JTrain
All-Conference
A lot of you probably know the Tim Donaghy story. He was an NBA ref who was caught betting on NBA games. The FBI investigated and concluded that his gambling winning percentage was around 75%. Anyone who is familiar with sports betting knows that 55% is a good bettor, 60% is a great bettor. Anything above that, in the long term at least, is almost unheard of.
So how did he do it? He swears never to have fixed a game. His method was simple. He would call other officials that he knew and was friends with prior to games they (not Donaghy) were officiating and simply have a friendly discussion about the game. He would get a sense for players that they personally didn't like and players they did like. Just from this information, he was able to have frighteningly high success rates betting against the spread.
Keep in mind that NBA refs are some of the most highly paid sports officials in the world. Almost all of them make over $100K and many of the veterans earn $200K or more. They are expected to perform at an extremely high level, and of course removing bias is a requirement of any official at any level of sports. If these officials' performances can be so significantly clouded by personal bias, what does that say about refs at lower levels?
I don't have any official numbers, but I don't imagine FBS officials make much more than $35-40K a year. It would be expected that they let bias slip in as much or more as the supposedly elite NBA refs. Now consider that the NBA refs allowed bias based on petty personality issues they had with players. Big 12 refs have much deeper reasons to dislike Nebraska. Nebraska's bolting for the Big 10 started a domino effect which very nearly led to the collapse of the Big 12. Most of these refs would be forced to find jobs in other conferences, lower levels of football, or look for another line of work altogether.
So even if you don't buy into any outright conspiracy theory, you would be silly to deny that some very significant bias is at play here (the numbers show this), and it cost us the game last night.
So how did he do it? He swears never to have fixed a game. His method was simple. He would call other officials that he knew and was friends with prior to games they (not Donaghy) were officiating and simply have a friendly discussion about the game. He would get a sense for players that they personally didn't like and players they did like. Just from this information, he was able to have frighteningly high success rates betting against the spread.
Keep in mind that NBA refs are some of the most highly paid sports officials in the world. Almost all of them make over $100K and many of the veterans earn $200K or more. They are expected to perform at an extremely high level, and of course removing bias is a requirement of any official at any level of sports. If these officials' performances can be so significantly clouded by personal bias, what does that say about refs at lower levels?
I don't have any official numbers, but I don't imagine FBS officials make much more than $35-40K a year. It would be expected that they let bias slip in as much or more as the supposedly elite NBA refs. Now consider that the NBA refs allowed bias based on petty personality issues they had with players. Big 12 refs have much deeper reasons to dislike Nebraska. Nebraska's bolting for the Big 10 started a domino effect which very nearly led to the collapse of the Big 12. Most of these refs would be forced to find jobs in other conferences, lower levels of football, or look for another line of work altogether.
So even if you don't buy into any outright conspiracy theory, you would be silly to deny that some very significant bias is at play here (the numbers show this), and it cost us the game last night.
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