Make sure the big-market big-revenue large-draw high-ratings teams win often enough.
I mention this because, well, the Chiefs went on to win the Super Bowl. I understand the thinking: How could the NFL not want the Chiefs to win when they have Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, two of the most popular players in all of professional sports? The new 2023 schedule came out and the Chiefs are showcased in seven prime time affairs! What's with that?
The reality is that it is harder to hide this in the NFL, but please know that all the powers-that-be -- I've been given to calling them the "NFLers," anyone who benefits in some way, especially financially, from other teams not the Chiefs winning -- all of them would much much rather have Mahomes and Kelce on a team like the Patriots or Cowboys or Giants. I promise you every NFLer is squirming inside their gut that they are instead on the Chiefs and not on one of those other teams.
Everything I wrote in that piece, and in every other one in which I write about these things, still applies. Even though the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, The Fix Is In factor is still in play, the Scorecasting factor is still very much alive and well.
You could, however, see it much more profoundly in NBA basketball and major league baseball.
You may know I'm also a Golden State Warriors fan and I've always reveled in those times we can be successful. And we have been -- getting to the Finals, even winning a few of them, several times over the past years. The truth is, in the same vein, the NBA does not want the Warriors to win.
Last night we lost our playoff series to the No. 7 seeded team in the conference. No No. 7 seed ever really does anything in the playoffs...
Unless you're the Los Angeles Lakers.
In the series the Lakers were handed every advantage in the book, particularly in the one major area Scorecasting identifies as the key reason a given team will win by virtue of the desires of the NBAers: the officiating.
I actually watched very little of the series because I knew my team was hosed from the very beginning for these very reasons, even though man-for-man the Warriors were the better team. What very little I did watch was an early part of Game 4. I saw a tough basket made by Andrew Wiggins during which he was hammered under the basket. No foul was called. Another play at about the same time featured LeBron James going to the basket while very loosely guarded by Gary Payton, and a foul was called. Right after a replay of that particular play the announcer said, "That was not a foul."
I was done. I turned off the game and didn't watch another minute for the rest of the series. Turns out the free throw discrepancy in favor of the Lakers was eye-popping. Please know I'm all for that not being any big deal... except in this instance. I wasn't the only one who noted it.
The Warriors players definitely recognized it and you could easily sense their abject despair in post-game interviews knowing that they really didn't have a fair chance to compete. Of course they can't say anything because they are so beholden to the NBA enforcers who'll rip them brand new aye-holes if they complain about it.
How about this other major factor: the ways people like LeBron James and Anthony Davis even get on the Lakers to begin with? How on earth do those things happen? When did LeBron in his prime ever consider joining the Portland Trailblazers, I mean Damian Lillard is an excellent player, LeBron could've won some titles with him for sure. When is Anthony Davis, now in his prime, going to join, say, the Charlotte Hornets? They have a pretty good baller in LaMelo Ball, how about that?
Nah. Those teams simply aren't the ones the NBAers favor. Indeed, just wait a few years. Those extraordinarily exceptional ballers, the Ja Morants and the LaMelo Balls who'll soon be in their prime prime years -- any of them who are a true cut-above your run-of-the-mill excellent players -- they will end up on the Lakers at some point later. None of this happens by accident.
With major league baseball it is just as pronounced.
The Los Angeles Dodgers are now starting the season yet again in first place in the NL West where they will likely finish again for an 11th time in 12 years. Oh, and that only time they finished second? They still won 106 games and in the playoffs they still beat the Giants the team that finished first that year.
This Dodgers thing isn't just happenstance. It was made to happen. I've made mention of it before, I'll share it briefly here again. A number of years ago the Dodgers were okay, a decent team and still a winning team, but it wasn't good enough for the MLBers. So the majors took the unprecedented step of forcing the sale of the team to major league baseball who then sent it to an ownership group that would ensure they would be even better winners and gain all the accompanying advantages of such a move.
Sorry, but this would never happen to a Diamondbacks or a Tigers or any other non-NY-or-LA team. Needless to say Dodgers have made the playoffs every year since 2012, and except for a scant four times the Yankees have made the playoffs every single season since 1994. That's 24 times out of 28. That doesn't happen by accident.
Maybe there is some divine intervention against this wretched duplicity because since 2012, after all those playoff appearances by those two teams, they have only one World Series title between them, and that was the 2020 Dodgers' in a ridiculously silly shortened Covid lockdown season.
I have to add that browsing in the bookstore last night I saw a book, How to Beat a Broken Game, about that 2020 Dodgers season, and right there on the inside cover, right there at the top, was a statement about how the Dodgers winning that year's World Series crippled baseball. Crippled baseball! Peeking in the book it seemed the reason the author gives for the game being worse is because of all the stark dehumanizing statistical elements that have woven their way in the game play and decision-making. I personally think much of the reason is the implementation of all the phenomenally idiotic new rules they put in place at that time.
The real reason, however, is that the majors have gone too far to make it so easy for the Yankees and Dodgers to win too often. Do they win all the time? Of course not, that would be too stupid.
But I discovered a long time ago that if a team can't have their own team winning it all, they really do want the Yankees or Dodgers to win it all. I've realized it is sadly much more the case that these major sports leagues require those teams to win for them to make it the most lucrative they want it all to be, bottom-line. Look at the history of both the NBA and major league baseball and you'll see there has never been very long at all between times featuring a Lakers or Celtics in the Finals, or the Dodgers or Yankees going to the World Series.
Go ahead and look. It is actually kind of astounding.
In fact I can't neglect to share this -- just riffing here in my blog to vent about the Warriors loss -- but let's just look at major league baseball.
In 1948 the Indians beat the Braves in the World Series, way back there just after World War II when the Braves were still in Boston. Then, from 1949 all the way to 1966, a total of 18 years, at least one New York or Los Angeles team competed in the Fall Classic. Every one of those 18 years! Of those 36 spots in the World Series during that time period, a New York or Los Angeles team occupied 25 of them. One of them won 14 times. The streak was broken in 1967 when -- ::gasp!:: no New York or Los Angeles team appeared! It was St. Louis and Boston.
It didn't stop there. The Amazin' Mets won it all in 1969. They were barely a .500 team in 1973 when they went to the World Series again. The Dodgers showed up there in 1974. The Yankees were there three straight times from 76 to 78. In 1981 a strike shortened the season and to ensure both the Dodgers and Yankees were in the playoffs the MLBers decided to split the season in halves so the "first half winners" could qualify for the playoffs. Guess who led their respective divisions at that time? Sure enough they both made it to the World Series yet again.
The Dodgers barely missed getting in in 83 and 85, but won it all in 88. The Mets won it all in 86. I should add that the Boston Red Sox are really just as much big-market big-revenue large-draw high-ratings, and they've recently had a huge amount of post-season success. If it isn't the Yankees from the American League, then the Red Sox will do just fine.
What does all this have to do with the Chiefs? It is simply there are too many obvious components that go into regularly shoving the bigger-market bigger-revenue larger-draw teams to the top of their standings. All the NFLers and NBAers and MLBers do work very hard to hide them, and if you point out those things you'll be wholly marginalized or if it comes to it dismissively tarred as some kind of sour grapes conspiracy nut. It doesn't make it any less criminal to take fans' money and deceive them about their team's chances to be competitive for any period of time when eventually championship spots must be handed to those favored teams.
Once again even though the Chiefs did win the Super Bowl and the Warriors did win last year's NBA title (Yay!) (But against the Boston Celtics -- there you go), all the things I wrote about in that post still apply. The ever-expanding gambling interests that are now officially connected to these games make it worse. These leagues could have officials in the booth actually getting calls right (even in the NBA!) but they won't because it removes that key Scorecasting advantage they embrace.
In this year's draft it seems as if Veach has done pretty well, indeed doing the one thing I think he should do, get front-seven guys. His first pick was a fine-looking edge rusher, and he even picked up another one in the later rounds. He got a nose tackle that looks like a monster. That safety we got looks like a real baller too. He also snagged a pretty decent looking wide receiver to help out Patrick.
And what about last year's draft? Wow. It was incredible -- of the ten players taken, every single one of them contributed something of substance to our 2022 success -- except for the tackle, Darian Kinnard, but he just didn't get playing time. The least notable of them, Nazeeh Johnson, did fine special teams work for us. Every single one of the others were terrific contributors to Chiefs Kingdom wonderfulness in this splendid Super Bowl year, at some time in some measurable way. And if they did that well then, think about their potential for the future as they get even more experience.
That is, if...
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The first image is of the Sports Illustrated cover for Super Bowl LVII, and I must say I really like it because it refers to the Chiefs as "Kansas City Kings," which was the name of the NBA franchise in KC for a number of years in the late-70s and early-80s. At that time they moved to Sacramento and in the early-00s they had an excellent championship-caliber team that was indeed a victim of arguably the most notorious officiating hose-job ever, in 2002 losing to the you-got-it -- Lakers.
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