Over many decades of sports watching, I’ve become more and more suspicious about the NFL and NBA referees and coaches with each passing year, growing ever surer that there is gigantic game-fixing going on—with no limits on betting that take poor schmucks to the cleaners. It’s billions of dollars we’re talking about. It’s way more than baseball or horse racing betting! It’s Las Vegas gone amok.
Earlier this year I watched a San Antonio Spurs vs Golden State Warriors basketball game. Right at the end Derrick White was flailing and so were the other great three point shooters in that team.
The Spurs have beaten a lot of great teams this year but always seemed to peter out at the end and they remain at the bottom of the Western league. Even the Golden State announcers commented about this on TV!
Early this year I learned the word for what I observed in many of those games.
WHAT IS TANKING?
‘Tanking’ is a term used to describe when sports teams lose games on purpose to secure some sort of future competitive advantage. You many remember my post on the economics term ‘comparative advantage’. Comparative advantage with two countries trading is a win-win game. Competitive advantage is not a win-win game, it is a lose to win later game by trading players and money.
Wikipedia shows many examples of tanking in sports. This list includes baseball and other kinds of sports in the U.S. and other countries that built their sports teams by tanking.
RACIAL AND SEXIST DISCRIMINATION ASPECTS OF TANKING
On February 2, 2022, Chris Hayes of MSNBC interviewed winning coach Brian Flores in February After being interviewed by the New York Giants, Bill Bellichek called Brian Flores, a black coach to let him know he’d been hired by the Giants because he was so outstanding—only to find out at the end that it was the other Brian, a white man whom they hired to coach their team
Brian Flores, currently a Steelers assistant coach decided to file a racial discrimination suit in hiring against the Giants, Dolphins, Broncos and and 29 other football teams in NFL. Just this month the NFL has asked a federal court to go to arbitration.
If you are a sports fan you might guess, Bill Bellichek whose quarterback won almost every year for a decade, and was outed along with Tom Brady as cheating for two of those years, would be the one to light the flame under Brian Flores to go to court! At this point Flores does not want to go to arbitration.
Brian admitted that he knew he was being hired by the New York Giants, and he was expected to do tanking, but he had previously won both years for the Giants before being fired.
Another outrageous practice from Corporate Sports team owners is that minority and women assistant coaches are now all but one or a few being pushed out of the NFL and NBA and other sports leagues.
THE NFA ROONEY RULE
The NFA has a Rooney rule for vetting new head coaches. It says they must interview a black person. That’s all! So every year black applicants get humiliated. That’s how Brian Flores became the last black head coach who was interviewed and fired.
This year, like many years in the past there are only white male coaches in the NBA. I’m a long term fan of the Spurs. Greg Popovitch was the first coach to hire a woman assistant coach, one with amazing credentials
As for Becky Harmon, the first woman in the NBA to be an assistant coach, like Brian, she was rejected from every interview she got after they asked if she’d ever been a head coach.
So Becky chose to go into the Women’s basketball Association (WBA) to find employment where she is head coach the winningst team, the Aces, from Las Vegas. If this blackballing against minorities and women for coaching isn’t a breach against Title Nine Sports I don’t know what is! I hope she and other women think about suing the NBA.
Professional women baskeball players are not paid anything near what the men get. That’s why one of them is languishing in a Russian prison right now. Professional women in sports do not get paid enough to aupport their families with the work they do.
It’s time for big-money sports to clean up their acts.
Starting back in High School when I was a twirler, I loved the passion and colorfulness of men’s football and basketball. But today while the athletics in male sports is breathtaking, the violence is getting too much for me. And tanking makes me feel depressed.
These days I much prefer to watch Battlebots over blood & broken bones. GO WITCH DOCTOR!
CORPORATE SPORTS GREED’S GAMBLING FANTASY
Here’s why I’d compare tanking by sports teams to casinos. Both games are rigged. Now, to make things a thousand times worse, TV ads on football and basketball are even advertising that bettors should make a plan before betting. How can they? When they don’t know how these games have being rigged? It would probably be safer to bet on bitcoin.
This spring California Native American tribes began urging voters to vote “NO” on California Proposition 27. Prop 27 would enable gambling on every electronic device everyone could use to place bets on sports.
Here are their very valid reasons for running these TV ads
p.s. You can catch Chris Hayes’ February 2nd show with Brian Flores on You Tube! Or Google the articles that are asking what can be done about tanking in professional sports.