The business of entertaining doesn’t mean legitimate, nor does it necessarily mean fair. Entertainment means showmanship, and in the sports world, this is everything.
For ages, NFL fans have engaged in an ongoing debate about whether the NFL is rigged, with one side proclaiming that there is no technical way to rig a football game while the other analyzes a game down to the last second, stringing together pieces of evidence to declare the opposite.
The one thing I will agree on with anti-rigged theorists: it is almost impossible to technically and systemically rig an entire game because, as we will delve into later, the cost isn’t worth the “rig.”
I won’t give them much, though, because the entire way this debate is framed is wrong. Instead of using “rigged” to describe an unfair phenomenon, let’s instead use the word “entertain.”
Avid fans on both sides of the debate should be less concerned with the fact that the NFL is rigging games and more concerned with how they are making the games more entertaining, at the cost of fairness.
There is one thing that all sports fans alike can agree on: they like a good show, and apparently watching football players tactically fight each other provides the best one.
Despite the amount of uproar and unsettlement that happens after a bad call, fans will continue to watch the next game — but why?
Sports writer Mike Freeman put it well in a USA Today piece, saying “Blown calls, as in years past, are everywhere. Complaints about them are everywhere. Owners, coaches, fans, media, all hate the officiating. It’s been that way for decades and will probably be that way for years to come.”
He argues one critical point: we tolerate it.
“The NFL, at least in part, loves the fact that officiating generates massive amount of controversy and even hatred,” Freeman wrote in the column.
He goes on to argue that, despite the fact that poor officiating has been deeply entrenched in the NFL’s system, we are complacent in the fact that we don’t want to do anything about it because it feeds the gambling universe.
Over the years, the NFL has sold a combination package of tension and sparked controversy that increases viewership.
In 2022, the NFL accounted for 82 of the 100 most-watched American television broadcasts. That number was 75 out of 100 in 2021.
Do you remember back in 2017 when it was a huge sigh of relief when the NFL relaxed its touchdown celebration regulations? Well, according to Pavement Pieces sports writer Zachery Devita, the once-nicknamed “No Fun League” viewership rose up by 5% in 2018.
This is what the media loves — when the NFL is fun, and when there is something to spark a conversation about and create tension between team fans.
One video on X proclaimed, “These games are purely entertainment and the NFL gets every matchup they want. Players don’t have a choice, they’re athletic actors making millions keeping secrets.”
While this claim was entirely baseless, it is no stretch to say that these opinions have kept the fire alive among NFL fans.
Being actors of the sports world, NFL players have won the hearts of millions of fans. The world swooned when Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift got together.
Kelce and Swift’s impact on the NFL world proves the game was never necessarily rigged to be more in favor of Kelce. But the narrative that the NFL built up surely generated a branch of football watchers.
The NFL wanted the Kelce brothers to play against each other in Super Bowl LVII — why? Not because it is rigged but rather because it was more entertaining.
With the recent change, the NFL has now opened up private equity in ownership of teams. This will completely change the name of the game as corporations have the opportunity to turn the tables on the financial infrastructure of the game.
So what do you think? Is the NFL rigged, or is it just the greatest showman?
