Hollywood could not have written it better. The Kansas City Chiefs once again won the Super Bowl as confetti rained down on Allegiant Stadium. Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift cemented their place as America’s Sweethearts. Patrick Mahomes sported a cheeky grin as he won yet another Super Bowl MVP and cemented himself as the biggest threat to Tom Brady’s legacy. Twitter/X was set ablaze, and all eyes were once again on the NFL. But was it too good to be true?
For years, a joke amongst passionate sports fans has turned into the belief that sports leagues, both professional and collegiate, are “scripted.” The winner of the championship is allegedly already determined before the season even begins, and the storylines surrounding each league are completely manufactured. From hockey to soccer, baseball to basketball, many believe each game’s results are determined on a keyboard rather than the field of play.
I do realize that this line of thinking is more of a joke than anything else, but some people genuinely believe that games are either rigged or scripted. Allow me to firmly debunk this theory, because the entirety of sports is predicated on moments that are unscriptable, games and events that can’t be made up
Take March Madness, for example. It is alleged by those who believe script theory that the motive for scripting comes from greed. The biggest teams (Duke, UNC, Kansas) bring in the biggest ratings and money to the NCAA. Last year’s Final Four is completely opposed to that line of thinking. While UConn and Miami are two historic programs, Florida Atlantic and San Diego State are small programs who have little to no sway compared to the Blue Bloods. You couldn’t make up the runs from the Aztecs and Owls last year, and I can guarantee you that this year a team will emerge that no one expects.
If sports were indeed scripted by a shadowy collective akin to the Illuminati, everything we have known as sports fans and everything that we have rooted for over the years would have been for nothing. We’d be about as useless as old men yelling at clouds. Sports cannot and will not be scripted- their very nature demands the best team to win. Sure, sometimes the popular choice wins, but for every favorite winning there’s an upset right around the corner.
One of my favorite sports that is in fact scripted is professional wrestling. From WWE to AEW, it is rare to find thrills compared to some of the greatest athletes on the planet duking it out in the squared circle. However, storylines and match outcomes are almost always predetermined in professional wrestling, with most match results being leaked before they happen. What’s entertaining about wrestling, then, is the story itself and performances of the wrestlers. Sports like the NFL and NBA, though, aren’t about the storylines as much as the play itself, because the results aren’t predetermined. The question is of skill, not story.
In short, the myth of sports being scripted is nothing but a paranoid reach from disheartened fans who don’t like a game’s outcome. Sometimes we don’t want to see the best team win, maybe because it does feel manufactured. But in the world of sports, that’s just the way the ball rolls sometimes. Here’s to hoping for more chaos and less predictability.
Sports Editor
