When considering how close NFL games are, all it takes is one or two calls tilted towards a particular team to significantly change the odds of them winning or losing. Since one person can achieve this, it's not far fetched that funny business may be occurring at some level.

What would that one person have to gain?

What would that one person have to gain?

The better question is if someone was compromised, what would the force behind it have to gain? Regardless if there is anything going on or not, the NFL is absolutely in position to influence the outcome of games. It could be something as egregious as an obvious blown call to something not as obvious like how team schedules are done, how bye weeks are positioned, etc.

Bye weeks are for the most part going to be chosen by the teams. They currently have the option of having it the week following an international game, if scheduled. Very soon there will be 16 international games every year so teams will choices in most all cases.

Schedules are for the most part based upon stadium availability. The final pairings are determined until after the Super Bowl. Events are prescheduled in stadiums sometimes years in advance. The use computers to generate the possible schedules based upon those and other factors. I saw a special on the making of the schedule a couple of years back. Very amazing!

As for the force behind a potential "rigger", what does that force have to gain? Now there are at minimum two people involved. What now do the additional parties have to gain? Vegas is actively involved in monitoring gambling activities to a degree that most would not be able to comprehend. Notice the number of players that have been "busted" by the league for a variety of gambling related activities recently? They were all reported by the gambling industry itself. I understand they can monitor things such as bank banking activities of individuals connected to the game, gambling apps, and other areas that can indicate questionable activity. Some of the players had other people placing bets for them and still got caught. Vegas is serious about anything affecting the integrity of the sport. They're making far too much money regardless of which team wins any individual game to have their cash cow toppled by any impropriety.

I don't see how they could miss the pass interference against us and that will probably bother me until the day I die. I think we would have won the Super Bowl too as we wouldn't have choked it away. Rams kind of had the perfect anti-Brees defense as they pressured up he middle hard, yet we still had them beat. I think we'd had a much better offensive showing against the Patriots.

They didn't miss it. They were all individually too afraid to call it fearing they would be blamed for affecting the outcome of the game while by swallowing their flags they did just that. They are nothing more than humans that are part time employees on the largest stage of the entire world having to make split second decisions. They screwed up BIG time. I was royally pissed and am still pissed, but I have never felt there was anything contrived involved. Just simple incompetence and the lack of a fallback system such as the "eye in the sky" in the most popular sport in the world.

And, yes, I agree we would have made a much better showing than the Rams.