It's getting harder and harder to watch football with other "fans". I'm not a "know it all"....but when people tell me that he couldn't have caught it because the WR was "double blocked" or complain every time the offense runs the ball because "the run never works!". .....I want to kill someone.

Not more than having a New York team win it.

As a Patriots fan, I hear this crap all the time, but believe me, you see PLENTY of terrible calls go against you. I think people who are highly attuned or suspicious of it tend to remember every little thing that supports their premise, and forget everything that doesn't.

These calls tend to even out over time, so I try not to get too agitated. The non-call against Gronk was, in my view, at least very, very close, and if there's a "get the Pats to the SB" conspiracy, that's an easy one for the refs to call. Instead they pick up the flag.

Yesterday there was, in my view, a pretty chintzy PI call against the Browns that was very helpful in giving the Pats the win. I wonder more about pandering to the HOME team (the Carolina non-call was in Carolina, the PI call yesterday in Foxborough) than "let's figure out how to give the Pats a win."

Why not the Jets or Giants?

It's all crap. A conspiracy on that level would've come out by now.

such an infectious smile

That was Belichick's idea, and if you think some marketing guru told him how to have his team introduced at the SB, you're completely out of your mind.

What? Who are you watching with?

On a hilarious (perhaps only to me) side note I went to the bar with my buddies in Sidney. I believe the NU game was on PPV. Anyway, they went to watch the game I went to drink. Well they got beat down and some old crusty bastard piped up and informed the bar that they should get a coach that runs the triple option and get some of those Nebraska farm kids on the line.

I laughed. Hard.

I hate to go against my fellow Chiefs fans, but I usually spend a little time on the game thread during the game. When there's a questionable call or non-call against the Chiefs, people go nuts. When there's one of those in the Chiefs favor, nothing.

The double blocked comment came from my wife. :facepalm: I had to stop watching football with her.

You want to get really depressed?

The Kansas City Chiefs are not a grassroots team that is supported by the community and runs to represent it. It's a corporation built to make money off the community and is supported by a conglomerate of corporations who are all doing the same thing.

And that's what you're rooting for every Sunday.

Kind of takes the magic away from it, does it not?

I don't really believe it, but if there was a conspiracy, I don't think they would need to influence it that much. The Giants didn't make the playoffs that year. The Jets did as a wildcard, so you could have the NYC team or a team named the Patriots win it all. And it's not like it's the end of the world if one of them doesn't make it, but a small influence (maybe a big call in the conference championship game :shrug: ) could go a long way.

Far too much stuff has to happen to really rig seasons, but stressing certain things (hey refs, in this Manning vs shittyQB match up, we really need to concentrate on protecting the QB) can definitely influence the outcome. And just because the NFL wants it to happen, doesn't mean it will or that it's the end of the world if it doesn't... but there are definitely outcomes that favor the NFL as a business (which is indisputable), it's just whether they act on the urge to push their agenda.

Yeah, I think it's like that for a lot of fan bases... it's really hard for people to be objective in that regard.

A few responses that I would add to the discussion:

First, teams are welcome to make their own mistakes, and are independently managed. The Chiefs can make the bonehead decision to not draft a quarterback for 30 years, and that's their call. The league doesn't care about that stuff, and it's an independent issue.

Second, I don't think that refs are explicitly told to rig games for one team or another, though it wouldn't surprise me at this point. But I have no doubt that they're told to "keep things close" within the context of the game, and if you "keep things close" then that's going to favor the teams with the big quarterback stars since they're more likely to get a bolt of lightning score. Then, voila! Instant drama! And atop that of course you have rules that are tilted toward the attributes that make stars. We want star quarterbacks in this league, so you can't touch a receiver. If you touch a receiver, the quarterback gets four more chances.

Having said that, take a look at the Patriots call yesterday, or the personal foul call on Bernard Pollard in the Broncos game. Do you really want to watch a football game where Bernard Pollard's shoulder bump on Eric Decker warrants four more downs for Peyton Manning? I don't. It's not a sport any more if that's the way things work. Like I said, I don't think that the refs are explicitly told to rig games, but some of these calls that always seem to favor the stars really make me wonder when they produce more short-term revenue for the league.

Third, bearcat's earlier post hit it right on the spot. The league is a business, and the management team is being given orders to increase revenues and profits by XX percent per year. They're going to do that. If the sport of football gets in the way, then that's too bad. They're going to make the changes and do the things that will keep the multi-billion dollar business growing, per their orders. That's what really bothered me about their writing contest. It was a contest about people's love of football, and there was clearly no one in the judging room who loved football and protected the integrity of the game.

Fourth, I stand by my casino example. The league doesn't know in Week 1 who's going to win the Super Bowl. There's too much chaos on the field for that. But they know who they want to position for it from a revenue perspective, and they're going to tweak the odds here and there as they're able. Can the Chiefs win a Super Bowl? Yeah, if a whole bunch of stuff falls right and they can stop Manning and Brady on eight or nine downs when it should be three or four. Or maybe in the long run they can win if they blunder into drafting a media star. But the latter's not going to happen in flyover country.

Fifth, maybe this is just destiny. The league started small and it was a sport. It blew up into a national phenomenon and the dollars exploded and all of a sudden it was a multi-billion dollar business. At that point you have to start treating it like a multi-billion dollar business, and that's when the lawyers and the marketers and the p.r. people come in and the football people leave. But at this point they're just companies, not teams. I'm not going to buy a Medtronics shirt or a Boeing shirt and cheer loudly and high-five when their earnings reports come out. Why should I do that when an NFL company has success?

I completely understand how you feel. The notion of everything being a calculated production has extended itself past football for me though. I think that most major products are designed to appeal to the broadest market of groups even when that is at the expense of the groups that originally popularized whatever that product was. It's a slow creep towards ensuring that everything mainstream is completely accessible for casual enjoyment regardless of what that does to the integrity of the original product as the rough edges are sanded smooth and all the corners are padded.

The same thing has happened to mainstream music and literature. Most music is slickly produced and easily consumable without a substantive message, most books are written with a focus on accessibility to reading groups and casual readers (and familiar, formulaic plots) without regard for the literary characteristics of classic works. Look at movies: to paraphrase your original post, blockbusters today are an orgy of special effects. It's all in pursuit of the almighty dollar rather than the pursuit of a goal or artistic ideal.

Our world has been sapped of authenticity by commerce, and I would argue that this extends to our jobs as well. Businesses exist to make money first and provide a service second, and their focus is on doing what's right for them right now, not on the long term or the greater good.

So, what's happening in the NFL is just a reflection of what's happening in the world at large, we just didn't notice until it seeped into football, an area we'd believed was shielded from that sort of insidious effect by virtue of it being a game rather than a business, a fact that is no longer true.

I should note that my comments are not intended to disrespect the Patriots or even the Broncos. As an older fan, I know that the Patriots were an unsuccessful franchise for decades. It's not like the league particularly wants the Patriots or the Broncos to win because they're the Patriots or Broncos. They're just the teams that have the stars and thus the most revenue potential at this point in time. If fortunes shift and another team gets the stars (and hopefully a team in a big market), the Patriots may sink back into the pack. However, given that they represent a big market, they'll do it slower than a Carolina team or a Cincinnati team. The modern NFL industry doesn't want revenues to shrink in bigger markets.

That said, I've long hated the Broncos for a variety of reasons. The Elway thing started it, and then the salary cap violations, the foreign substances, and so on. But they've got it figured out. They're going to win, and they're going to win because they understand the business of the NFL. Elway is the prototype and the genesis of using football purely as a vehicle for wealth and fame against the best interest of the sport, because he was the first one who did it. He understands that you don't earn championships in the modern NFL, you arrange them. You buy a quarterback who fits the fame model, or if you are a quarterback you don't go to a weak team and you use your power to force your way onto a playoff-caliber team. That's the way the industry works now, and the Broncos will thrive despite their small market because they embrace that.

Don't forget fantasy football. That shit is a multi-million dollar business. I'm not going to talk shit about it because I play it.