If you haven’t heard of FanDuel and DraftKings you haven’t been watching National Football League telecasts. Plenty of individuals who attend church in the morning and watch football on Sunday afternoon, may not have been exposed to gambling outlets in the past. That’s because the NFL kept a distance from the gambling world until a couple years ago when a Supreme Court ruling allowed states to sanction sports wagering.
For years, the NFL tried to stay away from the gambling world while pretty much tagging it an evil. But the owners of NFL teams are businessmen first, and they always knew that wagering on NFL games spiked the interest in their game like a pretty girl in a bikini walking on the shoreline arouses young men.
It was common for announcers of football games to use the point spread in framing a contest with such accepted statements like, “The 49ers come into this contest two point favorites over the Chiefs.” Introducing a baseball game while offering a comment on the Giants being a 160 favorite, or in basketball the Lakers favored by ten points over the Jazz, was a lot less common.
There is a logical reason for this. Football is to betting what heat is to a fire. It is inevitable. Consider this, more money is wagered on an NFL preseason game than a Major League Baseball World Series game.
The strict regulations in an attempt to keep their game beyond suspicion of foul play included allowing no employee of the league to wager on football. This point was driven home by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1963. Two of the league’s stars, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, were exposed to be making wagers of a hundred dollars or less on their own teams, the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions respectively.
In April of 1963, Rozelle suspended both of them for the 1963 season. Another star, New York Jets Quarterback Joe Namath, who had launched a new era of competition in the soon to be merged NFL and American Football League with his win over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, had become a partner in a restaurant/bar on Lexington Avenue in New York. The establishment was known to be frequented by a number of underworld figures and Rozelle used the NFL contract that cited activity detrimental to the league as reason to void his player’s agreement.
In June, 1979, Rozelle directed Namath to divest his interest in Bachelor III or face a suspension from the league. Namath, with as much bravado as tossing an ill-advised pass into coverage, made a statement in response to Rozelle’s directive, “I’m not selling, I quit.”
When the Jets opened training camp in 1969 the hero of Super Bowl III was missing, but not for long. Six weeks after his stand of not selling, he had a meeting with Rozelle on July 15, and pretty much aligned with all of Rozelle’s demands and returned to the Jets camp.
Still, with so much money illegally being shifted underwraps on football bets throughout the country, the league played the role as strict disciplinarian on gambling while enjoying the benefits the activating did to spike interest in their game. Twenty years ago, a gambler who thought his wagers were being lost because of shady refereeing, took the league to court with evidence of obvious bad calls that went against his wagers. The league lawyers argued in pretrial motions that the game was under the jurisdiction of the NFL and therefore they could manage it any way they wanted without penalty. It was good lawyering, blunting the case before it was ever heard by virtue of their control over the game, but it didn’t serve to add confidence that the refs in the NFL were always on the up-and-up.
My contention is that the part time refs the NFL employs to officiate their games are not as competent as they could be if they were full time and from the same age group as the athletes they were trying to keep up with. Incompetence knows no side.
That doesn’t explain Super Bowl XL, when the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks battled in Detroit. This marks the only Super Bowl that the team that had the most yards, most first downs, more time of possession and won the turnover battle lost the game. The Steelers won only two stats that day, they had less than half as many penalties called against them with more than three times as many yards gained on those calls and they won on the scoreboard.
Now, if the Seahawks would have been sloppy, and clearly guilty of more than double the number of infractions than the Steelers, that could be accepted. But they didn’t, we are talking about a series of highly questionable calls that consistently went in the Steelers favor. A call in the first quarter that was ruled offensive pass interference erased a Seattle touchdown, and a touchdown catch near the end of the second quarter that clearly showed the receiver inbounds that was not reviewed at a time all reviews were left to the booth upstairs.
When it was not reviewed, the broadcast team of John Madden and Al Michaels chipped in their comments. Madden said he was out without looking at the replay and Michaels stopped him with the words, “I don’t know, look at that John,” when the replay showed the Seattle receiver did get the second foot down in bounds. Michaels quickly returned to the league’s company line and didn’t discuss the play further.
I always had suspicions about this contest, because clearly assisted by the referees the Steelers not only won the game, 21-10, but the final score cleared the 4 point line. When the Seahawks returned home after the game, Seattle fans greeted them like conquering heroes. At the reception Seattle Head Coach Mike Holmgren said, “I knew it was going to be tough going up against the Pittsburgh Steelers. I didn’t know we were going to have to play the guys in the striped shirts as well.”
A few things have added to my concern about this game since Holmgren said that to the crowd that greeted him and his team. First, the NFL, who fines coaches for even slight slams on refereeing, didn't fine Holmgren for his yelled from the mountain top criticism. Second, the head official in that game was a one time client of Qoxhi Picks and his statement three years later, “I kicked two calls in the fourth quarter and I impacted the game, and as an official, you never want to do that. It left me with a lot of sleepless nights, and I think about it constantly.”
Side note, he botched a lot more than two calls in the fourth quarter … he raped the whole game.
Then came the final straw that confirmed to me that the NFL might not always be worthy of church on Sunday … except for confession.
In 2012, I was live on the air at an ESPN radio station in Reno with my broadcast partner Terry Cox. He was the sportsbook manager at the Peppermill, and while discussing the upcoming Super Bowl between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers, Terry mentioned that Super Bowl XLVII may generate the largest handle ever.
A handle in sportsbook vernacular refers to the amount of money wagered on a particular game. In response to his comment I asked, “What was the all-time most bet Super Bowl?”
“Oh,” Terry said, “That would be Super Bowl XL between the Steelers and Seahawks.”
While standing in front of my mic, my knees actually buckled. Why would that game be the most bet? I thought that while thinking I knew the answer.
A few years later, while discussing such things with a person that could have been a partner with Namath in Bachelor III, I asked this, “Why would you fix a Super Bowl, why not a preseason game between Tampa Bay and Cincinnati with less scrutiny?”
His response was matter-of-fact, “Because you can’t hide fifty million dollars on a preseason game.”
Okay, that doesn’t do anything to elevate my confidence that the NFL games are always on the level, but I’m still operating before the opening kickoff that they are. The head of NFL officials recently said, “What would make the Super Bowl best for me, is if the officials are not in the conversation about what was the key to the winning team winning.”
My wish too.
But the cloak of the NFL not working with the gambling world is now over. The league has picked a new bedmate, and the scrutiny on the league and their officials is likely to heighten to force what I have long lobbied for … competent full-time professional refs.