@farmerman,
Quote:It appears that the NFL, like the WWE is organized as a"for entertainment only" enterprise.
Obviously. The real question is the psychoanalytical nature of the "how". To what instincts in enough human natures to make a profit does it appeal, encourage and perpetuate?
Frank Harris wrote that Bernard Shaw "maintained that competitive games are the ruin of English manners, and provoke all the worst anti-social feeling between friends and nations..."
Both missed the point that bad manners and anti-social feeling might have economic utility in the Darwinian sense of nature being red in tooth and claw and in the psychological sense of good manners and social bonhomie being, scientifically, neurotic.
But the NFL is bound to come under suspicion when there is no relegation and promotion. There is no question of fixing games in our football leagues. The players are playing for big money. And they perform accordingly. The Premier League has 20 teams and the bottom three at the end of a season get relegated. That means they lose millions of pounds in TV grants and attendances and their best players leave. The top four go into the European Champion's League and that's where the real gravy is. Heads of state attend the games in the late stages of the Champion's League.
3 Pakistani cricketers have just been banned for 5 years for fixing to ball a no-ball at a certain point in a game. It is possible to bet on line "in running" on what happens on the next ball. A no-ball concedes one run to the batting side and is really neither here nor there in the vast majority of matches. That's how seriously the authorities take fixing. And it's a police matter as well. The bookies scream blue murder when it happens. Fraud.
I have seen inexplicable interceptions and touchdowns.
It is not necessary to be fixing a game to be fixing an event in it. It is easy to allow a stop on 1st down and 1 when leading 31-6 in the 4th quarter.
The Spectacle is the name of the game. The colour and the movement. The highlight of the week for seriously bored people.
The article posted is naive. Over-simplified. It is itself entertainment. And easier to accuse of being fixed than sport is.
