Teams that were ahead scoring on the last play

[rhickok1109]

Mildly off-topic, but perhaps I'll be forgiven...

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a Class D team called the Green Bay Bluejays. Their manager was Phil Seghi, who later became GM of the Cleveland Indians and was the guy who hired Frank Robinson as MLB's first black manager.

The team had a catcher named Frank Biskup, who was very good defensively but not much of a hitter. Seghi kept telling Biskup that he had to cut down on his swing to be a better hitter, but Biskup couldn't or wouldn't do it.

The Bluejays had a big lead in the bottom of the fourth inning of a game when rain began to fall heavily. Seghi told his hitters to swing at the first pitch to make outs quickly so they could get into the top half of the fifth and make it an official game. Biskup came up, took a half-hearted swing at the first pitch, and hit it over the leftfield fence!

The moral is that it can be hard not to score even if you try

[Reaser]

The moral is that it can be hard not to score even if you try

Along that line, when coaches put in the backups and call dive plays repeatedly, the backups still want to run hard, not fall down after 2 yards just so the other team feels better. So you'll see players who otherwise never play score TD's that "run up the score" even when the coach is just trying to run clock.

Though you mostly see that at the HS and college levels.

[John Grasso]

The moral is that it can be hard not to score even if you try

A personal example of that -
I was once bowling in a company bowling league where each week's scores
were summarized in a weekly newsletter with the high for the week
at the top of the page.
One of the bowlers in the league was a little guy (about the size of a jockey)
who probably hadn't bowled before that season and was averaging about 110.
One week his team was bowling mine and he had an exceptional game, about 175.
Although my team had outscored his and had the game won when I bowled the last frame I deliberately
tried to allow him to have the week's high game and on my last frame aimed
directly at the head pin figuring I would leave a split. Of course, as luck would
have it all the pins fell and I nosed him out by a pin.
Fortunately, I was also the editor of the newsletter so I conveniently neglected
to mention my score that week allowing him to headline it.

[Todd Pence]

I guess if Brian Tuohy were on this thread, he would insist that all of the forgoing examples were mandated by the mob in order to insure that the winning team covered the spread.

[Bob Gill]

I guess if Brian Tuohy were on this thread, he would insist that all of the forgoing examples were mandated by the mob in order to insure that the winning team covered the spread.

I don't think so. Wasn't his main thrust that the NFL was doing the fixing -- deciding who would win according to which team had the more compelling story line? I thought it was something like that, although the only one I'm really sure of was his fable of the league wanting the Saints to win over the Colts to compensate the people of New Orleans for the suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (Since the hurricane had come four years earlier and the Saints had been in the playoffs since then, it seemed to me that the NFL took its own sweet time in trying to help out the city -- but that's another issue.)

Anyway, I did think his idea was that the NFL itself was orchestrating everything.