{"id":20810,"date":"2024-03-12T19:09:25","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T03:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/?p=20810"},"modified":"2024-03-12T19:10:12","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T03:10:12","slug":"football-championship-accused-of-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/football-championship-accused-of-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Football championship accused of fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Written by: Liberty Miller | Lifestyle Editor<\/span><\/p>\n

The recent Super Bowl match sparked more controversy than usual under the watchful and neurotic eyes of crazed pop star fans and disillusioned supporters of the sport. While most large, televised matches and championships typically garner a small minority of antagonistic outliers claiming that the competition was \u201crigged,\u201d or that the referees were bribed to throw the game, the Super Bowl has gained an extreme amount of erratic misinformative hearsay on the topic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

From the perspective of a non-athlete, it may seem feasible that this could be true, their inside knowledge being collected from viral internet videos like WWE and bad calls from referees. However, as an athlete, this is a gross misconceptualization of the processes behind large professional sports organizations, and it\u2019s disrespectful to everyone involved in the administrative, coaching and athletic process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A player from Western\u2019s football team, sophomore linebacker Kenny Brown, chipped in on the situation \u2014 \u201cI did think it was super sketchy for a receiver to be left so wide open against one of the best defensive teams in the league, but it\u2019s easy to get lost in the moment. Especially against a quarterback as special as Pat Mahomes. There were a lot of holding calls that went unseen for the Chief\u2019s o-line, but they\u2019ve never been called for holding in a championship game or higher. Which is kind of sketchy, but I thought San Francisco just choked in the end,\u201d Brown said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Any athlete would recognize that as hard as it is to correctly perform a game plan in a match, it would be even more difficult to maneuver an intricately scripted match. In a way, it would be similar to a dance performance. It’s hard to imagine pulling off a purposefully choreographed performance with five or six people, but illogical to think that is possible on a field with 22 players and six referees, much less on the national stage with a championship ring on the line. At the very least, this line of thinking is rather short-sighted and lacks perspective, and at its worst, it discredits the work of all the athletes and coaches in all teams across the league that compete for the championships, as well as disregards the administrative staff, trainers and other support careers that go into making the championships happen. Coach Cori Metzgar is the director of sports performance at Western, and had a few things to say about how these theories affect the people involved. \u201cIt completely discredits all the hard work they do, they put in so much effort, time and energy to be the best, I believe it makes a joke of all they do, which is the opposite of what they are. As a strength coach myself, if someone accused me of cheating or scripting the outcome of our season, I\u2019d feel hurt and disrespected because I spend the majority of my life with the sole purpose of getting my athletes ready to compete at the highest level they can.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n



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Contact the author at howllifestyle@wou.edu<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1094,"featured_media":20811,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1791],"tags":[2277,1380,73,2275,1611,246,2276,2020],"class_list":["post-20810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion-special","tag-chiefs","tag-controversy","tag-football","tag-football-championships","tag-san-francisco","tag-sports","tag-sports-commentary","tag-superbowl"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1094"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}