America's favorite Dystopian pastime - NFL 2021-22

it's not about tanking

Deliberately making in-game decisions that ensure a loss is called "taking a dive", not tanking.

Tanking is where you strip your team of talented, experienced players and field a team of talented but raw rookies and veteran mediocrities on cheap contracts you can ditch later. Then you let them play and lose, because the team was built specifically for losing games and can safely be expected to lose all on their own.

yeah, being paid to lose is match-fixing. the type of thing mafiosos used to do in baseball in the early 20th century.

the NFL is going to get sued out the ass if it becomes apparent this isn't smoke and mirrors. and I have a feeling Flores has receipts.

if he doesn't, the NFL is going to lean really hard on plausible deniability

i personally don't see why match-fixing is illegal -- joke's on you if you're betting on games, honestly -- but yeah the rest of the world disagrees. particularly when the leagues now have such close relationships with gambling apps

well, there's the whole folly of buying tickets to games that you think aren't predetermined

Jet fans will sue, then someone will remind them they weren't tanking, they just sucked

i personally don't see why match-fixing is illegal -- joke's on you if you're betting on games, honestly -- but yeah the rest of the world disagrees. particularly when the leagues now have such close relationships with gambling apps

― mookieproof, Wednesday, February 2, 2022 2:47 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

well yeah, you kinda answered your own question there. if a team is deliberately trying to lose it's not just a rogue decision from the coach, and if several people know then in the gambler's mind that means HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE KNEW and deliberately FUCKED YOU OVER, which is just bad PR for sports betting all around

The fun thing about this is that it’s coming right as a No. 1 overall pick took a 2-14 team to the Super Bowl in 2 years so you could easily argue the Browns were actually right to do what they did

i need these tanking teams to drop little bread crumbs for Week 1 games from now on so I can clean up and retire

i gotta say it is weird that nashville got to the superbowl in their first year actually in the city, teeing up years of .500 futility and a lot of early exits in the playoffs and somehow also a rabid tennessee fanbase that wasn't that into the game until they came thiiiiiiiiis close to a championship
probably just a coincidence

Posnanski has an article up about this and he mentions something I had totally forgotten about - when Hue Jackson got fired, he was notably pissed about it, which drew a lot of mockery because he only won 3 of his 40 games...but looking back it makes total sense, cuz the implicit agreement must've been that they were gonna actually start trying in Year 3

also makes the point that Hue was probably not literally paid $100k per loss, but rather that there was some clauses in his contract that rewarded him for doing dumb shit like starting Kizer every game

lol

Doug Pederson will need 3 wins to move into 5th place on the Jaguars all-time wins list, replacing current 5th place HC Urban Meyer.

— Benjamin Allbright (@AllbrightNFL) February 4, 2022

due to the nature of football as a sport the NFL hasn't had a major tanking problem but if they really want to eradicate the incentive to tank they're going to need to implement a lottery and some of the stuff the NBA has instituted. in the year that flores was allegedly offered money to tank, the dolphins would have been able to draft joe burrow had they actually tanked. burrow will end up being worth billions of dollars to the bengals if he plays a full career, and i think any dolphins fans would say it would've been worth all the losses, flores suing the team, the owner being thrown out of the league etc to have him. of course flores would probably still have his job if they had tanked for burrow. the browns main problem was not paying their coach to tank but tanking in a year where no elite QB was available (the year they took myles garrett) and then tanking for baker mayfield

NFL to eye diversity efforts in wake of Flores suit

well that's sorted

Kyler Murray just threw a pick six in the Pro Bowl

and now Kirk threw one

well ok not a pick six, but a pick

Lol now Russell Wilson did too.

This is execrable but I'm bored

“Herbert. Throws. It is caught. Second touchdown of the day for Andrews.”

I’ve never watched the Pro Bowl before. It really is as bad as everyone says.

Yeah it doesn’t work at all for the same reason there’s not really a such thing as “pick up football” the way there is basketball and baseball (if you have enough people)

a. will the texans demand that lovie smith put josh mccown on his staff
b. how long before the latter replaces the former, because jesus

i mean i guess it's cool that lovie's getting paid