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Since sports betting became legal across the United States, more and more people have complained that sports, especially the NFL, is rigged.
While that theory may make sense to many people, the simple fact of the matter is that more and more people have access to NFL betting sites, especially men under the age of 35.
Those who simply enjoyed watching games are now attempting to figure out why they aren’t winning money betting on the NFL.
The reality is that they probably aren’t good enough to beat Las Vegas in the long run.
In fact, very few people can beat the house, which made an average of 5.1% on every sports bet in Vegas in 2022.
If sports were rigged in any way, that percentage would be much higher and become more apparent throughout the years, especially when we are talking about highly visible games like the playoffs.
We’ll lay out the facts and explain why thinking the NFL is rigged is just silly and why that is beginning to sink in.
We’ll use accurate data and talk about some great conspiracy theories.
What Are the Conspiracy Theories?
Let’s review some of the most popular conspiracy theories about a rigged NFL and explain why they’re not true.
1. They’re Paying Referees
NFL referees’ salaries are very generous, and becoming a referee in the NFL takes years of work.
The public shame and humiliation of being the next Tim Donaghy would just be too much to bear, and the risk would simply not be worth it.
The latest estimates show that the average referee pocketed $200,000 – 250,000 a year, with some top officials earning more than that.
In addition, most estimates indicate that officiating the big game will net a referee an additional $30,000 to $50,000.
Because of past incidents where questionable people have approached officials to change a score or a stat line, Ex-NFL VP of officiating Dean Blandino has revealed that the NFL constantly checks the financial records of NFL referees and those close to them.
They also monitor close calls and whether or not they have an impact on various betting lines.
The NFL knows when a massive bet is placed on an unusual outcome and pays close attention.
Sure, in theory, there could be instances of making a close, controversial ruling go one way or another, but it’s really hard to change the outcome of a game from a referee’s vantage point.
How will you get in the way of one team that’s clearly better than another?
2. They’re Paying the Players
From this perspective, it makes even less sense.
Quarterbacks are the engines running the show and they essentially make or break a team’s performance.
Quarterbacks are also the highest-paid athletes on the field, with Deshaun Watson of the Cleveland Browns the best-paid of them all. His five-year contract guarantees him $230 million.
Other NFL players’ salaries range from $795,000 per year all the way up to Joe Burrow’s $62.9 million average annual figure.
Even if you want to look at the average quarterback, they’re still pocketing about $7 million annually.
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to take such a risk.
Even looking at the other end of the spectrum, the (relatively) lowly paid kickers, you should know how cutthroat their jobs are.
One missed kick in a huge situation could spell the end of a kicker’s career if they aren’t already established as one of the league’s best.
Any kicker who misses a handful of kicks over the course of a season, regardless of how consistent they’ve been in previous years, is immediately on the hot seat.
There are only 32 kicker jobs and nobody’s paying a kicker millions of dollars on the side to throw a game.
Nobody is.
It just doesn’t happen, and the market isn’t there.
3. They Want to Boost the Ratings
People have always watched the NFL and will continue to watch the NFL.
They practically own a day of the week in the United States, and they have a pretty nice hold on Monday and Thursday nights as well.
It’s not like they don’t have a million ways to promote the game and that organic promotion doesn’t need the help of a couple of calls here and there.
The numbers don’t even go up across the board, which can kill that notion automatically.
Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” saw an 11% increase, and fellow streamer Netflix had its first live games on Christmas Day, attracting 24 million viewers.
However, NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” averaged 19.4 million viewers, a small decrease from the previous year, ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” averaged 15 million viewers, a 14% decrease from the previous season, and Fox experienced a 3% decline, averaging 18.4 million viewers.
Across the 2024 regular season, there was an average of 17.5 million viewers per game, a 2.2% decrease from 2023.
Therefore, if the plan is to rig results to boost ratings, they need a new plan.
4. They Want the Kansas City Chiefs to Win
A 2024 spin on the above theory is that the NFL wants the Kansas City Chiefs to win because one of its top players, Travis Kelce, is dating pop megastar Taylor Swift.
Seeing the opportunity for more crossover appeal, the NFL is rigging games so the Chiefs win, and they can show more of Taylor Swift during game broadcasts and tap into a new market of Swifties. That’s the theory, anyway.
We saw this debunked in real-time when the Philadelphia Eagles thoroughly defeated the Chiefs in Superbowl LIX.
This didn’t stop fans and bettors from being swept along with hype around this potential conspiracy.
The Chiefs were coming off back-to-back Superbowl victories and set up nicely for a historic ‘threepeat.’ Throw in some questionable officiating calls and a series of incredibly close games with increasingly narrow escapes for the reigning Superbowl champs, including a last-minute blocked field goal, and you have all the ingredients for a tasty new conspiracy theory.
I don’t think the Taylor Swift angle to this was ever taken seriously. However, there was a shift in the narrative around the Chiefs in the 2024 season. Previously, they were everyone’s second favorite team, and opposition fans had to watch in awe at how much better the team was than the rest of the league. However, due to the built-in parity of the NFL with its salary cap, dynastic runs of success are incredibly hard to achieve. This resulted in a strategic change by the Chiefs coaching staff to focus more on defense, and this made them less entertaining to watch, and the games became closer. Consequently, the narrative shifted to how lucky the Chiefs were to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, again.
It was quite the turnaround to go from the darlings of the NFL to the evil empire in the space of two or three years. Even without the closer, more defensive games, it’s very hard for a team to sustain dominance and be popular. Fans want to know that when they watch a game, anything can happen, and, more importantly, either team can win. In the last year or two, it morphed into a resignation that the teams would play for an hour, and then the Chiefs would win.
Therefore, this theory stems more from desperation to end a period of dominance and reignite the NFL’s ‘Any Given Sunday’ appeal.
Why the Math Doesn’t Make Sense
Still not convinced? Let us explain the math.
NFL’s Value vs. Vegas Sportsbook Winnings
You can harp all you want about how the NFL is rigged, but if you’re a true believer, one of your first points is probably because of Las Vegas and the growth of online sports betting sites.
We can immediately shut down that theory just from a purely mathematical standpoint.
While it’s difficult to put a value on the NFL as a whole, in early 2023, Forbes valued the 32 NFL teams at $163 billion combined.
The Dallas Cowboys are the most valuable football team. Jerry World is worth approximately $9 billion. The Washington Commanders were the last team to be sold, going for $6.05 billion.
If you want to look beyond the actual team values, consider the TV media rights deal.
On March 18, 2021, the NFL signed a contract negotiation package worth $110 billion over 11 years.
The NFL still (for the most part) owns TV, plain and simple, hosting 72 of the top 100 watched programs in 2024. This is down substantially from the top 93 in 2023 and 82 in 2022.
They already have an insanely profitable business that’s bigger than any amount of sports betting could produce.
With all that incredible value, you would think that if there’s a significant amount of money to be made, the NFL and the Las Vegas sportsbooks could work together to make insane profits, right?
Well, not necessarily.
While Vegas has won money in 30 of the last 32 Super Bowls, its total winnings are about 8%.
If you want to compare overall Las Vegas sports betting revenue to slots and table games, you won’t come anywhere close either.
According to a Forbes report, in 2022, Las Vegas brought in $446.7 million in revenue from sports betting on $8.7 billion in wagers across all sports.
Meanwhile, slots brought in $10 billion (22.4x sports betting revenue), blackjack brought in $1.29 billion (2.9x sports betting revenue), and baccarat earned Vegas $1.18 billion (2.6x sports betting revenue).
Sportsbook revenue is just about on par with smaller casino games like roulette ($456 million) and craps ($447.2 million).
They simply have much bigger fish to fry. The NFL is not rigged.
Players and Personnel
There are just way too many people in the NFL to keep a scripted version of the league secret.
It’s simply impossible for everyone to keep a secret, even if it was down to just coaches and quarterbacks.
Looking just at players alone, you’re talking about 1,696 players on active NFL rosters and another 512 practice squad players for a grand total of 2,208 players.
This doesn’t include additional players coming in over the course of a season from free agency and other means.
From a coaching perspective, most teams have about 12 coaches specializing in a certain area.
That’s another 384 people in the house, not including owners, presidents, vice presidents, and other personnel who are high-ranking officials for an NFL team.
Even if you think only a select few need to know these secrets and can change the outcome of a game themselves, there would eventually be whistleblowers in large numbers.
There aren’t, and there never will be.
Bottom Line
If you think the NFL is rigged, you’re probably not winning your sports bets, your fantasy league, or your favorite team is still losing.
In the NFL, things come down to fine margins so bad bets are inevitable. Working out how to bet on the NFL is a difficult task and one that gets more challenging every season.
Nothing has changed over the years except for the increase in day-to-day following because of social media and the sensationalization of many sports talk shows.
The game is still thrilling, athletes are getting better, and games are becoming even closer as a result.
This excitement, uncertainty, and drama from the closest of calls deciding a game one way or another has always been what the NFL is all about.
Is the NFL rigged? Of course not.
