Gambling? Sports? Say It Ain’t So
“Chief Wiggum could you hand me that little black book?” - Moe the Bartender
“Oh, sure thing Moe, I was just using it as a coaster.” - Chief Wiggum
Of the four big sports stories last week, three of them were, ahem, scandals and one was merely considered outrageous. Barry Bonds is the outrageous one, but I’ve written about him already and I don’t particularly care whether or not he breaks Hank Aaron’s record. Of the three scandals, the Michael Vick saga will get the most press for the next few months as we approach the trial date (in the middle of the season no less). The Tour de France will fade the fastest and will probably not merit much American press coverage until it starts up again next summer. (At which time the dominant storylines will be about who is and isn’t using banned performance enhancers and, I suspect, a few very loud teams and individuals proclaiming themselves purer than the driven snow before finishing dismally.) But it is the Tim Donaghy story that will be with us the longest, albeit in mostly inconsequential ways.
Though all the facts aren’t in (Donaghy isn’t even in custody yet), we can say a few things with pretty high confidence. Donaghy is done as an NBA referee, that goes almost without saying. He’s fired for cause, either for betting directly on NBA games or for simply passing information about games he was going to be officiating. Even the latter is enough for termination according to David Stern’s press conference last week. He and a couple of bookies he’s known since childhood are going to be indicted and all of them are in very deep trouble.
I am a casual fan of the NBA and while the specifics of this story are unpleasant it won’t have much of an effect on how I follow the Association. Officiating in the NBA comes in for a lot of criticism, much of it justified. (The obvious joke here is that since the officiating is so bad to begin with, how can anyone tell if it’s fixed?) That one of the referees has been revealed as having acted dishonestly feeds the general sense of unhappiness with the officiating. That’s understandable, but I don’t think this is all that big a deal as far as the integrity of the game is concerned.
The number of teeth gnashing articles that came out right after the story broke was over the top. Unless the NBA finds another ref or two with unexplained assets (and they’d be fools not to vet every single last one of them), this story doesn’t really mean much beyond the fact that Tim Donaghy is a greedy moron with shady friends. NBA fans prone to heckling the officials have gotten themselves a big, fat early Christmas present, but other than that not much is going on here.
ESPN.com has helpfully assembled logs of all the games Donaghy officiated in 2005-06 and 2006-07. By my count he called eight playoff games in that span, three last year and five this year. (Was he a ref on the way up, I wonder?) Only one of those games clinched a series (Game 6 of the Nets/Raptors this spring), and that was in the first round in the East. You need to be pretty far into Butterfly Effect land before you can think this pipsqueak altered the outcome of the playoffs.
Even if he was consciously favoring one team over another in a playoff series, which I haven’t yet seen him accused of, how much of an impact could he really have had? Game 3 of the Spurs/Suns series from this spring has gotten a lot of attention, but even in that game the officiating seems to have been more atrocious than sinister. The people with the most legitimate gripe against this guy are the ones who bet the under on games where Donaghy was deliberately pushing up the score to cover the over/under line. Those people have a right to be pissed off, the rest of us are just spectators.
Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has data that strongly suggests that large numbers (~1%) of NCAA basketball games have points shaved to cheat the spread. Long story short, don’t bet on favorites of more than twelve points. (He’s got a page with links to his press clippings, right at the top is a New York Times article with a succinct rundown of his position.) To me this should be a far larger story than anything Tim Donaghy is accused of. It appears to be widespread, systemic, and enduring. Donaghy is none of those things; he’s just sensational and stupid.
Sporting events have universally unknown outcomes, that’s why we can gamble on them. (And why betting on whether or not Harry Potter or Tony Soprano live or die is inherently flawed). Our sense of sport, and the wagers that invariably follow, are predicated on the idea that the competitions are as close to fair as humanly possible. When something comes along that calls that fairness into question we throw a media fit and the scolding begins. At the professional level there’s more money to be made in honesty than dishonesty (Donaghy threw away a $260,000 a year job), but there will always be people with access of some kind who will choose to make a buck the quick way. Official protestations of zero tolerance aside, the level of corruption we have in sports seems acceptably low.
