Yeah, it would be best for the goalie if it’s a 1-0 type of game. If his own team keeps on scoring and scoring, it gets successively more and more awkward for the keeper, having to concede more and more goals.
I heard a podcast claim that the NFL Super Bowl has been rigged since the 1980s and the proof was a PBS documentary about Sports Betting that supposedly got buried after being produced. Anyone know anything about this?
I wouldn’t think the Super Bowl outright rigged, but there are a few things that do tweak my suspicion meter a bit. Such as the fact that, since 2003, almost all Super Bowls have been close nailbiting contests whereas prior to that many were lopsided blowouts.
And that usually when one team surges out to a big lead, the other almost inevitably comes back to tie the game.
And that Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl…
But you can bet on just about every pro tennis match. There have been a bunch of bans over the past five years, and the highest ranked player I saw in a brief check was in the 70s. Tour pro ranked in the 300s knows he won’t win the tournament, and the payout from the betting syndicates for losing a round earlier than expected is better than the payout for winning at his talent level.
For team sports I think the only viable game that can be reliably thrown is basketball. If a bookie could pay off just one or two of the major players on a team that would likely be enough to affect the point spread. With only 5 players playing at one time playing both offense and defense they could swing the game a few points.
Apparently sumo wrestling is ripe for fixing. Freakonomics had an interesting chapter that used statistics to show that college basketball and sumo wrestling were both being thrown. (Sumo matches were being thrown as a courtesy to the other wrestlers, not gambling reasons.)
48 in 2013 was 43-8. 
Remember that the NFL pushes parity so much now that it’s hard for any game to be a blowout if you put the conference champions against each other.
While the officiating was embarrassing, the Steelers didn’t need the help as it was unlikely that Seattle was going to win since they were playing awful that day. (I say that as a Seahawk fan.)
This year’s was 31-9. Felt like a blow-out to me.
To follow up on this, gambling in modern times doesn’t necessarily involve winning-losing; it can take the form of point shaving.
You know anyone can make a podcast about anything, right?
Sumo is definitely ripe for wrestlers not giving it their all. The impression I get from having watched a lot of matches is that it’s often just a split-second thing about who got off the marks better and caught the opponent off-guard. If you know the opponent gains more than you lose, you’re not going to try your best and you’re probably going to get out-muscled much easier.
It certainly is true since Freakonomics came out that there was a massive scandal involving many wrestlers in the top two divisions who were win trading to maintain their rank, and it wasn’t uncovered until the police had seized the cell phones of wrestlers who were involved in illegal gambling, a completely separate scandal. The cell phones showed text messages of guys agreeing to trade wins and suggesting ways of making it look good. They threw a lot of people out, but not everyone was involved, and I think it’s clear to wrestlers now that if they’re going to not try hard, they shouldn’t create any evidence of it. It certainly still happens, but it’s at least unrecorded now.
I have never heard this from any sort of credible source. Honestly, it sounds like something that a high school friend of mine, who loved gambling on sports, but was nonetheless convinced that all pro sports were rigged, would have said.
FYI, in the past decade, PBS has run a Frontline episode about sports gambling, and another about the NFL and concussions, which was highly critical of the league. Neither of these got “buried,” so I have a difficult time finding the claim from some unnamed podcast to be credible.
That said, “League of Denial” (the concussion documentary) was originally being co-produced by ESPN, which pulled out of the project during production; it has been speculated that ESPN did so under pressure from the NFL (with which ESPN and Disney have a big contract).
wasn’t there a huge scandal concerning the pre nba boston celtics in the 50s and 60s ?
I remember seeing it in a history of basketball program and it being said it had a huge impact in the fact that because of it pro basketball wasn’t taken seriously again until the mid 80s …
Snooker has had a few match fixing scandals, the largest being Stephen Lee getting an 12 year ban while ranked number 7 in the world. (John Higgins, one of the greatest players ever, has also been fined but IIRC he managed to successfully claim he was just humoring the undercover reporters and had no intention of actually throwing games).
Looking at some of the games in question, it’s actually hard to notice any difference in play. I think with snooker (and probably pool) you can just play several long pots with little concentration, and while any given shot might go in, overall your average will come down enough to lose.
However, in Stephen Lee’s case, he was left with an easy pink and black to win a crucial frame, and this must have been a frame be couldn’t afford to win, and so he missed the shot in a clear enough way to raise eyebrows.
I mean if you want to argue with The Dollop than that’s on you.
Also - the timekeeper.
Back “in the day”, it was common to have office pools betting on the two digits of the second that the last goal was scored in a particular NHL game. (possibly players were betting as well). You would pick (or be assigned) a number between 0 and 59. The higher numbers were more desirable, since an empty-net goal would often be scored in the last few seconds.
With analog clocks (and - to an extent - digital clocks), the timekeeper could be bribed to let the clock run an extra second or two after a goal without anyone really noticing.
From the 1960’s: Coolopolis: The great Montreal Canadiens illegal gambling timekeeping scandal of 1969
They’ve made multiple movies about the art of convincingly throwing a game of pool.
One-on-one contests are always open to and suspected of fixing. While the team sports addressed above probably don’t encounter any such rigging at the high level where there is little to incentive for players, and a lack of individual ability to affect the outcome, any contest between two people can easily be thrown without detection. At least no detection from the actions of the participants if they are not idiots. It is still difficult to do, you can’t easily find someone to take a bet that you will lose a contest, they tend to suspect something is up. So a confederate has to be used who will not be traced back to the cheater, or gamblers themselves need to be behind it. And just like the other sports, the kind of event big enough to be worth fixing is also likely to involve athletes who get paid too much to do so.
One minor type of ‘fixing’ does happen in boxing. Fighters on the way up have to build up a record against other boxers, most of whom are less than stellar performers on their way down, or never having been up at all. Sometimes called ‘professional opponents’, these guys must walk a careful line. They are supposed to go out and try to win a fight even when they are the underdog, but if they do win they may never be hired again. Occasionally a fighter has no problem with this and gets a reputation as a spoiler who is brought in to fight increasingly better opponents, but for many of these guys picking up a few extra bucks is all the career they have and they can’t take a chance on beating the favorite. It is an open secret in what is known as the ‘Red Light District of Sports’. Boxing is dirty in a lot of ways, In these modern times it’s not the bookies behind the irregularities, they have to keep an eye out for these hijinks themselves.
I’m a pretty big Celtics fan and don’t recall anything like this. The NBA was started in the 40’s so that part is off. In my recollection Walter Brown, owner of the Boston Garden, helped start the league to use the arena when it was empty. Brown had a reputation of being a quality person.
You may be thinking of the “CCNY point shaving scandal,” which involved a number of college basketball teams in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and included several All-American players. Many of the involved schools wound up de-emphasizing their athletic programs as a result.
Professional Basketball may be mostly clean, but there’s something about those Washington Generals…