Ryan Rodenberg, an assistant professor of sports law at Florida State University, had a very interesting column in The Atlantic on Thursday, concurrent with the major sports leagues and the NCAA being in a Federal court case to attempt to prevent the state of New Jersey from creating sports books.
I do agree with Brian that Rodenberg is one of the few people with any real knowledge of law that takes this kind of thing seriously.
Unfortunately, I don't think Rodenberg has a clue as to how pervasive a lot of this is, and how reliant the corporate sports machine is on manipulated/rigged/scripted results.
He begins by comparing what should happen to sports these days to the quiz show scandals of the 1950's.
Honestly, "My Little Genius" aside, one has to really wonder, these days, as to whether the FCC's declaration of competitive reality programming as "entertainment programming" (and, hence, legal to rig -- and has been declared as such directly since at least the fourth season of American Idol -- almost a decade ago!) has not bled back into game shows, basically allowing the producers at least a limited revocation of the resulting law from the 50's quiz scandals: "Prohibited Practices in Contests of Skill or Chance".
That is a Federal Law which makes it a crime to rig a game show, and, likewise, a crime to assist in the production of a rigged show.
Given some of what I've seen over the last 5-7 years, however, I begin to wonder..
Two examples:
The complete changeover of The Price is Right to a bastardization of itself, where jokes and guest stars are more important than giving prizes away,
and that there hasn't been an up-the-tree millionaire on American Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? since Nancy Christy became the only woman to win the million on any American version -- in May of 2003!!.
(The only two million-dollar prizes given since on the US franchise were sweeps stunts. Robert "Bob-O" Essig won a million in 2004, but needed only 12 of the 15 questions to do it, since the top prize on ABC's Super Millionaire was $10,000,000. It was five years before a "Tournament of Ten" top winners of the early part of the 2009 10th-anniversary syndicated season (10 years of Millionaire, not 10 syndicated years) yielded Sam Murray's million-dollar win.)
But what I've noticed is that it appears that, with a number of possible mechanisms (insanely difficult games/questions, deliberately selecting contestants on how poorly they are expected to do, not how well they are expected to do, etc.), it could well be said that the shows are attempting to rig the games such that NO ONE wins.
So I'm not sure how Rodenberg basically can come to any conclusion similar to then-President Eisenhower, especially since, as one famous "NFL is rigged" video put it:
"Surely, the National Football League believes that the average NFL fan has the IQ of yogurt."
Anyway, Rodenberg then reviews the Dan Tan situation from Europol to Singapore.
Again, it is my contention that Dan Tan effectively runs international football now. Any match, especially those in lower divisions where paychecks are sometimes in question and the like, can be rigged or scripted through his operatives. One has to wonder, with this kind of power, what kind of "nuclear option" against sports his people have if he ever is dealt with.
Then Rodenberg mentions the current court proceeding and makes this claim of the six sports leagues suing New Jersey:
"Specifically, the sports leagues, in their August 7, 2012 complaint, say that New Jersey's plan would "irreparably harm amateur and professional sports by fostering suspicion that individual plays and final scores of games may have been influenced by factors other than honest athletic competition.""
The only people who don't "foster suspicion" that this is true, pervasive, and going on today (and for at least 35 years in the past, if you have ever read Interference) has no real clue of the corporate nature of sports.
Brian Tuohy has referenced two videos on his site effectively proving this. Both are long and quite dry, so he basically touches on some of the highlights.
The first one is a website about a conference that Brian actually attended (hosted by Rodenberg) at the very same Florida State University last October, and a panel on sports manipulation.
The presentation showed some very interesting facts (and you can jump to the presented slides at the point they are presented in the video)
- (Slide 6, part of the "Is Point-Shaving Widespread?", as well as Slides 10 and 11): Richard Borghesi talked about the Wolfers study in 2006, where the study examined over 44,000 college basketball games from the previous 17 years (presumably all Division I) to see how many games could be point-shaved. He found that, admittedly, at least 1% of all games could be PROVEN rigged, and that 6% of strong favorites (double-digit favorites) have chosen to take a dive to benefit gamblers betting against them in the point spread. This is basically covered up by the fact that the athletes can still claim they did try to win the game, but clearly were seen to have manipulated the game to benefit one "side" of the gambling -- the "side" against their covering the Vegas spread.
- It starts getting dry and mathematical here. Eventually, the conclusion is that there isn't such a strong correlation that can be laid on point-shaving in the NBA or NFL (Slides 13-22). Wolfers is also contradicted on the concept that it could be either that a strong favorite deliberately tanks on one side of the court/field or the other (offensive/defensive). (Slides 15-19) This shouldn't surprise anybody who reads this site -- my belief is that, instead of getting players to tank in most cases, the leagues take direct control through officiating or other means to get the result they want -- for whichever of the multiple ways the result may be manipulated (the "correct" team going over, the most exciting result possible (total points or close game), or to aid Vegas one way or the other, to name just three).
- Then, by the time we get to Slide 30, we begin to enter similar ground to the Europol/Dan Tan situation in Europe, reported by Katarina Pijetlovic (and I hope I got that right!) of Estonia. Slide 35 lists three such fixed events, one of which you can see here, one of the many Italian football fixes of the last few years:
- The other two are another farce where French handballers were accused of placing bets against themselves, and a doping scandal in the English Rugby League.
- After studying the above video in depth, she basically reports that, with less space for sports investigative reporting, fewer people willing to do it (I wonder why!!), and a lack of funding, the state of sports journalism is falling further and further short.
- This, however, does not preclude positive efforts in the genre -- the likes of Sporting Intelligence, PlaytheGame.org, and a site by Alexander Lebdev, The Journalism Foundation.
- It then goes into the problem in ATP mens' tennis of match-fixing, presented by ATP Associate Counsel Jeff Real. After a (far too long for this forum) promotional video on the ATP Tour, Real gives a perspective on how the ATP is addressing the issue.
- Then Brian takes over and starts talking about some of the things you've already read on his site (and if you haven't, go do so) and in his upcoming book, Larceny Games.
"In a high-profile 1997 case concerning who owns real-time sports data under copyright law, the federal judge reasoned that "[u]nlike movies, plays, television programs, or operas, athletic events are competitive and have no underlying script.""
However, how does one juxtapose that with the 2010 Federal court decision in Mayer v. Belichick, New England Patriots, and National Football League, the Spygate trial which concluded the following:
First, even though:
"3. Plaintiffs contend that in purchasing tickets to the New York Jets that, as a matter of contract, the tickets imply that each game will be played in accordance with NFL rules and regulations, as well as all applicable state and Federal laws."
Mayer did not suffer:
"actionable injury (or, in other words, a legally protected right or interest)"
What this effectively means, in short, is that he has no right but to a seat at a performance, the same seat that I might occupy for a concert at Davies Symphony Hall for Olivia Newton-John in San Francisco, or a Broadway Theatre to see a Disney production.
He has no right to a legal, lawful, nor legitimate contest -- and no recourse from same!
So, then, how does it serve a corporate sports league NOT to have an underlying script, especially with such advertising dollars (four million of them for 30 seconds at the last Super Bowl) in play?
And that's where I believe that Rodenberg's central thesis fails: He talks about the concept of "uncertainty of outcome", and believes that such situations as manipulation are merely hypothetical. Here's the problem, as Rodenberg's own article puts in large type:
"Published empirical studies have found increased fan enjoyment during buzzer beaters, certain pecuniary biases among sports referees, and heightened advertiser brand effectiveness following close contests. Leagues, broadcasters, and marketing agencies are surely aware of such studies, all of which probably mirror their own in-house analyses. Accordingly, they have a strong incentive to be tempted to act insidiously absent any explicit prohibition."
I would openly like to invite Mr. Rodenberg to examine a number of things and wonder if this is still merely hypothesis that the corporate sports leagues are manipulating results for maximum economic gain:
- The fact that, of the last six Super Bowls, five can directly be traced to game-deciding plays in the last minute, and the sixth is believed to have been a deliberate dive late in the fourth quarter to ensure a desired result.
- The fact that questions abound about every Super Bowl of this millenium, which can be anything from the above to "pecuniary biases among sports referees", etc.
- The entire Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls era, where one study eventually showed that 70% of the league's fans were Bulls (more like Jordan) fans. (And if fans really wanted uncertainty of outcome and would turn away from the league if the games were shown rigged, why is the NBA still in business over a decade after Jordan's last game, with the strongest belief among the major sports that the NBA is rigged?)
- And then we get to the second video...
Robert Dupuy, Esq.: The President and Chief Operating Officer of Major League Baseball, said the following:
"We sell fantasy. We don’t sell reality. And we have grown men and women in costumes playing for millions of dollars, and more importantly enthralling tens of millions of people. And furthermore, we sell competition. Our teams and our athletes have to be bitter, bitter rivals and competitors on the field of play, but they’ve got to be partners off the field of play. And we need rules. We sell uncertainty of outcome, and so we need rules, both playing rules and frankly, we need economic rules."
Note the admission, whether he intends it or not. He says the following two statements:
"We sell fantasy. We don't sell reality."
and
"We sell uncertainty of outcome..."
That's a dangerous juxtaposition if you don't want me to state that the games, then, have to be manipulated because of the status of the teams/athletes as off-the-field corporate partners. (Which is exactly what I believe.)
And then DeMaurice Smith, chief of the NFL Players' Union, adds:
"Isn’t the reality that it’s a business when owners want it to be a business and it’s a sport when they want it to be a sport and for a fan it’s—and I agree with you—it’s a fantasy."
How does one not draw the conclusion that that fantasy is a contrived, scripted, controlled series of events?
So I'd ask Mr. Rodenburg, given these comments, how a similar situation to quiz shows in the 1950's not only exists in sports today, but is their modus operandi?
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