Day (2)10 (Part 1): A Decade

You are not going to believe this, but, yes I did check...

TODAY is the TENTH ANNIVERSARY of the beginning of Super Fraud.

October 7, 2010 was the first post on this blog.

And this blog has basically gone completely off the rails I had originally intended it.  I'm not even sure I meant this as a long-term project.  My ORIGINAL INTENT was to use this blog as a case study of the then-44 Super Bowls to establish how many of them were fixed, rigged, manipulated, tampered, whatever have you.

Well, I never really got there.

Why?

If you had told me the kinds of things we would find out in the last 10 years about sports and the true machineries behind it, I would look at you and wonder why we even watch another sporting event, whether that level be professional or our nephew's youth basketball league.

I don't know when I finally openly converted the blog to a running commentary on match-fixing, game-rigging, the politics (both literal and simply sports-related) behind sports, etc.  It may have always had that bent (my second post was from no less than Brent Musberger commenting on the effectiveness of steroids in sports -- and even if he hadn't meant it as an endorsement, it WAS a material endorsement of same!)

Now, I make no warranty that I ever break stories around here.  I don't have the "secret sources" around to break that final chain that's going to cause the entire house of cards to come down for any one sports league specifically with respect to game-rigging, or to the American Sports Machine.

That doesn't mean I haven't seen some awful zingers in ten years:

• One week after the blog's inception, I made note that ESPN no less than warned the current Bowl Championship Series that it was going to have to rig matters off the field (and eventually on it, see Auburn's comeback over Alabama and Boise State finally bowing to reality on the same day within a month and a half!) to ensure that a non-qualifying conference school would never play for the National Championship, when it ran all the numbers and declared that Boise State University would be the #1 team in the nation under the BCS' system.  Within one week, the first official numbers came out, and the BCS took care of their business.  And, between the Alliance (created in 1992 as a result of BYU's National Championship in 1984), Coalition, BCS, and CFP (the latter of which actually was demanded after the one-and-same Boise State defeated Oklahoma in a classic Fiesta Bowl), no non-major conference has ever played for the recognized National Championship of major college football in the 28 seasons since -- even though at least two schools would almost-certainly have won national championships in the pre-Alliance backroom system had the polling still been in place (2006 Boise State, 2017 Central Florida).
• The first ten months of the blog saw less than 70 posts, but then a referee attack in Florida youth football (months after ESPN exposed that said youth football was largely drug/gang-related professional football back to about the age of seven or so!) started a football season where all Hell broke loose -- the last one being a pre-meditated orchestrated mass attack on a rival football team by a Georgia community, which they got away with.   So bad that my Fine Blotters actually go all the way back to about NFL Week 3 of this first full year of the blog.
• But then, Pedo State.  The first real transformative content on the blog.  Really, the nation's first real exposure to the central pillars of American sports:  Abuse, Rape, Pedophilia, even Murder...  But the real one that got swept too far under the rug (largely because of the guy who reported the possibility, caustic Mark Madden of Pittsburgh) was the report that an Epstein-style "Pedo Plane" was being used to court wealthy Penn State donors to give donations to the school.  If this (and Baylor and half the Big Ten) is not evidence for the abolition of the NCAA, and even the thought that the coronavirus may be a message from God that He's finally cleaning up the damn mess...
• 2012 started with the NFL Bounty-Gate coverup, where New Orleans won the Katrina Super Bowl due to deliberate injury of the other teams.  Then, the complete English FA at least rig-job (if not coverup of how Joey Barton was ever allowed to play professional soccer in the country at any level) to give Manchester City a Hollywood Ending championship to expand the number of relevant teams, raising the rights fees for the Premier League television contracts...
• And then the ESPN/NCAA sweep under the rug of Penn State, after Mark Emmert revealed a four-year Death Penalty was on the table.  Then, apparently accusations of both the murder of an investigating DA, as well as Sandusky's charity allegedly attempting to kidnap Cal Ripken Jr.'s mother to maintain her son's compliance...
• The football season had a youth coach in California paying players $20 to give other 10 year-olds concussions, plus a coach in Utah charging the field and knocking out a 13 year-old opponent!
• Then, kicking off 2013, the Biogenesis downfall of A-Roid, the rise and fall of Johnny Football, and a case study as to the number of BCS games which never should've taken place as advertised, motivated by an expose on the 2008 National Champion Florida Gators.  
• Or how about the 1980's NFL ex-player whose house was used for a ransacking party, and the parents of the ransacking White kids didn't like that people found out, all but endorsing the violence?  
• Or the father who kills his son because the son wanted to go home and no longer watch any football?  
• Or the Jets Superfan who belted a woman in the face in a post-game fight -- only to find out the guy had already done prison time for MURDER!!!
• Or Deadspin buying the ballot of a BBWAA member for the Hall of Fame in baseball?
• Or "THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT ALABAMA!!!"  *BLAM!!*
• The year Rapeis Winston won the Heisman, a year before there should've been investigation he was throwing (or at least spot-fixing) games -- and an investigation into sexual assault all over the Florida State football program.
• 2014 starts with Chris Kluwe announcing he's been blackballed from the NFL. (The same year Michael Sam gets the same treatment!)
• Then, the next major transformative blog event:  Donald Sterling. Sterling is immediately thrown out of the league as a condition of it's continuance, the NBA being four-fifths Black.
• Soccer has long been a common target of my ire, including the work of Declan Hill to explain why -- everything from hooliganism to the 2014 World Cup, to, more recently, the travails of Wigan Athletic FC.
  
• And then, the next transformative, within a week of each other, the Ray Lewis beating video and the Adrian Peterson controversy, and the NFL coverup to prevent people from rightfully asking the rightful questions.

And that's just about the first four years.  More to come...