Note: This thread is not specifically about the Kansas City Chiefs. However, they are the team that seems to be getting the most accusations of being favored by the refs these days.
In many sports leagues, there are constant accusations that referees show preferential treatment to the marquee teams and players - Manchester United, Lebron James, Lakers, Chiefs, Mahomes and Kelce, Tom Brady and the Patriots, Pittsburgh Steelers, Michael Jordan, etc.
Whether these accusations have merit or not is another topic; I’m sure someone could dig up deep statistical analysis to prove or debunk it. What I wanted to discuss, though, is whether this approach is beneficial to a league or not.
The drawbacks - as accused - are that by favoring the high-profile players and teams, you piss off fans of the other fanbases, decrease interest by other fanbases, and you also miss out on an opportunity to grow the league fanbase by letting other teams have a better chance of sharing the pie - for instance, if the Kings had had fair officiating in 2002 and beaten the Lakers, then the NBA footprint in Sacramento may have grown more because of increased fan interest (had the Kings later on won the NBA Finals, and they would have been favored to.) It also decreases parity across the league, and parity is generally regarded as a good thing (that’s why salary caps exist, and why the NFL drafts worst first.)
The discussion is tiresome. The current theory revolves around Taylor Swift and woke liberals. All over my feed there screenshots of the Chiefs game of supposed bad calls only one of which was questionable. No talk at all about the more than questionable calls that went to the Eagles in the other game. It’s 95% confirmation bias. The NFL would be greatly hurt by genuine cheating. The way the TV contracts are structured the NFL makes billions whether the Chiefs are in the SB or it’s a high school team. The network might care but the NFL doesn’t. And next year TV will still pay the same amount. If the NFL wanted to push a team into the Superbowl it would be the Cowboys.
I think in baseball a very small minority of players get the benefit of the doubt from umpires. That has more to do with skill than the desire to see a team win. Tony Gwynn only struck out an average of 21 times a season over a 20 year period. He only struck out looking 75 times in his career. If he took a close pitch the umpire would more likely call a ball because he was known to be right almost all of the time. Certainly not because they wanted the Padres to win.
Well said, @Loach. When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, I was convinced that the Celtics of Russell and Havlicek got the benefit of every close call. Later on, I realized that they were a damn good team that won a lot of close games. Same with the Yankees of the late 70s, and the Cowboys of the mid-90s, and the Jordan-led Bulls.
Does MLB want the Yankees and Dodgers in every World Series? Of course, because that means more eyes on the broadcasts. Will MLB instruct the umpires to favor those two teams in the playoffs? Of course not.
You missed the most important one - that if the league rigged it for whatever reason, it would inevitably come out, and the league would die, a la horse racing and boxing.
If it came out that the FBI was currently monitoring NFL referees looking for evidence of tampering, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least - but I find it impossible to believe such a thing could happen without a leak.
Even more impossible to believe is that anyone on the inside with evidence wouldn’t have leaked it and gotten a bazillion dollar book deal. Or that the dozen or so sportsbooks in the country and their army of Pinkertons wouldn’t have sussed out an ongoing conspiracy to rig games.
Example: the time a rookie pitcher complained to umpire Bill Klem about a pitch to Rogers Hornsby that was called a ball. Klem replied “Son, when you pitch a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know.”
I wouldn’t agree with that - disgraced referee Tim Donaghy did a public tell-all announcement of what refereeing was like in the NBA in the 2000s and yet the NBA is still thriving today. Sports leagues can very much survive such things.
Tim Donaghy isn’t exactly the most trustworthy guy.
Sports leagues benefit most from having fair competitions that involve all sorts of teams. Yes, they’d like big market teams to be relevant every year, but having small market teams in the mix keeps those fan bases engaged. The occasional dynasty is good for business, as long as it goes away as some point.
Patrick Mahomes is a major prima donna, but I don’t think he benefits any more than any of the other quarterbacks (a prima donna position anyway) from protection by the refs (e.g. defensemen getting flagged for roughing the passer). Altho it may “seem” that way when he does get roughed-up a little and he jumps-up whining to the refs rather than just taking it like a man. Add to that his “franchise player” status and the mind wanders into thinking his belly-aching is actually having an effect on the refs.
There is a ton of statistical analysis of referee biases in association football (soccer), and it generally says
There is a home team advantage, but it doesn’t seem to be much associated with crowd noise
Home teams see reduced extra time at the end of a match when they have a narrow lead
And then this one, which looks to see if more successful teams get more favorable penalty calls, concluding that they do.
Home team biases should wash out, but rewarding successful teams, not so much.
Whether any of this translates to the NFL, I don’t know, but based on my own biases and decades of following the Patriots, I do believe more successful teams get better calls regardless of the sport.
Does that benefit the league, if true? Maybe. I’ve certainly done my share of hate watching, hoping some up-and-comer supplants the most successful team.
I realize I didn’t answer the question in the OP. I don’t think favoring teams will do much for the league, but protecting McDavid or Messi from injuries by giving them favorable calls may benefit the league, since the league wants their super stars playing.
In the NFL in particular, which I have the most experience with as a fan, I don’t think any teams or players get special help from the refs in particular. Sometimes I might say it seems like it when I gripe, but I don’t think it’s done on purpose.
I do think that they get things wrong, sometimes embarrassingly wrong, sometimes to an excessive degree in a game. And sometimes they admit that they do! They are human and screw up.
But no, I don’t think that officials collaborate and decide to go easy on a particular player or penalize a team more.
I have seen situations where MLB umpires get into a personal feud with a manager and it seems like they are making calls that favor one team over another in response. Such as calling a slightly outside pitch a ball for one team but a strike for the other on a consistent basis. That’s certainly not the sort of thing being suggested in the OP here, but I don’t think they are always objective. It’s still not to “fix” a game by making the more popular team win, though.
I think that’s the case across sports and even at a team level. Better teams are either better at staying just this side of penalties or the referees (probably unconsciously) give them some slack that they don’t give lesser teams.
I would think though, that all this could be identified via statistical analysis though.
If leagues want to give the bigger, more popular teams a head up, it would be much easier and lower risk to just get rid of salary caps and other devices to maintain parity, thus allowing those teams to sign all the best players. Why bother trying to run some conspiracy of officials, which will likely get discovered and blow up in your face?
WRT the team that this thread definitely isn’t about, I’m pretty sure if the NFL was going to cheat to favor the more popular teams, they wouldn’t have picked the Kansas City Chiefs to be the beneficiaries.
Why not? One of their players is dating Taylor Swift, and she is shown cheering every time the team scores, and studies have shown more female people are now watching the Chiefs than before, which is driving up consumption of Chiefs merchandise sales and female engagement of the NFL in general. If it’s good for the NFL $$ then yeah, I can see the the conspiracy to help the Chiefs succeed.
The one I recall most clearly as it was happening was the Atlanta Braves in the late '90s. Among Houston Astros fans like myself, the belief was that Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine were getting a larger strike zone than other pitchers, and that had it not been for that, the Biggio / Bagwell era Astros would have managed to win a World Series.
Looking back it’s clear that those Braves teams were better than the Astros, but none the less I’m still not convinced that Maddux and Glavine weren’t given a larger strike zone than other pitchers.
Agree WRT the fanbase of the Chiefs, but I would not put it past the NFL to cash-in as hard as possible on something even as ephemeral as celebrity love.
OK, I must admit that if you were to tell me that a pro league had fixed a playoff series exactly one time during my lifetime, my first thought would be “2002 Kings!”
The risk/reward is completely lopsided on this. Taylor Swift certainly increases revenue - but how much? And how tenuous is that Swifty fandom that they won’t watch anymore if the Chiefs don’t win it all?
If the league wanted to maximize revenue, they wouldn’t have allowed the Chiefs to get the #1 seed so they could air one extra playoff game. They wouldn’t focus so much of their energy on Mahomes, but rather getting Kelce’s numbers through the roof (or, at the very least, doing both).