My faith in the integrity of sporting events continues to get shaken.
NCAA basketball officiating is a joke, favoring the home team nearly all the time. I hate it getting justified as “that’s home court advantage”. How tough is it to call a game down the middle and not get influenced by where the game is at? I continue to see home teams get ridiculous number of free throw attempts vs. visitors. Some of that can be explained off by aggressiveness, but I’m sorry, not all of it.
MLB umpiring was pretty terrible in the playoffs as well. They gift wrapped at least one game to the White Sox with the AJ “dropped” third strike play.
The NFL has been getting worse throughout the years, but the Indy-Pitt game, where the Polamalu INT was overturned was one of the first times I’ve seen what looked like an absolute agenda. Then the debacle of a Super Bowl happened, with the Jerome Bettis agenda.
The NBA has always been suspected of having agendas. The following example is very loosely defined as a sporting event. The slam dunk contest was an absolute farce. It was crystal clear to me that they wanted Nate Washington (another Spud Webb) to win it, to help keep the contest alive. While I’ll agree Iguodala wasn’t very imaginative with his remaining dunks (after the ridiculous alley oop off of the back of the backboard), it was absurd for Washington to win. What is the criteria for the dunk contest, judge the dunk on level of difficulty? Do you incorporate a players height into it? I personally don’t think you should, otherwise a short person should win every time. Lastly, something needs to be done with a system in which a player requires 7 tries before they make it once and 14 tries before they succeed again. How can that not penalize a player?? Without a penalty, I would try to dunk with the ball hanging from my teeth over and over again until I finally made it.
The 3-point contest was also a joke. In the first round eventual champion Dirk Nowitski released his last money ball clearly after the buzzer. This allowed him to make the finals and denied two other competitors the chance. I always wondered why they had officials there during this contest, and after the ref missed this one, I still wonder the same thing. It’s not like he had anything to look at other than his feet when he released and whether or not he beat the clock. There were no potential fouls, no 3-seconds, no traveling, etc…just a joke.
And no, I didn’t have money on any of the NBA events.
I find myself being less and less interested in sports as these things happen.
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