ESPN investigating possible OSU point shaving scandal
it sounded like it was football but they didn't say anything specific about it.
That could add a whole new level of depth to the problems there. Of course, we can't assume that there even is an investigation given that the report comes from local radio.
EDIT: I don't even want this to be true. It would hurt the rivalry and the Big Ten.
I want THE Ohio State University to be exposed for every bit of cheating it has ever done. I want John Lennon's "Instant Karma" to be their de facto theme song for the next ten years. They cheated for at least ten years; it's about time they paid for it.
I want the scandal to be so bad that even parents in Ohio tell their kids not to play there. They thought the Ed Martin scandal was funny? They thought "stretchgate" was funny? They thought the Michigan coaching change fiasco was funny? Great.
Now who's laughing?
FtOSU...
Point shaving? How rich is that? Yes, please add the feds into this investigation.
Can someone put a popcorn machine into the sidebar? It could happily pop away to remind us of the spectacle unfolding.
Not quite on topic, but how the hell is point shaving a federal crime?
Because you are falsely advertising something that is rigged as a game of "chance".
Point shaving can sometimes imply involvement with the Italian Independent Businessman's Association or groups like it.
Doesn't make any sense for it to be football. JT is good against the spread.
http://beyondthebets.com/2011/05/30/covering-the-spread-no-coach-did-it…
Yeah, they were something like 11-2 against the spread last year. Tressel's reputation actually made (past tense!) his teams good bets. The lines are set to get action on both sides and Tressel's rep for holding his teams back pushed point spreads down.
OSU u dun goofed.jpg
No.Way.
- Click "share" and then "embed" on YouTube.
- Copy embed link.
- Switch MGoBlog to plain text editor.
- Paste embed link.
- Switch back to rich text editor and look for a box saying "iframe".
- ?
- Profit
Tresselball=Point Shaving
there isn't anything I wouldn't believe
Edit: Embed isnt working, so here's the link:
.....I thought there was something extra refreshing about last night's deluge. I felt another OSU scandal in there, and it was a nice feeling.
3 hours of tornado warnings in Louisville - clearly the storm was just trying to get to Ohio.
That would be the ultimate popcorn moment
...bring on Ms. Johansson,Orville himself could not have imagined popcorn would become such a hot commodity.....
Hmm someone might want to run a site search, because I think this story has legs ;) COUGH COUGH!
The majority of sports fans don't really care about players getting extra benefits. It does nothing to interrupt our enjoyment of the game. But point shaving? That's another matter entirely and it's not taken lightly by sports fans.
If extra benefits result in a team getting a competitive advantage, I certainly care about them.
Right, and as a Michigan fan I'm right there with you. I'm just talking about sports fans in general. The backlash would be much greater nationwide for an OSU point shaving scandal than a loaner car scandal.
My head hurts just thinking about an OSU fan arguing that if it wasn't for the point shaving scandals of the 2000's then OSU would have won multiple national championships...
All you have to do to make their heads explode at that point is just smile and nod. Agreeing with them will make them that much more furious. If only they didn't have a lying, cheating coach, they might have been so much better off.
i'd be surprised if they were trying to cheat to win and point shaving at the same time.
They said it would involve former players, and the cheating to win is a much more recent event.
Pryor is a former player. Just sayin.
I'm not sure I see the contradiction. It seems to me it'd be a lot easier to shave, without suspicion, as a 30-point favorite than it would be in a tossup.
It appears the point shaving is tied to basketball, but there aren't any concrete articles. Apparently Ohio State didn't cover the spread in quite a few games, by close margins, and in a lot of those games they were missing easy baskets late, and consistently missing the front end of 1 and 1's
It's not like they would hit the football program any harder and they won't give the entire athletic department the death penalty.
Their football program has already fired the coach and is headed for NCAA sanctions. At this point I'd rather see their basketball program also get nailed, rather than have it remain intact while the football gets a marginally worse punishment.
I don't think the NCAA would get involved even if point shaving was discovered, unless it was part of a larger LOIC charge (which it might well be, given that was the same time that O'Brien was paying players). I know that Northwestern didn't suffer any NCAA consequences for their mid 90s point shaving scandals (Dennis Lundy and Dion Lee).
I don't remember the specifics of the Northwestern case, but I seem to recall Arizona State getting in trouble. Doesn't the NCAA pretty much have to investigate? Point-shaving gets right down to the integrity of the games themselves.
Neither Northwestern nor Arizona State got any kind of NCAA sanctions. Both those situations were explained as the actions of rogue players either gambling themselves or being paid by gamblers.
I think the NCAA would investigate, but I don't think they'd hand down penalties, unless OSU had gamblers around the program and should have known about it (ie, kind of a Reggie Bush thing).
I can't believe point shaving apparently isn't a big deal to the NCAA. Of all the things to care about, going back and seeing NCAA games that were fradulaunt should be a bigger deal than cars or cash, IMO.
If you're going to hand down program sanctions for money changing hands for playing, shouldn't it be worse when the payments involve fixed games?
I think most examples have been individual cases that the universities have acted very aggressively in cooperating with the NCAA and FBI when suspicions became known. I think the logic is (and I'm just guessing here) is that illegal benefits grant a competitive advantage and call amateurism into question, and academic fraud challenges the ideal of the student-athlete while point shaving is a criminal act of an individual.
Now if a coach or administrator was aware of point shaving and didn't cooperate with authorities, or if they investigated and found out a point shaving athlete was suddently waving unexplained cash around and didn't ask questions, that would likely bring the NCAA hammer down.
One of the articles I looked at in re the Northwestern thing mentioned that the NCAA has connections in Vegas that alert them anytime they see unusual gambling activity or unusual line swings. This would suggest that the NCAA sees point shaving as something that member institutions are not likely to detect. In other words, the NCAA does regard it as a big deal, but a deal somewhat out of the normal scope of compliance departments.
Just posting to say that your last paragraph is really interesting, and probably a good indicator of what goes on.
No one is getting the death penalty, regardless of what anyone would like.
Point shaving is kind of a weird issue. By its very nature, it's going to be limited to a very small number of people and no one in the administration is going to know. The only person who could predictably influence a game's outcome is the starting QB (Pryor in OSU's case) and at this point, OSU can probably throw up its collective hands and say Pryor is a sociopath. If OSU's starting point guard was point shaving, it would be another data point to say the athletic department is totally out of control, which would in theory open OSU up to LOIC and the most severe penalties.
RIght. This is why USC got nailed so hard--Reggie Bush was the only football player against whom the NCAA allegations stuck, but then there was OJ Mayo in hoops (and also the women's tennis team!). Had the violations been limited to just one sport they sanctions likely would have been much less.
Agreed. It rarely comes up in football...also too risky you will actually lose the game if a few things go wrong.