Boxing Itself In

Mike Florio will tell you that he doesn’t believe that NFL games are scripted. Unless, of course, he does.

When the Superdome last hosted the Super Bowl 12 years ago, the game between the 49ers and Ravens was marred by an in-stadium blackout. Officials in New Orleans have confidence that it won’t happen again.

Given that it already happened once during a Super Bowl, the powers-that-be are on even greater notice about the importance of making sure it doesn’t happen again.

Unless, of course, the script calls for it.

Look, everyone with a three-digit IQ who pays regular attention to NFL football knows the score. And we can’t even complain that it’s not, to a certain extent, justified. One calculation by a SGer estimated that the NFL lost $16 million in revenue due to the 13 million fewer viewers who watched the NFC Championship blowout this year than either a) the year before or b) the AFC Championship game.

Can you honestly say that if you were the NFL Commissioner, you wouldn’t keep a ready thumb to put on the scale, just to keep the games close enough to keep the viewers involved for that kind of money? I wouldn’t seek to alter the outcomes, but once the outcomes were settled organically, I can’t honestly say that I wouldn’t permit some level of interference in order to prevent viewer disinterest.

After all, the fans are literally voting with their eyeballs. If they prefer intervention and close games to honest blowouts, that’s on them. The NFL is merely honoring a very respectable service-provider philosophy: the customer is always right.

The problem, of course, is that the seeds of failure are sewn by the harvest of success. The temptation to ensure that a large market team makes it to the Super Bowl, or that Taylor Swift will be there cheering on her ostensible romantic interest, is more difficult to resist once the league is already intervening in the games.

Anyhow, it appears the greater scrutiny the NFL is under is methodically removing some of the methods for their manipulations.

DISCUSS ON SG


Why the Scripting Will Continue

As much as the NFL hates public discussion of its obvious activities in a) occasionally scripting the results and b) putting a thumb on the scale to reduce margins of victory, it’s almost certainly going to continue, although perhaps in a more circumspect manner, due to the costs of not doing so.

Via Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, the game between the Bills and the Chiefs generated an average audience of 57.4 million. That’s a record for the AFC Championship and the most for any conference championship game since Giants-49ers had an audience of 57.6 million in 2012. The Bills-Chiefs game landed in the late window, which drew 56.7 million for Lions-49ers a year ago.

The bad news is that the audience for Commanders-Eagles in the early game was way down. Last year, Chiefs-Ravens racked up 55.4 million. This year, the NFC Championship did 44.2 million. It’s a drop of 13.2 million.

This isn’t about big markets vs small markets. The Redskins and Eagles are major, historic franchises, with strong support from their fans. But the Redskins aren’t an elite team yet and the game was a blowout . I don’t know what the cost of 13.2 million lost viewers is, but I know that it’s more than enough for the NFL to do whatever it feels it has to do in order to prevent it from happening. It’s not an accident that we don’t see the Super Bowl blowouts anymore, and I doubt we’re going to see many going forward in the conference championship games either.

The problem is that most people aren’t as invested in the season’s champion as they are in their team. That’s why the blowouts are more costly in the postseason than in the regular season, and even more so the deeper into the playoffs we go.

And the observable reality is that far more people turned off a game because Saquon Barkley was running over the Redskins than because the refs ended a dangerous Buffalo drive in the 4th quarter with a questionable spot that favored Pat Mahomes and the Chiefs again.

DISCUSS ON SG

Yes, I continue to call them the Redskins. My grandfather was a Redskins fan, and we all know it’s only a matter of time before President Trump issues an executive order instructing the NFL to restore the traditional name and logo to the franchise.


An Intrinsically Uncompetitive Society

The cost of having your society run by nepotistic foreign socio-cultural parasites is the inevitable loss of competitiveness.

It is not surprising really. I am an innovative psychology. You can see how I synthesize stuff here, bringing together Google Streetview and surveillance camera footage, and reveal the surveillance in America as few could. Politics and biology, psychology, I come up with interesting stuff. And when I was just a young lad, I was identified by US Domestic intelligence’s grade school monitoring units as innovative, and their response was to supply me with massive amounts of pornography to try and make me a degenerate. When that was ineffective, they decided to flood in the kids of agents, acting as kid spies to try and beat me down. When that failed, they rolled out honeypots. And when I proved resistant to it all, I believe they rolled out an early version of the Havana Weapon to degrade my health physically.

I do not think I am unique in that regard. I even think there was another kid, maybe brighter than me, and certainly more disciplined and dedicated to academics, who they also beamed into chronic illness to try and clip his wings as well. I would assume that has been going on across the nation, with every young kid who showed an innovative potential, for the last thirty to forty years, as domestic intelligence has tried to make sure nobody could rise too high in society, and maybe oppose it. My guess is, given the granularity of the surveillance, if you ever have a child with real potential, the single biggest threat they will ever face in life will be US domestic intelligence, because the American Stasi will find them, it will view them as a threat, and it will try to destroy them using all the most advanced tools of the CIA. It is just how it works in America now.

As a result, at present, the only chance America has to compete lies with the rubes and imbeciles of the insecure surveillance, and there just are not enough innovators there to keep up with nations like China.

After six decades of fake science, fake literature, fake art, fake genuises, fake 115-average IQs, the financialization of the economy, and the moral and intellectual degradation of the workforce, it is absolutely no surprise that the USA is losing on every side to its global rivals in China and Russia. The fetishization of frauds from Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, combined with the suppression and sidelining of the genuine American creative class, has been sufficient to render the USA a global also-ran.

Someone once asked: “Where is America’s Wang Hunin?” Wang, arguably the most observant individual of the 20th Century, rose from a complete nobody who wasn’t even a member of the Chinese Communist Party to the CCP’s chief ideologist solely on the basis of the merit of his prescient observations. Someone else answered: “Living in Europe making comic books.” And while I’m not the equal of Wang Hunin, who saw things 20 years before I did despite being only 13 years older than me, the difference between the way he was embraced and elevated by the Chinese political elite versus the way I was explicitly banished from even the editorial pages at the age of 23 by the US political elite is telling.

The irony is that I’ve been treated with far more respect by the Chinese and Russian state medias than by the ostensibly private medias in the USA and Europe. Pravda used to occasionally run the very syndicated Universal Press column that the newspapers in the USA refused to touch, back when I was warning everyone about the coming financial crisis in 2002. Note that I’m not at all bitter. I caught enough of a glimpse into the US political elite at a young age that I wanted nothing to do with it and I’m quite content with having been sidelined. I like what I’m doing and I harbor zero desire to get involved with The Great Game. But that doesn’t change the effect the sidelining of me and others more talented than me have inevitably had for the last six decades.

So now we have corrupt second-generation mediocrities like Donald Kagan and complete frauds like Elon Musk establishing US geopolitical strategies instead of anyone setting them in the national interests of the American people. As long as we do, China’s triumph is absolutely 100-percent certain no matter what economic or demographic vagaries it might be facing. It’s like seeing one NFL team building a historic staff with Ron Wolf at GM, Bill Belichick as head coach and Andy Reid as the offensive coordinator and the other being run by the historically awful combination of GM Matt Millen, head coach Marty Mornhinweg, and the immortal Brad Childress not calling plays as the offensive coordinator.

The truth always and inevitably wins out over time because the longer the parasitical pretenders have influence in a society, the further from objective reality their policies will reliably guide it. It’s not an accident that everything across the West from AI to zoology has become fake and gay, because convergence toward entropy is the objective. The latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended will fall again, because it celebrates falsehood and worships evil.

DISCUSS ON SG


NFL Scripting Confirmed

The NFC Championship game didn’t require any interventions; the non-call on Saquon Barkley’s hold made absolutely no difference to the outcome of a game the Eagles dominated from the start and won 55-23. Indeed, given the way the NFL hates blowouts, it’s likely that the refs didn’t put a thumb on the scale due to the way that everyone is now watching very closely for them doing so.

The AFC Championship game was pretty good despite the Bills losing a key cornerback early in the first quarter to his second concussion in a matter of weeks; he almost certainly should not have been playing even though he cleared the concussion protocol. That made the game closer than it should have been. But once again, the Chiefs were given a dubious call at a very critical moment.

  • As CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore said, it looked like quarterback Josh Allen got the ball to the line to gain before he was pulled backward on fourth and short early in the fourth quarter, with the Bills leading 22-21.
  • CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore thought Josh Allen got enough yardage for a first down on a fourth-down quarterback sneak early in the fourth quarter and Bills head coach Sean McDermott felt the same way. Unfortunately for McDermott, Allen and the Bills, the officiating crew saw things differently.
  • The refs running in with two different spots — and the Chiefs getting the benefit of the spot and the stop on 4th down — is going to be the number one discussion from this game.

Even big names in the mainstream sports media are paying attention to the observable fact of the NFL favoring certain teams and disfavoring others. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, has even gone so far as to claim he won’t watch the NFL anymore.

I’m quitting watching football. There is no other way to teach @nflcommish a lesson. This is blatant cheating. #nflrigged

Given the growing professionalization and competitiveness of college football, and a situation where top NCAA players can actually make more money staying in college than declaring for the NFL draft, it’s a tremendous mistake for the NFL to continue scripting outcomes and using the referees to control the winning margins. What was necessary to force through the AFL-NFL merger and eliminate the Super Bowl routs of the 1980s is not only not necessary anymore, but is increasingly detrimental to the health and popularity of the league.

It’s time to protect the Shield, Mr. Goodell. Stop the scripting, stop the rigging, take the thumb off the scale, and let the players play the game. Make every call reviewable and put a chip in the ball to ensure the accuracy of first downs and touchdowns; it’s now absolutely and entirely obvious to everyone that the reluctance to do both is based upon a reluctance to give up the ability to influence the outcomes.

DISCUSS ON SG


The NFL’s Scripting Crisis

The Chiefs and the NFL are desperately trying to deny the obvious. And absolutely no one who watches the league or has anything to do with it is even remotely convinced.

OUTKICK: Many fans not rooting for the Chiefs believe that to some extent that the Chiefs get calls they don’t deserve. That’s a problem for the NFL’s all-important integrity of the game aspirations. But, you see, the problem is there is statistical data that suggests that is exactly what’s happening. During Kansas City’s current eight-game playoff win streak, opponents have been called for six roughing the passer penalties. The Chiefs have been called for none. This according to the ESPN statistics department. The Chiefs furthermore have been called for one unnecessary roughness penalty, while their opponents have been flagged 4 times.

PROFOOTBALLTALK: The NFL imposed a $25,000 fine on Texans defensive end Will Anderson Jr. for publicly criticizing officials. Said Anderson after the loss to the Chiefs, “We knew it was going to be us against the refs going into this game.” The initial Mixon fine was based on this comment from former Bengals receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh said, “Why play the game if every 50/50 call goes with Chiefs. These officials are trash and bias.” The second Mixon fine was based on this, which he did say: “Everybody knows how it is playing up here. You can never leave it in the refs’ hands. The whole world see, man.”

FOX SPORTS: NFL legend Champ Bailey was among those glued to the television when he saw the controversial penalties called on the Houston Texans during their playoff loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. “I don’t feel like the games are fixed because I was in it, but when I’m sitting here every year – I’m out of the league – the more and more I start believing what the fans are saying about the games being ‘fixed,’ because you see things like this happen over and over, so they just got to figure out a way to get the calls right and live with it.”

Just let them play and stop trying to dictate the outcome of events. Pat Mahomes is good enough on his own, if he needs the refs to get him over the top, he doesn’t deserve to win anyhow.

DISCUSS ON SG



The Russians Knew

Vladimir Putin admits that the Russians knew the 2020 election was stolen and none of the six Joe Bidens were ever elected President of the United States:

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump, and that had the outcome been declared fairly, the Ukraine conflict might have been avoided.

“I cannot disagree with him that if he had been president, if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, perhaps the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022 wouldn’t have happened,” Putin has said in an interview published by Russia 1 TV journalist Pavel Zarubin on Telegram on Friday…

Trump has never admitted that he lost the 2020 election, despite courts failing to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. He has consistently alleged the 2020 election was blighted by irregularities, and that he lost despite winning 10 million more votes than Biden.

I’ve never admitted it either, because he didn’t. My early estimates were as accurate in 2020 as they were in 2016 and 2024, the only thing they couldn’t account for was millions, perhaps even tens of millions, of fake votes. I have never, ever believed, not for one second, that Joe Biden got more votes in Minnesota than Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama. The election fraud was clear, blatant, obvious, and statistically undeniable, and the fact that the media not only wasn’t all over it, but actively denied it is one reason that I no longer read any US “newspapers” or watch any US “news” channels.

It’s counterintuitive, but you will actually develop a better sense for what is going on in the world, and in the USA, if you completely ignore what passes for the mainstream news and the conservative news alike. What they report is the Narrative, not the news.

I’m not surprised that the Russians knew exactly what was going on. I assume the Chinese and the Israelis did too. The certain knowledge that the “rules-based world order” of “the Western democracies” was resting on a completely false foundation that was neither rules-based nor democratic was probably what proved the decisive factor in deciding to begin openly opposing it because it meant Clown World had lost the rhetorical high ground.

DISCUSS ON SG


JFK Declassified

President Trump made good on his 2016 promise to declassify the Federal files concerning the JFK and RFK assassinations:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order at the White House on Thursday to declassify government records related to the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Trump’s order could put an end to some long-standing questions surrounding the assassinations, all of which occurred more than a half-century ago. The official conclusions that all three assassinations were carried out by lone gunmen have been challenged by a raft of conspiracy theories. The fact that some records about the investigations of the murders have remained classified for so long played a role in fueling those theories.

This should be interesting. I hope this will also reveal who was responsible for pushing the nonsensical “lone gunman” theories too.

DISCUSS ON SG


Which Trump Will Be Sworn In Today?

We know there are at least two Trumps, possibly three. What’s interesting is that over the last year, the Hellmouth has been talking openly about body doubles, and forcing the reference in a nonsensical manner that isn’t funny and doesn’t even make sense in the advertising context, such as in this Booking.com commercial starring Tina Fey. As soon as I saw one, it made me think about which method they were revealing, which I assumed referred to the Six Bidens.

And yet, here is Short Trump on stage with Elon Musk. Musk claims to be 6’2″ but since he lies about pretty much everything, he’s almost certainly shorter than that. While he does appear to be about six inches taller than Amber Heard, all Hollywood heights are exaggerated by two inches, so he’s probably 6’0″.

Which makes it hard to explain how Trump magically grew 4 inches for the President Carter funeral, where he can be seen standing next to the 5’11” Melania who is clearly wearing 4-inch heels. The hair also looks the wrong color.

In the event that the picture with Musk was insufficient to convince you of the existence of Short Trump, the photo below with Zelensky, who is 5’5″ or 5’6″ at most, should suffice. Note that the average length of the human head is between 8-9 inches, so given that Zelensky hits the halfway mark, Short Trump is between 5’9″ and 5’11” in shoes. And that is clearly not the same man as the one attending the Carter funeral.

One wonders if the reason the presidential inauguration has been moved inside is to make the ceremony easier to stage for the cameras and obscure these details, in much the same way the Obama inauguration was repeated the following day. In any event, there are clearly a number of anomalies of much the same kind that surrounded the Biden inauguration. And there is reason for cautious optimism.

Last night I had the privilege of being included in a Zoom call with Steve Bannon, former investment banker and media executive, host of the “War Room” show and chief political strategist during the first seven months of Donald Trump’s first term in office. Much of what Bannon presented wasn’t surprising, but what seemed significant was that he confirmed that Trump and his team will go on the offensive from day one in office. “The days of thunder begin on Monday,” he said, and the world will not be the same again. Bannon wasn’t talking about Trump going on the offensive against the Chinese, Iranians or the Russians. Trump and his team are preparing to take on the “they.”

“They,” in Bannon’s words, are the people who control the world’s most powerful empire and, elections or no elections, democracy or no democracy, they will not voluntarily relinquish their privileges and the control over their empire: there will be a fight. Nessun dorma.

DISCUSS ON SG


Why the NFL Fixes Games

I find it genuinely amusing that the NFL expects us to believe that the Aaron Glenn-coached defense that supposedly played “lights out” and completely dominated the 14-2 Vikings, who supposedly didn’t show up at all for their biggest game of the year, just happened to be blown off their home field by giving up 45 points to a rookie quarterback playing in his second playoff game.

  • 31 December: The Detroit Lions defensed was gashed throughout their Week 17 tilt with San Francisco. Though they were able to generate a pair of takeaways and ultimately win the game, the porous effort at times raises concerns about how the Lions’ defense will hold up in the postseason.
  • 11 January: Lions’ defense rewrites narrative in domination of Vikings. What more can you say about these Lions, who do not care what you say in the first place. But if you want their honest opinion, “it’s bulls**t,” said Alex Anzalone, the idea that the defense isn’t good enough for the team to win the Super Bowl. That was on Thursday. Three days later, Anzalone returned from a broken forearm and the Lions broke the Vikings, holding them to their fewest points of the season in the biggest game of the year.
  • 18 January: The truth is that what happened to the Lions against Washington was probably going to happen eventually. Their defense was cooked. Starters Aidan Hutchinson, Alim McNeill, Carlton Davis and Derrick Barnes were already out with injuries, and against Washington, cornerback Amik Robertson and safety Ifeatu Melifonwu left with injuries. On one of the last meaningful plays of the game, Commanders tight end Zach Ertz caught a pass for a first down and cornerback Morice Norris tackled him. Norris did not have a single tackle all year. He barely played.

The Vikings and the Redskins (aka Commanders) have similarly high-powered offenses; the reason the Vikings finished with two more wins than Washington is because the Vikings had the #5 defense in the league while the Redskins were #18. But we’re supposed to believe that the heavily-injured Lions defense magically pulled it together for one week, in between poor showings against San Francisco and Washington.

Now compare the reactions of the two NFC North coaches after their big playoff upsets. Or, in the case of the Vikings-Rams game, “upset”. One coach was calm and unfazed in the face of league-dictated defeat, the other was near-distraught after experiencing the real thing.

  • “I’ve got 100 percent confidence in our players, our coaches. We’ve got the right kind of things going on in this organization, but we’ve gotta find a way to play better as a team and complement each other and do the things we need to do to win games against the class of the NFL.”
  • “The whole point of doing what you is to get to the show, man. It’s why you play this game. And we fell. We fell short. It just hurts to lose. I don’t care if you’re the seventh seed, five seed, one seed, cause I’ve lost as all of them. And it stings and it hurts. It hurts.” Campbell was so emotional that his voice cracked as he spoke of his players.

Translation: KOC knew the Vikings weren’t going to be permitted to win either game before kickoff. Campbell knew the divisional playoff was a real game, even if it was one in which the refs were favoring them, and the Lions still couldn’t get it done.

Dante Fowler Jr. nearly had a clutch tackle for loss against running back David Montgomery on third-and-2, but the officials nullified it due to a phantom face mask call.

Note to the NFL refs: we can see that a shoulder pad is not a face mask. This is why it it is so stupid for the NFL to fix the occasional game to try to setup its ideal matchups. Because they will eventually have to go full WWE to reliably get the results they prefer, or stop trying to play puppet master and simply let the games be played. Needless to say, the latter would be preferable, as the declining TV ratings for the playoff games tend to demonstrate.

The game that was fixed last night was the Chiefs-Texans game and everyone knows it. The thumb on the scale is simply getting too heavy to avoid noticing.

  • Sports Illustrated: Patrick Mahomes followed up an absolute joke of a drawn personal foul penalty in Saturday’s 23–14 divisional round win over the Houston Texans—he wandered around the Kansas City Chiefs’ backfield like a lost old man on the beach wielding a metal detector before collapsing to the ground late, causing two defenders who were unable to redirect themselves to fall over him at the last second—with a second attempt to bait Texans defenders into a flag-worthy hit eight plays later… This isn’t just conspiratorial trash can banging by the way. The Associated Press noted that, since the 2022 postseason began, the Chiefs have gotten five roughing the passer calls in critical loser-goes-home games. Their opponents have not gotten one. This is enabling at its finest... After the game was over, Texans coach DeMeco Ryans said his team knew coming into the game that it was them against everybody. 
  • Outkick the Coverage: The Kansas City Chiefs are easy to like for a lot of different reasons, but when NFL officiating gets involved it ruins things for a lot of people. It adds legitimacy to the conspiracy theory that the Chiefs have allies wearing stripes in every game.
  • Will Anderson, Texans: “We knew it was going to be us versus the refs going into this game.”

You know what they say about conspiracy theories: they’re just spoiler alerts from people who pay closer attention than most. The NFL appears to take four approaches to its games:

  1. Let them play. This is how most games appear to go.
  2. Keep it close. When one team gets a big lead, the winning team is informed that the game is de facto over, then both teams put on a display as the losing team comes back, makes it close, but falls short in the end. This is excusable interference due to the unwillingness of about half the viewership to watch games that are not close. It’s a business, after all. Both Vikings-Packers games were good examples of this; after going up 28-0 at halftime, the Vikings did nothing for the last two quarters until their final possession, when they closed out a 31-29 win.
  3. Thumb on the scale. This is the sort of game that we saw with the 49ers and Patriots for years, and now with the Chiefs. One team gets all the calls at all the crucial moments, and while the other team is permitted to try to overcome them, it doesn’t happen very often. Last night’s game was an obvious example of this. The Lions also benefited from the referee’s calls, but it wasn’t enough.
  4. The straight fix. Both the Vikings-Lions and the Vikings-Rams games were clear-cut examples of this; I suspect the complete inability of the Vikings to keep either game close was a passive protest by KOC. The Rams appear to have replaced the Lions as the league’s preference this year due to the LA fires. If the 2009 narrative is any guide, we’ll see a Rams victory in the Super Bowl, presumably over the Chiefs or Ravens.

The NFL is an entertainment product run by a very smart business enterprise. Which is why I have every confidence that the league’s strategists will realize that the optimal level of influence is minimal, and its interference with the organic results should be focused on maximizing viewers on a game-by-game basis, not a seasonal narrative one.

UPDATE: Mike Florio is concerned that the 45-point debacle might cost Aaron Glenn a shot at being hired as a head coach.

Yes, the Lions gave up 481 yards. Yes, Washington’s average gain was 6.6 yards per play. But the Lions’ defense was besieged with injuries, all season long. It was one after another after another, after another. And Glenn did a masterful job in Week 18, holding the Vikings to nine measly points.

Yeah, so, about that “masterful job”…

DISCUSS ON SG