Watch the NFL With a Hand on Your Wallet

Rams late FG arouses predictable gambling suspicions

It’s Free-For-All Thursday, the day each week when we open the doors to all Mobsters, paid and unpaid. Just like the old days. It’s a token of my appreciation for everyone’s loyalty over the years. If you’d like to join the growing ranks of smart, urbane, sophisticated and good-looking Cincinnati sports fans, it’s $8 a month or $80 a year. If not, well, paraphrasing Bogart, “we’ll always have Thursdays.’’

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(Pinterest)

Do you bet on NFL games?

The NFL hopes you do. The league was religious forever about the corrupting power of legal wagering. Pope Roger I said this, a decade or so ago:

“If gambling is permitted freely on sporting events, normal incidents of the game such as bad snaps, dropped passes, turnovers, penalties and play calling inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.”

Sounds dire. Can’t let that happen. If fans stop believing the games are 100 legit, the league is cooked. Legal betting can never be allowed.

Then the league was shown the money. That’s all it took to shred any sense of morality, or worry that betting would make cynics of all football fans. Now, we have what Roger Goodell thought we’d have.

With 4 seconds to play Sunday, the LA Rams kicked a 38-yard field goal so they could lose to the San Francisco 49ers by 23-30 instead of 20-30. The situation normally would call for a kneel-down. The Rams had no chance of winning, no chance of doing anything but adding three cosmetic points.

It was meaningless. Or would have been, until legal betting turned the world into instant cynics. The spread closed at 7.5. Suddenly, the Rams covered the spread. Let the wondering begin.

Here’s how Rams coach Sean McVay explained his decision. Maybe you can make more sense of it than I could:

“What we were trying to do is we were trying to be able to get a completion to where we kicked the field goal beforehand with the opportunity to be able to . . . if we had hit that deep in-breaking route, it really would've worked out the way that we wanted to," McVay said. "We were going to try to kick a field goal once we got into field goal position to then be able to kick an onside and try to give ourselves the real opportunity to win the game. By the time it got down to it, [I] didn't anticipate that in-cut that we hit Puka [Nacua] running that long and just said, ‘Alright, go ahead and kick the field goal.’ [I] felt like it was an opportunity to be able to not leave Matthew [Stafford] susceptible to an unnecessary heave to the end zone and get an opportunity for our field goal operation. The initial goal was to try to get a two-for-one to where you end up getting into field goal range a little bit earlier with some of the play selections that we had and then ultimately be able to try to have an onside kick to then be able to go try to compete to tie or win the game. Apparently, [Rams V.P. of communications] Artis [Twyman] told me there's a lot of people in Vegas pissed off about that decision. I clearly was not aware of that stuff.”

What?

McVay preferred to leave his field-goal unit susceptible to “unnecessary’’ injury rather than his QB. He hoped to have time to kick the field goal, recover an onside kick, then Hail Mary it for a win or tie. All in four seconds. I guess.

McVay didn’t even mention the best argument for losing by 7 instead of 10: Net points as a tiebreaker for postseason eligibility. Even if that criterion is way down the list — 7th, to be exact — at least it offers some stab at legitimacy.

No one’s saying McVay was deliberately trying to make the day better for Rams fans who took the home guys and the 7.5 points. But everyone’s thinking it. Chew on that, NFL, as you line your pockets with dollars from Caesar’s Entertainment, FanDuel and DraftKings.

From a January 2022 story on casino.org:

In 2021, the first season featuring legal gambling, “The NFL received $1.8 billion in sponsorship money, a 12 percent jump from 2020. The gaming industry — specifically sports betting — greatly contributed. The $1.8 billion represents the total amount that businesses such as DraftKings and FanDuel spent to buy the rights to partner with the NFL. Caesars Sportsbook, DraftKings, and FanDuel are the three big advertisers and sponsors. In part of their official sports betting partner designations, the trio last year committed to directing $1 billion to the NFL over a three-year period.

When is enough money enough money?

The league already owned a money-printing license. TV revenues guaranteed that a long time ago. The NFL is a monopoly. It spent a decade under former pope, Paul Tagliabue, extorting cities for stadium money, our city very much included. It spent decades throwing its concussed alumni under the financial and emotional bus. It does nothing unless it’s seen to have PR merit.

And now, the NFL’s insatiable greed has led us to this: A Sunday at SoFi Stadium where everyone questioned the outcome of a game.

If you took the Rams and the points, good on ya. If you went the other way, well, tough luck, Chuck. The rest of us, those who bet nothing, who want only a weekly escape from life’s cynicism, we’ve suddenly got a hand on our wallets.

It didn’t have to be this way. Well, maybe it did. We are talking about the NFL.

Now, then. . .

THE REDS REALLY COULD USE A STARTING PITCHER right now, yeah? Bless Connor Phillips. Praise DBell’s talent for juggling his pitching crew like they’re flaming swords. That doesn’t change the argument that’s as solid today as it was at the deadline:

The plucky little club desperately needs starting pitching. Even with Hunter Greene back lobbing zeroes.

Si.com

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If you’re really interested in seeing October, you don’t have a Bullpen Day once a week. Half the guys in your rotation don’t go by the name TBD. You aren’t wheeling Andrew Abbott out there beyond what’s considered a safe innings limit for a kid in his situation.

The Dodgers have the 2nd-best team in the NL, maybe in baseball. They added Lance Lynn. He’s 6-2 for them in nine starts. Justin Verlander is 5-3 in Houston, Max Scherzer 4-2 in Texas. Even Michael Lorenzen has four wins and a no-hitter for the Phillies.

There is no statistic (yet) for What The Eyeballs See. What these eyeballs have seen for the better part of four months here is a stretch of good fortune and karma rarely witnessed in a baseball season. It has been a magical summer of everything going right. See: Number of 1-run Ws (34), number of comeback Ws (46), number of times good things happened exactly when needed (routinely).

The Reds have been outscored by 47 runs, a dubious mark that suggests their “Pythagorean’’ record should be 73-81, not 79-75.

Baseball is not a game of stardust happenings, certainly not night after night. More often, it is a game of grind, in which everything eventually evens out, including the bad and good bounces. Do youse believe, as I do, that this has been a season of mostly good bounces for The Club? And that sort of karma is entirely perishable?

Not to take full advantage of the gods’ benevolence could be something this team and its fans will regret for awhile.

I GOT A BIT O’ BLOWBACK from the item in This Space two days ago, re fan violence at NFL games. Some thought I singled out the league’s fans unfairly. I appreciate the feedback. I disagree with it.

I’ve seen too much. As a kid going to Washington Redskins games with my dad, I saw fights in the men’s rooms, on the concourses and in the stands. Covering the Bengals for more than three decades, I saw fights break out before kickoff. The one time in 30-plus seasons I used a restroom that was not within the confines of a press seating area, I slipped on puke.

Any Monday morning in the fall now, you can visit, say, YouTube and find video of fights at an NFL game. That doesn’t make violence any more or less prevalent than it was a few generations ago, only more easily video-ed.

The violent nature of the game fosters the incivility. The prevalence of The Tailgate Party adds to it.

Here’s a story about an incident at a New England Patriots game last week. A fan got thumped in the head by another fan and died. No one’s saying the hit was the cause of death. No one’s ruling it out, either.

Over a football game?

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . One more from Jim Croce and I’ll let it go. A Mobster’s note Wednesday mentioned this tune. I’d almost forgotten it. Delicate, wispy, wise, unusual.