BUSINESS RULES: Phil Mushnick writes the NFL could mess with its brand and its fans, but there was no way it could mess with the bookmakers and gamblers. (Getty Images)
A duck, a polar bear and two NFL replacement officials walk into a bar …
If only Monday’s Packers-Seahawks had been played on the Monday night of Week 1, the regular NFL officials would have been back the next day, 32 games ago.
You can mess with fans all you want, but once you mess with bookmakers and gamblers, well!
All that was needed after Week 1 was for Las Vegas or any large cooperative of bookmakers to have pulled a big TV market or national primetime game off the board.
Not only would that have scandalized the NFL as scandal relates to widespread conjecture that the integrity of games, preemptively, can’t reasonably be guaranteed, it would have hit the NFL right in its bread basket — right in its large-screen HD TV set, right in the TV money that fires the league’s pistons.
And gambling on games is the premium juice at the NFL’s pumps. Despite the NFL’s socially altruistic public positions, gambling is very good for the NFL’s TV business. Has been for 40-plus years. Forcing the reduction of those who gamble on games would be very bad for NFL business.
OK, so it took three full weeks of games for the inevitable to occur, for the nation to have seen, at once, the NFL take a colossal fall after slipping on one of its own banana peels. Week 1 or Week 3, it was the inevitability the NFL couldn’t wish away.
Plainly put, the replacement officials were bad for business — the gambling business. Those who think they can handicap games — and that’s most gamblers — were growing convinced that they could not handicap these games.
The $1,000 per game gambler, paying 10 percent on losses, this week might have chosen to instead risk $100. Or, perish the thought, take the week off. Or wait until the regular officials returned. Without action, NFL primetime audiences would decrease by tens of thousands.
The NFL, never particularly strong on foresight, was lucky it got as far as it did before it finally blew up.
The NFL presumably collects a few hundred thousand dollars in fines a month for flagrant violations of rules. Though we never quite learn where that money goes, why didn’t the league throw some toward an officials’ pension?
But the NFL, for all its branded glory, has long been in the habit of reactively making things up as it goes along (see: 20-plus years of Instant Replay Rules). Apparently, it believed that it had a chance to get away with this one.
Imagine if the Acme Parachute Co. dismissed all of its experienced makers and packers, replacing them with “some other guys.”
For all the PSLs, must-buy exhibition games, invented-for-its-own-network Thursday night games and Roger Goodell’s claim that “It’s all about the fans,” most fans aren’t as stupid as leagues would believe. That fans buy into a con — or get out — doesn’t mean they don’t know they’re being had.
The NFL’s unsigned reply to the end of Monday night’s game — that the correct call was made, TD Seattle! — was a con, although not an unexpected one. The league’s statement could have been titled, “Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes.”
If the NFL believes its own claim, the settlement with the regular officials that followed should be considered coincidental. Fat chance. But everything attached to sports now includes a shameless con told with a straight face.
As reader Jerry Skurnik writes, after finally clearing NFL Network: “Time Warner Cable wasted no time hyping something it had claimed no one wants.”
YES, ‘sometimes’ Kay talks nonsense on air
YES’s Michael Kay continues to find significant baseball talking matter in nonsense, leaving us to wonder if he knows the game or is just out to re-invent it.
On Monday, with Andy Pettitte in trouble in the first, Kay took us on a ride to nowhere: “Now, one thing you worry about with Pettitte … Ivan Nova pitched really poorly his second start off the [disabled list], and sometimes that happens, and this is Andy’s second start off the DL. We’ll see how Andy does.”
For crying out loud, Kay took Nova’s irrelevant sample/example of one, applied that to a different pitcher and asked us to think of it as so relevant that we should beware! Then, by adding, “sometimes that happens,” Kay took into account that sometimes it doesn’t, meaning Kay’s “One thing you worry about” wasn’t worth the mention, let alone the worry.
Pettitte was replaced after six shutout innings. Now Kay has a sample of two to apply to the next Yankee pitcher’s second start off the DL. Sometimes happens! In fact, sometimes happens almost all the time!