Citizen wrote: ↑Sun Jan 26, 2025 8:30 amWhat's a bit disheartening is concluding, right or wrong, that the league doesn't mind fans questioning the integrity of the games as long as they're watching them (and the flood of commercials that pollute them). The open endorsement of sports betting by the networks does not come without the NFL's at least implicit approval. The money that flows to the NFL gets dirtier and dirtier, but as long as it's green enough to be spent, it's all good.
Yeah, this is it. The NFL -or any major league- priority one was "integrity of the game" and fighting even the most innocent thing to make sure everyone knew and/or believed everything was on the up and up. Chunk of that was avoiding gambling, obviously, but it's more than that now. And the leagues just don't care anymore about "protecting the shield." At least, not in the "our games are on the level" and fighting hard to assure everyone of that.
I'm not big on conspiracies and think it's sort of absurd to think it can so easily be 'fixed' -- and those that do think it's fixed, you'll get 100 different answers on the how/why it happens kind of proving the opposite true. But that's also the thing, when my parents, uncle, cousins, half my friends now immediately "it was rigged" and I say "well, Mahomes always gets that call" or "they obviously were going to call P.I. in that situation, they always do" and their response is just "exactly." And there's nothing really to say to that. The NFL doesn't care to defend it, and nonsensical conspiracies aside, there's nothing really to say in response when, "that happened." It's harder and harder to find a but other than, the best response I've had, at least this season was that I've known a player in the NFL since he was born, grew up street over from me, know his family and his integrity so I could respond to my family with "you think he would be involved in a fixed game?" and that works, to an extent. Otherwise, everything Citizen said.
Also, college football is very much the same and even a little more blatant in favoritism. Lot more "of course they got that call" (random example UGA/Bama/etc. v. SEC school that doesn't matter) happens there.
At least I still got HSFB. Sort of. Always liked my state that we basically had only 9 private schools and only half of them were the absurd recruiting type so the majority of classifications were just pure public school football play for where you grew up with your friends you grew up with, your town against the neighboring towns, find out who is better. Unfortunately the private schools recruit to an even more egregious level now and no one cares because "that's how HS football is" and worse, each area has a public school that operates in the de-facto private school way of recruiting all the best players from their respective area. Regular seasons are just a barrage of 60-0 games, long gone are local rivalries or a mix of towns having their couple years to shine before it's a different area school. Every classification, know either the one school that's going to win, last year, this year, next year and the five years after that, or there's a whole TWO schools that have a chance and you just wait all season to see what happens in the state championship. Still like watching the 3-6 v. 4-5 games for the variance of offenses, schemes, etc., but a lot else of what I loved about HSFB is gone. League championships and just making the state playoffs used to mean something, shoot, an honorable mention all-district used to be an accomplishment in a stacked district but even that, now 10 QBs are "first team" and 20 more are "second team," every individual gets a trophy, and the same handful of teams have all the best players and win every year the last decade plus.
Sad.
We all got football history, at least.
