With gambling now legal in almost every part of the country, it seems NFL officials have come under more scrutiny this year. Whenever there’s a bad call, you’ll almost always hear at least one fan screaming that the “fix” is in.
While the NFL has never had to deal with an officiating scandal, there have certainly been instances where officials have been approached and asked to manipulate games, according to Dean Blandino, who ran the NFL’s officiating department from 2013 to 2017.
While recent interview on the Terrible Announcement PodcastBlandino was specifically asked if he was aware of any situations where an official may have been approached about fixing a game by effecting “a score or a stat line.”
“We’ve had situations where people have been contacted,” Blandino said. “We’ve always told our game officials because they’re in hotels — they’re traveling during the season — we didn’t want them wearing NFL-branded gear. We wanted them to be inconspicuous because somebody sees them. and ‘Oh, those are the NFL officials,” and then you never know. You don’t know who you’re going to run into. And they know they have to go to NFL security if something like that happens, and it has happened in the past.”
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Blandino mentioned that one reason the NFL has been able to avoid an officiating scandal is because the league has dozens of safeguards in place to prevent something like this from happening. That includes putting each official through a rigorous hiring process.
“The NFL has so many controls in place, just to become an official,” Blandino said, by Terrible Announcement. “They’re looking at all your business associations. They’re looking for conflicts of interest, all that, bank accounts, everything. And there’s checks during the season. And so, they’ll look to see if a game official has $10 in his bank account on Friday, and then they run a game , and now it’s $100,000; that’s a red flag, right? So, you check those things. You check the betting lines and look at how calls affect those lines and it’s their. individual officials that are involved in more of those calls. It is a massive, massive undertaking. Because what the league doesn’t want and what we never wanted was a situation like what happened with the NBAright?”
The NBA had a nightmare situation in 2007 when it emerged that referee Tim Donaghy had bet on games and manipulated the point spread of games in which he was directly involved. Based on the safeguards the NFL has in place, it sounds like Blandino. don’t think the NFL will ever deal with a similar situation.
