A Desperation Move

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.

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Wruh-Wroh, Wrexham

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.


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.

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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.

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Ben Johnson to Bears

That was what I did not want to see. The NFC North may have underperformed in the playoffs this year, but it arguably now has four of the best young head coaches in the league: KOC, LaFleur, Campbell, and now Johnson. Three of the four are very smart, and Campbell has proven the effectiveness of his aggressive leader of men approach.

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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”…

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Chaos in College Football

The NCAA transfer portal was just rendered irrelevant, all but eliminating the last vestige of that corrupt organization’s attempt to exert control over college football:

Thanks to decades of blatant antitrust violations that limited players to an education that didn’t begin to match the value they brought to their school, the model has collapsed in recent years — thanks to a stream of slam-dunk lawsuits attacking the habit of independent businesses coming together under the umbrella of the NCAA to rig, and to cap, labor expenses.

The latest chunk of chaos comes from the apparent collapse of the transfer portal. After Wisconsin refused to allow cornerback Xavier Lucas to enter the portal, he left the school and transferred to Miami. The NCAA, which apparently has learned the lessons of multiple failed antitrust cases, has thrown the door open for transfers beyond the parameters of the portal.

“NCAA rules do not prevent a student-athlete from unenrolling from an institution, enrolling at a new institution and competing immediately,” the NCAA said in a statement to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo.com.

That’s another way of saying the transfer portal doesn’t mean a thing. That players have the same freedom that students have to switch schools, whenever they want. Taken to its extreme, could an Ohio State player transfer to Notre Dame before Monday night’s championship game, and vice-versa? If “immediately” means immediately, maybe so.

Whether you think the recent changes in college football are positive or not – and despite the loss of some conferences and traditional rivalries to the expanded conferences and the playoff system, it’s very hard to argue that the game isn’t in better shape than it was before – the transformation of the once-regimented NCAA system into full professional free agency for the players is a complete unknown.

While the combination of the NIL payments and transfer portal have expanded the number of competitive teams, I’m not confident that this apparent move to full free agency will be good for the sport. It’s a lesson in the danger of administrative overreach; the NCAA should have been pursuing the players’ interests rather than those of the institutions. If it had, it might not have lost both its control over them as well as any influence with them.

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A Different Breed

It’s fascinating to see how the young Christian athletes of today are increasingly bold in public about their faith. We’ve already seen it with Notre Dame, Boise State and with Georgia. Ohio State released a pretty solid hype video ahead of their Cotton Bowl game against Texas in which one of their leaders can be seen taking the eye black that we’ve been seeing a lot more of lately to a new level.

Romans 8:28: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

That being said, where was THE Ohio State University? Perhaps it’s only the alumni in the NFL who say that.

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