upon sports corrupt our higher educational process, and to at least some degree, our secondary educational system….

I have observed the disgusting extent to which television will go in order to get a rating….I have covered the development of labor unions in sports, lockouts in sports, special-purpose legislation passed by the Congress for sports. And I have seen the birth of a curious new stratum in society, which Robert Lipsyte brilliantly entitled “the Jockocracy.”…

The world of sports today is endlessly complex, an ever-spinning spiral of deceit, immorality, absence of ethics, and defiance of the public interest. Yet, somewhere within all that, there continues to lurk the valid notion that there is good in sports and that the games themselves provide a necessary respite from the ills and frustrations of life itself.

It is in that latter notion that the bulk of the American public believes, although the number of such believers decreases almost daily. They believe as they do because they have been taught to do so virtually from birth. They are taught in their homes and by the sports media people….

We are taught a series of postulates, each of which can serve as a natural concomitant for any of the others, and which, in totality, constitute the Sports Syndrome. They are:

1. The game is sacrosanct—a physical and almost religious ritual of beauty and art.

2. Only those who have played the game can understand and communicate its beauty.

3. All athletes are heroes, to the point where some are cast as surrogate parents in the American home.

4. Winning isn’t everything…it’s the only thing! (Something Vincent T. Lombardi never said!)

5. Sport is Camelot. It is not a place for truth—only for escape, for refuge from life.

6. The fan is sacred, even as sports are. He pays the freight, thus he is an entitled being. The media people tell him this every day. Therefore, once within the arena, his emotions whetted by the Sports Syndrome, the fan adopts what John Stewart Mill found to be the classic confusion in the American thought process, the confusion between Liberty and License—a natural and probable consequence of which is fan violence.

….The essential point is that sports are no longer fun and games, that they are everywhere—in people’s minds, in conversation, in the importance we attach to it—and that they can affect the basics of our lives (to wit, the part of our taxes that may be directed to supporting a sports franchise, without our ever knowing it). Once I bought the Jimmy Cannon dictum that “Sports is the Toy Department of life.” I don’t now and never will again.

The task then, as I see it, is to get a fix on sports and put it in its place, in balance with the mainstream of life, and to dispel romantic ideas about sports—ideas that exist only in a fantasy world.

From I Never Played the Game, pages 131-132, in which Cosell explained why he left ABC's Monday Night Football:

First, the moral problem I had with the NFL. I no longer believed in the league, and I became increasingly disillusioned with what I felt was a deception of the American public. Thanks to Monday Night Football, the NFL took off in the 1970s, becoming the most powerful, prestigious, and glamorous organization in professional sports. At the same time, however, what was happening off the field began to sicken me. As I have related in previous chapters, power eventually corrupted a lot of the owners and the men who run the league. Greed and political chicanery became normal business practices. Their arrogance knew no bounds. They thought they had a license to do exactly as they pleased, particularly with regard to carpetbagging franchises—or threatening to carpetbag franchises if the cities in which they played didn’t come through with bigger stadiums, better tax breaks, and other concessions.

The NFL got away with such outrageous behavior for two reasons: one, its partnership with the three networks; and two, its almost all-encompassing influence over the sportswriters, who could be counted on to parrot the party line. It was disgraceful and I wanted no part of it….

And God forbid you disagreed with them, or criticized them, or as a working journalist exposed their duplicity. They circled the wagons, even tried to discredit you by distorting what you had reported….

If you weren’t a whore for the NFL, then you were a pariah. I wasn’t going to shill for league....

Love him or hate him (that is, if you even remember him), there was never another sports broadcasters like Howard Cosell.

The following was sent to me by a fan. It was taken from "Long Island's Own Newspaper" Newsday dated December 8, 1978, and was attributed to Peter Gent, member of the Dallas Cowboys from 1964-68 and author of the great book (later a movie) North Dallas Forty:

"For there should be a fundamental difference between professional and amateur sports that goes beyond the technical distinction of whether athletes make money from their sport. I learned the difference at the end of training camp my rookie year with the Dallas Cowboys. Management called a meeting to explain the responsibilities of being a professional football player. The man to give the best advice was the team's public relations director. He told us: 'Boys, this is show business.'

"With these words in mind, nothing about professional sports, even Howard Cosell, is mystifying. Professional athletes are first and foremost show business, dealing in illusion and entertainment. The first responsibility of the players is to the audience, not themselves. If the audience wants winners, that is what is given. If it wants losers, that also it will get. The principle is the same for midget wrestling and the National Football League."

 

[Lisa]

I recently listened to a really great podcast and the guest, Brian Tuohy (bio below), is an author and sports writer targeting sports corruption and conspiracy for some years now.

The details he outlines on his website are worth checking out, especially the excerpts he includes from the late and great Howard Cosell’s book. VERY telling insight into the word of sports.

Podcast: the actual podcast starts around 3:00

Brian’s website:
https://www.thefixisin.net/


Bio:
Brian Tuohy is the author of The Fix Is In: The Showbiz Manipulations of the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NASCAR and Larceny Games: Sports Gambling, Game Fixing, and the FBI. He has been published in Sports Illustrated, Vice Sports, Sports on Earth, and Bleacher Report. Google Books

*I also wanted to include something else I found when I dug deeper on the topic - Someone clipped this from an article on QuorA and posted it. It’s anonymous but echos the same suspicions:

Original article https://www.quora.com/Are-the-NFL-playoffs-or-Super-Bowl-rigged/answers/23056297

“ALL professional sports championships are rigged. And not just rigged by referees (as the controlled opposition wants you to think) but rigged from the top to bottom with the assistance of select players and coaches on each team.

Every Super Bowl you have ever watched has been rigged. Most playoff games and regular season games too. Some superstars are manufactured (such as Cam Newton) and some are repressed if they don’t play along.

Most veteran QBs are in on the fixes, ALL head coaches, most coordinators, and certain players in certain positions (CB, OL, RB, WR, etc.). It’s important to know that not all the players or coaches are in on it, although some may suspect but are not willing to risk their career or earnings over it. Most of the players and lower level coaches are dupes IMO.

This also includes owners and GMs. Some owners are actually a front for corporations, agencies, or secret billionaires who really own the team (Terry Pegula comes to mind). To them it is just an investment. They don’t care if their team wins or loses, as long as the fans show up.

Super Bowl champions have more to do with narratives and giving favors to certain owners than with the play on the field. It’s a racket that has cost working class fans billions of dollars over the decades. It has also cost most players their brains and bodies, despite the outcomes being pre-determined. It also explains how Vegas is always so close to the real spread. Vegas never loses, because they know who’s going to win.

For those looking to do more research and go further down the rabbit hole, try to find out why nearly all of the expansion owners of the 1960’s came out of the Navy. That’s right, the NFL is a military creation. The Navy is the home of intelligence. Football is subconscious military promotion, originating from elite schools such as Harvard and Yale.

NBA fixes every game. The NHL is better IMO but fixes a few regular season games to ensure favored or big market teams advance and fixes all the playoff games that need fixing.

In case you’re wondering, Spygate , Bountygate, and Deflategate never happened. All done for marketing, awareness, and controlled opposition purposes. Done with full consent of all parties. Why would people risk their reputations? Well, you need to start asking who these people really are and if the biographies we are told are actually true.

For those open-minded willing to go down this path, prepare for depression, then enlightenment. The entire world you have been told by newspapers, TV, and media is not what you think it is. In fact, Quora is not what you think it is. And some of the posters who you trust are not who you think they are (including some who answered this question).“

How can you fix any game if all the players are not in on it? Aren’t some playing to win?

 

[Todd]

Well I guess that’s it then! lol I mean you if can’t listen to what the dude is saying about it or read the proof he’s outlining on his site, yeah its speculation from that perspective.

Here’s a blurb from the site I found pretty fascinating:
from Howard Cosell’s book
I am writing this book because I am convinced that sports are out of whack in the American society; that the emphasis placed upon sports distorts the real values of life and often produces mass behavior patterns that are downright frightening; and that the frequently touted uplifting benefits of sports have become a murky blur in the morass of hypocrisy and contradiction that I call the Sports Syndrome.

I did not always feel this way...

In the beginning, like most people in America, I had romantic ideas about sports. I found beauty in the contests, and I really believed that the public needed the surcease that spectator sports provided from the daily travail of life. But the past fifteen years have developed vast changes in my thinking and have caused me to reach the conclusion set forth at the top of this prologue.

In that time, I have walked away from professional boxing, and I have come to have grave doubts about amateur boxing. I have walked away from professional football because of family pressures and because I no longer believed morally or ethically in the actions of the National Football League. By doing this, I gave up, literally, millions of dollars, and yet I suffered tremendous vilification in print for my action.

In that time, I came to realize, however reluctantly, that there was an inexorable force working against revelations of truth about sports in America. That force exists in the form of an unholy alliance between the three television networks and the sports print medium. It is the fundamental purpose of both, for their own reasons, to exalt sports, to regale the games, the fights, the races, whatever, to the point where these contests are indoctrinated into the public mind as virtual religious rituals.

Only rarely does one ever read or hear about how sports in the current era inextricably intertwine with the law, the politics, the sociology, the education, and the medical care of society. It is common practice now for sports franchise owners to rip off great cities in financial distress either by franchise removal or threat of franchise removal. I have seen emphasis upon sports corrupt our higher educational process, and to at least some degree, our secondary educational system….

I have observed the disgusting extent to which television will go in order to get a rating….I have covered the development of labor unions in sports, lockouts in sports, special-purpose legislation passed by the Congress for sports. And I have seen the birth of a curious new stratum in society, which Robert Lipsyte brilliantly entitled “the Jockocracy.”…

The world of sports today is endlessly complex, an ever-spinning spiral of deceit, immorality, absence of ethics, and defiance of the public interest. Yet, somewhere within all that, there continues to lurk the valid notion that there is good in sports and that the games themselves provide a necessary respite from the ills and frustrations of life itself.

It is in that latter notion that the bulk of the American public believes, although the number of such believers decreases almost daily. They believe as they do because they have been taught to do so virtually from birth. They are taught in their homes and by the sports media people….

We are taught a series of postulates, each of which can serve as a natural concomitant for any of the others, and which, in totality, constitute the Sports Syndrome. They are:

1. The game is sacrosanct—a physical and almost religious ritual of beauty and art.

2. Only those who have played the game can understand and communicate its beauty.

3. All athletes are heroes, to the point where some are cast as surrogate parents in the American home.

4. Winning isn’t everything…it’s the only thing! (Something Vincent T. Lombardi never said!)

5. Sport is Camelot. It is not a place for truth—only for escape, for refuge from life.

6. The fan is sacred, even as sports are. He pays the freight, thus he is an entitled being. The media people tell him this every day. Therefore, once within the arena, his emotions whetted by the Sports Syndrome, the fan adopts what John Stewart Mill found to be the classic confusion in the American thought process, the confusion between Liberty and License—a natural and probable consequence of which is fan violence.

….The essential point is that sports are no longer fun and games, that they are everywhere—in people’s minds, in conversation, in the importance we attach to it—and that they can affect the basics of our lives (to wit, the part of our taxes that may be directed to supporting a sports franchise, without our ever knowing it). Once I bought the Jimmy Cannon dictum that “Sports is the Toy Department of life.” I don’t now and never will again.

The task then, as I see it, is to get a fix on sports and put it in its place, in balance with the mainstream of life, and to dispel romantic ideas about sports—ideas that exist only in a fantasy world.

From I Never Played the Game, pages 131-132, in which Cosell explained why he left ABC's Monday Night Football:

First, the moral problem I had with the NFL. I no longer believed in the league, and I became increasingly disillusioned with what I felt was a deception of the American public. Thanks to Monday Night Football, the NFL took off in the 1970s, becoming the most powerful, prestigious, and glamorous organization in professional sports. At the same time, however, what was happening off the field began to sicken me. As I have related in previous chapters, power eventually corrupted a lot of the owners and the men who run the league. Greed and political chicanery became normal business practices. Their arrogance knew no bounds. They thought they had a license to do exactly as they pleased, particularly with regard to carpetbagging franchises—or threatening to carpetbag franchises if the cities in which they played didn’t come through with bigger stadiums, better tax breaks, and other concessions.

The NFL got away with such outrageous behavior for two reasons: one, its partnership with the three networks; and two, its almost all-encompassing influence over the sportswriters, who could be counted on to parrot the party line. It was disgraceful and I wanted no part of it….

And God forbid you disagreed with them, or criticized them, or as a working journalist exposed their duplicity. They circled the wagons, even tried to discredit you by distorting what you had reported….

If you weren’t a whore for the NFL, then you were a pariah. I wasn’t going to shill for league....

Love him or hate him (that is, if you even remember him), there was never another sports broadcasters like Howard Cosell.

The following was sent to me by a fan. It was taken from "Long Island's Own Newspaper" Newsday dated December 8, 1978, and was attributed to Peter Gent, member of the Dallas Cowboys from 1964-68 and author of the great book (later a movie) North Dallas Forty:

"For there should be a fundamental difference between professional and amateur sports that goes beyond the technical distinction of whether athletes make money from their sport. I learned the difference at the end of training camp my rookie year with the Dallas Cowboys. Management called a meeting to explain the responsibilities of being a professional football player. The man to give the best advice was the team's public relations director. He told us: 'Boys, this is show business.'

"With these words in mind, nothing about professional sports, even Howard Cosell, is mystifying. Professional athletes are first and foremost show business, dealing in illusion and entertainment. The first responsibility of the players is to the audience, not themselves. If the audience wants winners, that is what is given. If it wants losers, that also it will get. The principle is the same for midget wrestling and the National Football League."

I'm not at all disagreeing that the leagues are corrupt or fleecing cities for tax dollars, etc. I still see no evidence or motive for rigging the actual games. I'm not saying it isn't happening, I'm just not convinced yet that it is.

 

[~JC~]

How can you fix any game if all the players are not in on it? Aren’t some playing to win?

...there’s so much about this that blows my mind, but I trust there’s validity to what this guy is reporting on. It’s obviously heavily organized in ways that most of us (the oblivious paying public) will never be able to wrap our heads around.

If you can believe that since the moment we’re born that the system wants control of how we perceive reality, than anything is possible. And I absolutely don’t trust the system.

 

[Lisa]

...there’s so much about this that blows my mind, but I trust there’s validity to what this guy is reporting on. It’s obviously heavily organized in ways that most of us (the oblivious paying public) will never be able to wrap our heads around.

If you can believe that since the moment we’re born that the system wants control of how we perceive reality, than anything is possible. And I absolutely don’t trust the system.

But really JC, if it’s only a few players on the team trying to rig the game and every other player is trying to win...how can that work? I’m mostly thinking football btw.

 

[~JC~]

Videos of rigging caught on camera

https://www.thefixisin.net/magnets

 

[~JC~]

But really JC, if it’s only a few players on the team trying to rig the game and every other player is trying to win...how can that work? I’m mostly thinking football btw.

It’s a good question and wish I could answer that myself.

 

[Lisa]

Videos of rigging caught on camera

https://www.thefixisin.net/magnets

That’s the football video citing that the game is rigged? Some guy misses a kick? The video won’t play btw. Honestly, I can see a missed kick being a reality. What I can’t understand that only a few players on a team are rigging a game that most of the players want to win...how does that even work that the rigged players can beat out the players who really want to win?

 

[Todd]

But really JC, if it’s only a few players on the team trying to rig the game and every other player is trying to win...how can that work? I’m mostly thinking football btw.

Football is dominated by the QB position. I’m not sold on the idea that it’s happening but if you wanted to do it, that is the single position you want to control to fix the outcome.

 

[~JC~]

.

That’s the football video citing that the game is rigged? Some guy misses a kick? The video won’t play btw. Honestly, I can see a missed kick being a reality. What I can’t understand that only a few players on a team are rigging a game that most of the players want to win...how does that even work that the rigged players can beat out the players who really want to win?

Idk maybe dig deeper into the referenced material and listen to what he’s saying about it. I can’t answer all of these questions, just relaying what I found to you kind folks for you to draw a somewhat informed conclusion based on said materials.

 

[Todd]

Thinking about other sports one person can dominant a basketball game, so that is the easiest sport for one superstar alone to throw a game. Baseball could be somewhat fixed by the pitcher position alone. Think about it...more than 2/3 of the time the pitcher beats the batter. A pitcher could easily throw a game by putting enough pitches in a place to make it easy for the opposing batters.

Same thing with Hockey...the goalie position is the easiest way to throw a game. Teams usually have 20-40 shots on goal yet each team typically only scores between 1-5 goals per game. A goalie could purposely let one or two shots go in to throw a game.

So it’s feasible for one person (granted it has to be the right person) in every sport to throw a game.