“The NFL is Rigged”

Considering that there is a significant movement out there that actually believes that the world is flat, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the idea that was once only something you’d hear in between a classic 80’s homeless person screaming about the CIA and the moonlanding, has now, thanks to the internet (and Youtube, mostly) become something that is clogging the comment section of this website, our live chat and Facebook page. The thing about the internet/Youtube, is that it really is only utilizing a few different kinds of arguments that seem to have taken conspiracy theories from the break room in the post office to not only the larger masses but also the White House itself and in the process has taken conspiracy theories from the break room of the Post Office to the White House itself . So, I felt compelled to respond to the fact that far too many Vikings fans are literally saying that the Vikings purposefully blew the NFC Championship because either the NFL or the City of Minneapolis/State of Minnesota wanted an out of town team for the Super Bowl because they’d make more money that way (or that the NFL has always been rigged and they’re just now realizing it because the NFL got sloppy).

Now, let me be the first to say that I understand the need to rationalize what happened in the game on the Sunday before last. I get it. That game was so surprisingly terrible that it felt like a completely different team was on the field in Philadelphia. Multiple Pro Bowl and All Pro players on the Vikings defense were playing like they were confused or really like they’d never played football before, with Eagles players being left wide open seemingly on every play. The Vikings defense, that was historically good on third down and was being coached by a defensive mastermind, allowed Nick Foles and Brett Favre back-up Doug Pederson to convert over eighty percent of third downs late in the game (around the time that I muted the game and started writing an article about how this “Anti-Vikings” Vikings team was doing what every other Vikings team had done in my lifetime, which was break my heart). So, instead of admitting that this team was and is capable of blowing a game like that, people have decided to latch onto the perfect storm for a conspiracy theory, which was that the Super Bowl is in Minneapolis this year (timing), the tragedy that was the Eagles game (opportunity) and a general distrust by many that are already angry with the NFL because of the Colin Kaepernick situation (emotion).

There are a few reasons why conspiracy theories take hold beyond that. The first is the band-wagon effect and you saw that after the “Minneapolis Miracle’, in which people who had written off the Vikings during the fight between President Trump and some of the players in the NFL and band wagon fans in general all decided that they had been fans of the team all-season. Those people, mostly the former, subconsciously enjoy the feeling of being a part of something, it has to do with staying alive back during the days of hunting and gathering and so it’s not hard to see why people join a band-wagon, just as it’s not hard to see why people both distrust and dislike the NFL (beyond the aforementioned kneeling situation). There’s deflategate, the iffy-officiating, the refs shaking Tom Brady’s hand after the AFC Championship game, the league removing videos of that from the internet, the league’s Facebook account accidentally releasing that ad for a Vikings/Patriots Super Bowl (how’d that pan out?) and again the fact that the Vikings would’ve been the first team to play at home for the Super Bowl. I tend to think it’s a mix of all of those things, with the cherry on-top being the 38-7 score, and people feeling some semblance of relief when they “realized” that it was rigged all along and thus something that they needn’t feel bad about anymore (although if I were to actually believe that the league was rigged I’d try to find who was responsible for putting me and my Dad and deceased uncle through this hell our entire lives so I could round-house kick them to death). So, while I get that I’ll be called part of the “main-stream-media” (I’ve had that before, which is hilarious as I’m writing this in my sweatpants from the couch, where I’ve been all day (I’m making a dandruff angel!) and that it’d feel better to have people agree with me and to feel like I’m part of a group (bandwagon-ing), this entire idea just doesn’t make any sense.

We live chatted the NFC Championship and before the game started one of our readers joined and immediately started saying that the NFL was rigged. He was using that Facebook ad as an example and said “could they make it any more obvious?” (again, I wonder how people justify that now? By saying that they did that on purpose to throw people off of their scent, I’m sure? There’s always an explanation when things become a worldview, that’s how talk radio exists), after the kickoff my patience wore thin and I said “there’s a semi-important game going on right now” and he replied that he was just a skeptic and that it was good to ask questions, when I reminded him that he was making declarative statements (and that being a skeptic sometimes isn’t a good thing, like when you’re skeptical of reality) he actually said that he was wrong and that he’d think harder about what he says next time and that was a really rational response from someone who was touting such an irrational line of reasoning. It felt like he was representing another part of how conspiracy theorists have added people to their ranks and that’s by appealing to rebellion. There’s a (few) reason(s) why right wingers are more prone to believe conspiracy theorists and that’s because they’re not the biggest fans of the government (if you hadn’t noticed) and so anything that appeals to rebellion will appeal to them by proxy and it often does. That’s how blanket arguments can work, where people can blame everything on their opponent, or on the Illuminati, the Deep State, etc. This is definitely part of that, or how otherwise rational people can believe super irrational things (because ideology can oftentimes mean more than fact).

Beyond that, the selective clips/videos used on sites like Youtube can be really, really compelling, especially when the clips are taken out of context and shown to people who don’t fully understand how football works. Shit, I write about the Vikings everyday and I don’t really know how to identify the defense that’s on the field (which is why I’m so terrible at Madden), so if you were to show me a player on a specific play that’s perhaps running the “wrong” way and thus leaving someone wide-open, I’d ask you to tell me how you knew what that player’s assignment was on that specific play. Those videos use shotgun arguments, which is the practice of really the death by a thousand cuts. Where tons of small examples are given that by themselves aren’t smoking guns but together feel like one gigantic smoking gun. Beyond that, there’s the phenomenon of Pareidolia that seems to sum up this idea even better, the definition of Pareidolia is:

Pareidolia is, basically, the phenomenon which happens when we perceive recognizable patterns in randomness, even though the patterns really aren’t there. For example, random blotches of paint might look like a face, or random noise might sound like a spoken word (or even a full sentence).

While football is an organized game and thus a bit different from chaos or random order, the idea that people are seeing tons of examples of cheating or rigged situations, really just may be an example of people seeing what they want to see (a self-fulfilling prophecy). That’s really what this all boils down to is people really seeing something that they want to see and creating an argument based on a belief (as opposed to coming to a conclusion based on evidence, so it’s essentially backward). If you really think about what it’d take to “rig” something as complex as a football game, it starts to fall apart rather quickly. Now, I understand that it seems that I also have a bias, as my life is based on a game that I love and that if found to be a fraud, could really hurt a massive investment that I’ve made into both of my sites (purplePTSD and VikingsTerritory.com), however, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense that the league would risk a ten billion a year industry by fixing games because it simply doesn’t need to, and that’s really the most compelling argument as to why the whole “NFL is Rigged!” line of reasoning doesn’t make any sense.

The benefit of rigging the NFL is making money, right? Having larger markets in the Super Bowl so the NFL can make more money from television ratings and ad revenue. However, the NFL also makes money when smaller markets are in the big game, and over time the amount basically becomes the same. If it were only big market teams in the Super Bowl, eventually those fans would disengage and they’d lose the money from those markets as well, so only putting Los Angeles or New York in the Super Bowl every year would make sense in the short term, but not in the long term. Beyond that, the NFL was unable to even get a team together (or a stadium built) in Los Angeles for YEARS, and outside of the two Super Bowl victories that the Giants had this century (over the Patriots) the Giants haven’t been a dynasty by any stretch of the imagination, so the whole “big market” argument doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Every market that has an NFL team is a large market, and even if it’s a smaller market, like Minneapolis, it makes up for it by having fans from surrounding states (like North and South Dakota, parts of Montana, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oklahoma, etc), which is something that people don’t point out when they’re comparing the Vikings to the Eagles.

Beyond that, the complexity of the game would make it extremely hard to rig things like dropped passes or blown coverages. While people believe that the Vikings/Eagles game was a blatant example of the league rigging things, why would they make it that obvious considering the fact that if they were exposed they’d lose everything? Why would the players agree to that? Money? Don’t they already make a lot of money? Because they “have to”? Threats? So, if that’s the argument, wouldn’t that upset a lot of them to the point that news of the NFL being rigged would leak to people like me? Unless I’m also in on it, which if that was the case, why am I still living with my parents? Lastly, people have said in the case of the Vikings that the city of Minneapolis or the state of Minnesota had some sort of influence over the outcome of the game because they wanted all of that sweet out of state money that’d come from the fans of the Eagles coming to town to spend money. That doesn’t really need much of an argument against it, as the Super Bowl’s tickets mostly go to corporations who mostly would’ve come in from out of town anyway. Beyond that, the tickets still cost money that would’ve benefitted the economy here. So, really, outside of the airfare and hotel rooms, regardless of whether or not people would’ve been from Blaine or Boston they still would’ve been downtown spending money, so the idea that that would’ve mattered to the league or the city makes little sense. Not to mention how the City or State somehow would’ve had the ability to rig a game (does every city/state have this ability? Is it just the city/state that is hosting the Super Bowl? Do they lose that power after the Super Bowl moves to a new town?).

It’s said that the most simple explanation is typically the right one and the simple explanation here is that the Vikings just choked, and that’s really what happened. Perhaps it’s a bit more complex than that (they were outcoached, also), but that’s really what happened because any other explanation would be too complex, risky and pointless. So, if you want to stop watching football, do that, just don’t imply that those of us who spend all this time covering the team are covering the most complex scam in the history of the world. This isn’t pro-wrestling, it just has a similar retirement plan.

Share: