Tag: NBA

The Hidden Game: How Sports Betting is Giving Power to the Mob and the NFL

This is a story that quickly disappeared: the NBA gambling scandal.  However, one of the great things about money is that it reveals a lot about the people who want it. In the gambling world, where easy money is a prospect for those who are lazy, the character of all endeavors is relatively easy to reveal.  And it’s not just the NBA; I would say the rigged games in favor of betting odds are much worse in the NFL.  In the age of legalized sports betting, the question isn’t just who will win the game—it’s whether the game itself is being played fairly. As billions of dollars flow through betting platforms and fantasy leagues, the integrity of professional sports is under more scrutiny than ever. Recent scandals in the NBA and questionable officiating in the NFL have reignited concerns that games may be influenced not just by athletic performance, but by money, power, and even organized crime.

The NBA was rocked by a recent FBI investigation led by Kash Patel, which exposed a network of players and insiders allegedly involved in illegal gambling activities. The scandal implicated figures like Chauncey Billups, Terry Rozier, and Damon Jones, who were accused of sharing confidential injury information to manipulate betting outcomes. The scheme reportedly involved rigged poker games backed by mafia families and the use of cheating technologies like altered shuffling machines and hidden cameras.

This wasn’t just a case of players making side bets—it resembled insider trading. Athletes and coaches acted as “tippers,” passing non-public information to bettors who profited from the edge. The FBI’s involvement underscores the seriousness of the issue and suggests that this may be just the beginning of a broader crackdown.

The idea that sports can be rigged isn’t new. The infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal involved eight Chicago White Sox players who were accused of throwing the World Series in exchange for money from gamblers. Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest hitters, was banned for betting on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds, even back then.  These days, it can only be thought to be much, much worse.

In the NBA, referee Tim Donaghy admitted to betting on games he officiated and providing inside information to mob-connected bookies. His case revealed how easily a single official could influence the outcome of a match through foul calls, clock management, and momentum shifts.

Organized crime families like the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, and Bonanno have long used sports betting as a tool for money laundering and manipulation. With the legalization of sports betting in many states, the opportunities for corruption have only grown.  And would a referee be inclined to rig a game through penalties to cover a margin?  I would think the answer is an emphatic yes, and that it’s a problem that the NFL itself has very little control over.  Players aren’t welcomingly encouraged to criticize the referees.  They may disagree with the calls, but if they want to play the game, they have to honor the game within the game—the sports betting that is the real fuel for the industry. 

While basketball and baseball have their own vulnerabilities, the NFL may be the most susceptible sport to manipulation. Why? Because of the nature of clock management and the subjective power of referees.

In football, a single penalty can stop the clock, reverse a touchdown, or shift field position dramatically. Referees have enormous discretion in calling holding, pass interference, and roughing the passer—penalties that can change the momentum of a game in seconds.

A recent study from the University of Texas at El Paso found that referees disproportionately favor teams with large fan bases, such as the Dallas Cowboys and Kansas City Chiefs. This bias isn’t necessarily intentional, but it reflects the subtle pressures officials face in high-stakes environments.

One of the most glaring examples of potential manipulation came during the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ matchup against the Detroit Lions. Tampa Bay, a team that had been gaining momentum and sitting at 4-1, faced a Detroit team also vying for NFC dominance.

The game was riddled with controversial calls:

• A missed tripping penalty on Baker Mayfield, who was clearly impeded while scrambling.

• A fourth-down catch by Cade Otton that was reviewed twice—despite NFL rules prohibiting double reviews.

• A reversal of a completed catch into a turnover on downs.

• Multiple missed defensive holding calls and phantom illegal contact penalties.

Mayfield, known for his competitive fire, publicly criticized the officiating, saying, “I work my ass off… when things I don’t deem are fair, I’m going to let somebody know.”

These calls didn’t just affect the scoreboard—they disrupted Tampa Bay’s rhythm, shifted momentum, and arguably changed the outcome of the game. For fans who know their team well, the inconsistencies were glaring.

The NFL is a multi-billion-dollar entertainment empire. When one team dominates the standings early in the season, it can lead to reduced viewer engagement and betting activity. A close, competitive playoff race keeps fans watching, betting, and spending.

If Tampa Bay had continued its winning streak, it could have created a lopsided picture in the NFC. By slowing their momentum—intentionally or not—the league maintains parity and keeps the narrative exciting. This benefits advertisers, sportsbooks, and the league itself.

Legalized betting has created a new layer of influence. Referees, who earn significantly less than star players, may be more susceptible to corruption. Even if the league itself isn’t orchestrating outcomes, individual officials could be incentivized to make calls that favor betting interests.

At some point, fans must ask: Is the NFL a sport or a scripted entertainment product?

Like professional wrestling, where outcomes are predetermined to maximize drama, the NFL may be leaning into narrative manipulation. Injuries, rivalries, and comeback stories make for compelling television—but when officiating inconsistencies align too neatly with betting odds, it raises eyebrows.

This doesn’t mean every game is rigged. Players still compete fiercely, and many games are decided by skill and strategy. However, the influence of money, media, and betting creates an environment where manipulation is not only possible but also profitable.

Legal sportsbooks have helped uncover scandals, such as the lifetime ban of NBA player Jontay Porter for betting violations. But they also create conflicts of interest. Integrity monitors like Sportradar and Genius Sports are financially tied to the leagues they’re supposed to oversee.

Betting is now embedded in broadcasts, apps, and team partnerships. Fans are encouraged to wager on everything from coin tosses to player stats. This normalization of gambling makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between sport and speculation.

Despite these challenges, some teams still manage to win. Tampa Bay, led by Baker Mayfield and a strong coaching staff, has shown resilience. Even when calls go against them, they find ways to compete.

But it’s harder. When referees disrupt momentum, call phantom penalties, or ignore obvious infractions, it forces teams to play not just against their opponents—but against the system itself.

Professional sports are no longer just games—they’re entertainment products shaped by money, media, and betting interests. Fans must approach them with a critical eye, understanding that while the athleticism is real, the forces behind the scenes may not be.

The NBA scandal is a wake-up call. The NFL’s officiating inconsistencies are a warning. And the rise of legalized betting is a game-changer.

Enjoy the games. Cheer for your team. But remember: the real game is always happening off the field.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Companies Aligned with China are Failing: It’s not a good idea to bet against America

There has been panic which I’ve explained before to those concerned about the amount of power corporations have.  The worry is that corporations will force us to accept vaccine passports to move around the country, that they’ll push us out of amusement parks if we don’t get woke policies, and that they’ll regulate our lives by generally denying us fun and happiness.  It is essentially the Chinese model that we are seeing play out in the opening days of the Biden administration. Companies like Disney and Coka Cola, who have global aims, have placed their bets that the way to those international markets is through the communism of China.  That is essentially the bet of the NBA, an organization made up of socialist players to go global China style.  So, they are ignoring American markets treating us like garbage because they are going for what they think is a bigger prize in the world of tomorrow under a one-world government ran by the United Nations and influenced by communism. That’s how we arrived here, but I have explained it a different way, and my bets are placed opposite of the international trend.  Those who are betting against America are going to pay for it in a big way. 

Now I love traditional Disney.  I think Walt Disney is one of the great entrepreneurs of our American history.  I have no problem sharing Disney with the rest of the world.  If Disney is broadcasting American values, it’s a great thing.  Disney the Man.  Not Disney, the corporation that woke leftists and Democrat presidential hopefuls now run.  I would offer that these new leaders of corporate Disney, Coke, and the NBA—among others—don’t know what they are doing and have over-leveraged their influence over the American population.  For instance, Disney thinks people are so hungry for their Disney+ service, their amusement parks, and their many restaurants and hotels that they will put up with crazy, radical communist policies in trade for fun.  I would offer that people reject those services in favor of freedom and that market pressures will shift away from those corporations to other options.  Such as Facebook and Twitter assumed that they would have control over the flow of information, but instead, options are erupting everywhere.  The Facebook model is now dying as we speak as well as Twitter.  Their influence is waning due to their activism against President Trump and his 70 million voters.  Disney is suffering the same fate; they are losing billions of dollars in their commitment to wokeness, and I don’t ever see them recovering.  Their decision to leverage their entertainment assets against American traditions is costing them as they speak, and the brand damage is incalculable. 

I have wanted to return to Disney World for a vacation, so I occasionally watch video vlogs of people who cover the parks in Orlando, and what they are reporting is embarrassing compared to my experiences in the past.  Disney World as a vacation spot has been one of the best locations on earth for entertainment.  Not only do they have a collection of the best rides that are anywhere, but they have great employees who carry the company message of happiness and enthusiasm for life.  But this move by the company to go full woke, to empower all the radical leftwing causes, the Black Lives Matters types, the gun grabbers, the rainbow gays on Disney characters, the transgender policies have ruined that positive employee interaction.  I didn’t help to shut down for Covid and never fully restaffing.  With the theme parks at a much-reduced capacity, waiting times excessively high only to be greeted with more and more Covid restrictions, the brand of Disney has been whittled away during the election year of 2020, and their gamble will not be paying off.  You can see it most in the many specialty shops that are closed and appear to be gone forever, the little chocolate shops and souvenir spots that are seldom ever open anymore because of the declined attendance.

This past week, Ron DeSantis in Florida removed all emergency Covid restrictions, so Disney cannot blame the government for its temperature-taking and mask mandates.  That is a liberal policy from the management of Disney as a company that wants to see central government restriction to get the payoff of a culture shift from America to China, where they placed all their bets.  And those bets are now in the multibillion dollars.  That is why they are trying not to show panic, but they look to have lost their pre-2019 market share forever.  The evidence was in the fan reaction to the Gina Carano firing from the Star Wars Mandalorian series because she came out on Twitter as a conservative.  The way that Disney fired her showed they have no idea what is driving market forces these days, and when Star Wars fans rebelled by canceling their Disney+ memberships, the company had to attempt to fix it by hiring her back, or at least to let the fans know they were thinking about it.  With Florida now without Covid restrictions, yet Disney insisting on keeping them going costing themselves even more billions by the month, there are many more Gina Carano-like concessions they will have to make in the future to attempt to regain market share.  That might help.  I might revisit the parks, but I’m not going to spend a lot of money there to see a bunch of closed restaurants, lines that are socially distanced, and having to wear a stupid mask in the hot Florida sun over a communist attempt at insurgency by the management of the Disney Company. 

That has been my message from the beginning of this woke attempt by companies to steer us into political directions.  Money rules, and they can’t cheat that vote.  People ultimately have the power over their corporations, and the best way to make them honest again is by hitting them in the pocketbook. Don’t buy their crap and watch how fast they give up their communist dreams.  They should have never listened to the China playbook.  The market share was never going to come from the East, and stealing it from America was never going to work.  It might have looked good on paper to people too stupid to ask the obvious questions.  But now, the dollars and cents are telling the story quite well.  It’s not just Disney either.  They make an excellent example because their brand is so well known and significant.  Watching them fall the way they have provides a glimpse into smaller corporations that are just as bad off but not obvious to the public.  The NBA gained popularity because of Larry Bird and the great competition with Michael Jorden.  People will be turned off by athletes taking up communist causes.  The corporations themselves do not set public policy; they are created to fulfill a public need.  And so long as they do that, they will make money.  When they think they can steer that policy, they will fail every single time.  The NBA has seriously damaged their brand, likely forever also.  It took a long time to build and only a few years to destroy.  Good luck in China, where they don’t have the money to support those types of endeavors, and they never will.  So, fret not; you have a lot more control over this wokeness than you think.  It’s already coming apart, so let it fall apart.  There are plenty of other things in life to do.  We don’t need companies that aren’t pro-American.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


Share, subscribe, and see you later,https://rumble.com/embed/vciikp/?pub=3rih5#?secret=bniNjt4gII


Sign up for Second Call Defense at the link below. Use my name to get added benefits.
http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Michael Jordan in ‘The Last Dance’: It’s never organizations who win, it’s individuals

All during the Covid shutdowns where sports was obviously hit very hard leaving people cleaving for anything, the ESPN documentary on Michael Jordan ‘The Last Dance’ was showing from week to week giving talk radio personalities something to discuss. Given the unreliability of supply chains to provide me with the amount of bullets I needed for shooting I took it upon myself to make my own at my shop bench leaving me with more hours than usual to listen to those programs, so I heard a lot about ‘The Last Dance’ before I ever watched it, and now that its on Netflix as a complete release for streaming, I was able to catch up. The result was that ‘The Last Dance’ is really something special that captures a time in Americana that most of us would love to see again, and that Michael Jordan in hindsight, especially after watching Kobe Bryant and LeBron James attempt to be just as good as Mike, but falling very short, the trip down memory lane especially as Covid had literally shut down the world was I think important. As I was watching the program I thought back to all those professional sports analysists on talk radio and wondered how they had missed the point of the entire show, the several lines of importance that the show was all about, because they directly led to the problem we are seeing now, where sports and sports figures were hijacked by progressive politics to the point where many won’t even stand for the national anthem. The thing that separated Michael Jordan from everyone else, even today was that he understood his role in sports and what that role was to others, and he never wavered.

I never thought of Michael Jordan as a black man until Barack Obama made it quite clear in ‘The Last Dance’ that he felt the star basketball player for the Chicago Bulls had an obligation because of his skin color to represent progressive civil rights causes. Jordan smartly when under great pressure at the height of his popularity refused to pick a side by saying to several other teammates on the traveling bus “that Republicans buy tennis shoes too.” And there it was, the theme of the entire show, and the very diseased outlook that has contaminated modern sports and entertainment where even baseball stars are kneeling at the National Anthem. Jordan was a capitalist, he had parents who were smart, and they actually forced the young Jordan to visit Nike and hear their pitch to him to develop Air Jordans. They may have been black, but they obviously loved America and the opportunities it could give their young son, and Mike listened to them even when it was tempting to hear other voices who all wanted a piece of the Michael Jordan rock.

Jordan was a businessman, he enjoyed capitalism and he found in basketball an outlet for his true love of winning. He was smart enough to understand that what made him great was his competitive drive and so long as he focused on that, everything else would take care of itself. He did not get pulled into political causes by the drowning people of the world the way LeBron James has, essentially splitting half the country against him. Jordon let his game play do all his talking, to the public he was nice the way his parents taught him to be. To his teammates he was ruthless in his pursuit of perfection which is an element about him that set him apart from every other basketball player in the history of the NBA. It is astonishing to watch ‘The Last Dance’ in hindsight because it’s clear where the NBA is going, and where Nike, ESPN and so many other entertainment venues are lost now that they don’t have a Michael Jordan figure to hook their stars to. They are all dying because as natural looters Michael Jordan carried them all, built them to greatness by association. Without Michael Jordan, they can’t do it on their own and fall into decline. The NBA today is essentially a spokesman for Chinese communism, and people are not excited about it. You don’t see anybody like Michael Jordan playing today. There are good, talented people, but there aren’t players that everyone likes the way that people loved the winner Michael Jordan presented to them.

I always did like Michael Jordan, which is why I took the time to watch ‘The Last Dance.’ I have a similar problem that Jordan does, I obsess over winning and feel I must crush my opponents at everything. I’ve managed a different way to deal with that burden which Jordan never did come to terms with. Instead he used it to his advantage and obsessed his way into becoming the most alpha, of all alpha males in a sport dominated by the top alphas in sports and it was a 24 hour 7 days per week thing that never turned off. When I say I understand Michael Jordan’s competitive spirit, his need to win everything, to gamble anything, and to take any attack on him very personal and to turn it into greatness, I saw that without the good parents Jordan had and other older people to guide him along, Michael Jordan would have easily become another self-destructive individual face down at a Black Jack table in a casino drunk and penniless. But because he found an outlet in sports as guided by his dad, he was able to take those personality traits into a positive direction, and we are all the better for it.

But I wasn’t surprised that Michael Jordan never really had peace, that he worked at being great all day long, seldom hanging out around the house with his family pouring everything into being the best. Most great people could tell the same story yet even knowing that, Michael Jordan’s work ethic was phenomenal. And that is what people saw in him and loved. Jordan never used his skin color as a point of political leverage, instead he used the things he did in life to tell his story and that is what made him a great American and preserves his memory for all time. The interviews in ‘The Last Dance’ with Barack Obama told a lot about the world we are living in. Obama loved Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, but the former President’s below the line beliefs could not grasp why Michael was great. He was left only to observe that he was even though it went against all his socialist views of how the world should be. But Jordan understood the power of his individual spirit and he used that spirit to do great things and because of that, the Bulls were a great team, Chicago had something to cheer for, and America could relate to where skin color didn’t matter a bit. For anybody who insists that America is a racist nation, all they need to do is watch ‘The Last Dance’ and they’ll understand that a culture that can produce a Michael Jordan, that can give a platform for someone like him to speak with action, is nothing close.

Since Michael Jordan’s playing days those who came along with him found themselves just as lost as the Bulls were when he retired twice, and immediately became just an average team. It truly is individuals like Jordan who make greatness and it is the search of capitalism to always find such people. Without those opportunities people like Michael Jordan just stay hidden from the world and explode in on themselves in the corners of life. And the world that the NBA supports now, along with the looter class of politicians like Barack Obama don’t understand greatness. They think like the management of the Chicago Bulls thought, that its organizations who produce greatness, not individuals. Yet, since Michael Jordan has left, the Chicago Bulls have never touched greatness again providing proof that the course everyone is on now is a lost, and empty chase for a utopia that only exists in the hard work of individuals who find greatness by committing to it with their total essence, and nothing less.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

Sign up for Second Call Defense at the link below. Use my name to get added benefits.
http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707