“It’s really cool that Tom Brady got to be there for the Eagles’ two Super Bowl wins! He might be a good luck charm.”
Nick Foles
And this ad starring the two of them is hysterical. At least Tom can laugh at himself.
#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
“It’s really cool that Tom Brady got to be there for the Eagles’ two Super Bowl wins! He might be a good luck charm.”
Nick Foles
And this ad starring the two of them is hysterical. At least Tom can laugh at himself.
Three minutes into the first quarter and a nonexistent “offensive pass interference” call negates an Eagles 4th-and-2 conversion with a long pass. Absolutely terrible. Even the announcers are expressing disbelief.
The NFL is absolutely, 100-percent, using the refs to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Chiefs.
The Eagles are going to have to blow the Chiefs out or they will lose.
UPDATE: And now a phantom false start to take away another Eagles first down.
UPDATE: 24-0 Eagles at halftime.
Now we’ll discover if there is a Superhero Mahomes script in play or not. Personally, I doubt it. He’s not playing poorly, the defensive line is simply running over his protection. The other thing to look for is if the Eagles have been ordered to let things get closer; watch for overtly retarded play-calling, inexplicable fumbles, and, of course, more flags preventing first downs and giving the Chiefs first downs on third-and-long.
UPDATE: 37-6. It’s over. Hopefully this will persuade the NFL of the wisdom of leaving the players to determine the results. Either the Bills or the Ravens would have made for a much better, more competitive game.
Mentally disordered foreigners imagining that they are women will not be permitted to participate in the 2028 Olympic Games.
Not only did President Donald Trump sign an executive order effectively banning males from competing in women’s sports at publicly-funded institutions (like schools), but Trump also announced he plans to deny foreign transgender athletes entry into the country for the 2028 Summer Olympics.
Trump says he instructed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “make [it] clear to the International Olympics Committee that America categorically rejects transgender lunacy. We want them to change everything having to do with the Olympics and having to do with this absolutely ridiculous subject… In Los Angeles in 2028, my administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes.”
Men who are US citizens won’t be permitted to compete with the women either. That’s the best way to deal with this wicked madness: call it out for what it is, then ban it.
The NFL referees practically confirm that certain games are being rigged on the orders of the league office in their very suspicious non-denial denial of their own corruption.
On Monday, Commissioner Roger Goodell pushed back on the suggestion that game officials favor the Chiefs. On Tuesday, the union representing game officials issued a statement expressing appreciation for the Commissioner’s remarks.
“Commissioner Goodell’s comments that it is ‘ridiculous’ to presume that NFL Officials are not doing everything possible to make the right call on every play is spot on,” NFL Referees Association executive director Scott Green said. “Officiating crews do not work the same team more than twice each regular season. It is insulting and preposterous to hear conspiracy theories that somehow 17 officiating crews consisting of 138 officials are colluding to assist one team.”
That’s a bit strong. And it teeters on the possibility of protesting too much.
It doesn’t teeter on the possibility of protesting too much, it’s an obvious non-denial denial. When someone suspected of robbing a specific liquor store at a specific time pompously declares that it is insulting and preposterous to hear conspiracy theories that somehow 17 different criminal organizations are colluding to rob 138 different liquor stores and gas stations, instead of directly addressing the actual accusation, that’s such an obvious evasion that it serves as a practical confession.
We all know that the NFL puts the thumb on the scale when one team is blowing out another team at halftime. We can all see when a coach and quarterback have been instructed to lose a game. And it’s absolutely and entirely obvious when a head referee has been told which team should get the important calls. The NFL and the NFL Referees Association is insulting our intelligence when they try to pretend that they are a completely honest and organic sporting association when we all know that they are a for-profit entertainment organization that has the legal right to put on a show in any way it deems most entertaining.
The more they protest in such stupid and obvious ways, the more they confirm our suspicions. And if the Vikings bring back Sam Darnold, that will serve as strong support for the hypothesis that the last two games of the 2024 season were intentionally thrown by the Vikings on the orders of the NFL.
After the dollars and eyes on last year’s event, this organization was always intending to make sure the fix was in. They aren’t going to give up all that new money and new viewers from last time. Whether or not it’s obvious that it’s rigged no longer matters.
NFL/Kansas City Chiefs/Super Bowl
The NFL may not realize it yet, but it has a budding crisis on its hands concerning its legitimacy. The price of capturing new viewers is capturing the attention of people who aren’t fans and aren’t inclined to accept the official explanations. And the way the NBA is forcing teams to move players around against their own interests definitely isn’t helping, so blanket denials that simply assume the argument won’t cut it.
CDAN had another NFL-related one.
Plantation Khaleesi is the one leaking stories that she is going to be in the suite next week with the A+ list singer. That isn’t going to happen.
The answer, of course, is Blake Lively and Taylor Swift. I’m paying attention to the whole Reynolds v Baldoni thing since it may have some eventual fallout in the English football world.
Talk about a thumb on the scale. The NBA doesn’t just script game results, it literally moves its players around to its favored franchises. The only reason Luka Dončić is being traded to Los Angeles is because the league’s television ratings are free-falling and league officials know they need a white star in their signature franchise:
Utter disbelief fell across waves of NBA followers as a league-altering trade hit their screens in the hush of the night. Luka Dončić is headed to the Los Angeles Lakers, while Anthony Davis is on his way to the Dallas Mavericks in an unexpected blockbuster days before the NBA’s Feb. 6 trade deadline. ESPN’s Shams Charania first reported the trade which shook the whole league.
In full, the Mavericks sent Dončić, Maxi Kleber and Markieff Morris to the Lakers for Davis, Max Christie and a 2029 first-round pick. The Utah Jazz were also in the deal and received Jalen Hood-Schifino, a 2025 Clippers second-round pick (via the Lakers) and a 2025 Mavericks second-round pick.
The move was so unbelievable, Charania had to ensure the many NBA fans who get his posts straight to their phones that the deal was, in fact, real.
The LA ownership is not that much smarter than every other franchise, it just happens to be a more important team. It’s not an accident that so many of the league’s biggest stars somehow find a way to end up there. The only real surprise here is that it was Dončić who was sent to LA to rescue the league, although perhaps they’re still planning to move Nikola Jokic to Boston and Victor Wembanyama to New York to create a three-way rivalry that might spark sufficient fan interest to get them watching the NBA again.
Those Hollywood millions may be flowing out of Wales even more quickly than they flowed in after Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the team. Lady C, who usually knows what’s going on behind the scenes, explains why Reynolds and Lively appear to be heading for defeat in court, as well as, she suspects, a divorce.
Here’s the story. Reynolds has form in hijacking movies from their originators and not only taking credit for them, but taking the profitability as well. When he and Lively realised that “It Ends With Us” was going to become a huge hit – and Baldoni, who was not only the male lead but also the brains behind the film, the producer, director, script writer and held the option to a sequel, had control of the project – they set about wresting control of the movie frmom him.
However, to achieve their objective of supplanting Baldoni, they had to obtain the rushes and edit the movie themselves. And that’s where things derailed… Ryan Reynolds became increasingly unsettled (to be polite) when he witnessed the unbridled attraction his wife was displaying towards Baldoni… So what does Lively do? Ever the pastmistress of deflection, she denies behing attracted to Baldoni, spins her overt acts of attraction into victimhod, and blames her co-star for taking advantage of her. Remember, at this point, neither Lively nor Reynolds appreciated that Baldoni had footage with sound which could disprove her accusations.
Now, it all made sense to me except one thing. How could publicly destroying the man guarantee them the control over the sequel that they were allegedly pursuing? Did they think he would grant it to them in a settlement, when the movie did $350 million globally? That seemed… improbable.
Well, it’s been reported that there was a clause in his original purchase of the IP that would strip him of the right to use them for the sequel if he was accused of sexual harassment. Which, to me, tends to tie the whole thing together.
It’s entirely possible that this scenario isn’t exactly correct, and even if it is, it’s at least theoretically possible that everyone involved takes a deep breath, steps back, and realizes that letting bygones by bygones and making nice in public would be a win-win-win for everyone. But where sex, pride, and lawyers are involved, people are seldom rational about their interests.
Anyhow, I hope for the sake of the town and team of Wrexham that the vagaries of celebrity ownership don’t wreck what has been a very good thing for everyone, including our community and our FC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.