I can now reveal that I am a deep cover operative, working on a team with with Taylor Swift for the Biden campaign, and it was my job to make sure the Chiefs win the big game, so that she and Travis Kelce could share a big, photogenic smooch on the podium when the Lombardi Trophy was being hoisted triumphantly, and then they would shout “VOTE FOR BIDEN” to thunderous applause from the combined worlds of manly professional sports and adolescent girls. Can’t miss, right? Think of it: the handsome (white) breakout star of a team with a racist name, in a city that straddles the border between 2 very red states, and his (also white) girlfriend, a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed superstar country singer, enthusiastically endorsing our candidate. What’s not to love? Unfortunately we had to pull the plug. Vivek Ramasalami sniffed out our plan, so we had no choice but to abort the operation. There were, however, other considerations that might have made the plan more difficult to achieve than we had originally assumed.
First, it turns out to be really hard to actually rig an NFL game, especially one as widely watched and closely scrutinized as the Superbowl. It became clear almost right away that we would have to focus our efforts on the opposing team, rather than on the Chiefs. There wasn’t really anything we could offer KC that would give them any additional advantage. NFL players are already trying really hard to win, so unless we could come up with something like allowing the Chiefs to play with 12 men on the field, or giving them some kind of automatic yardage advantage on every play, we couldn’t come anywhere close to assuring a victory, and the referees would undoubtedly notice anything like that.
Speaking of referees, we briefly considered simply bribing one of the refs, but opportunities to actually alter the outcome of a game with a bad call are rare, and it can be difficult to make a biased call without it being obvious, at least to the other refs, especially if you have to keep making bad calls to guarantee the outcome you’ve been paid to ensure. We thought about just bribing the entire officiating crew, but that would not only be more expensive, it would also expand the conspiracy to more people, with more chances of being exposed.
So we had to focus our efforts on infiltrating the San Francisco 49ers, and the obvious target was the quarterback. That’s the only player on the field, after all, who can intentionally throw a game without collusion from any other player. Simply by making a couple of bad passes at key points in the game, the QB can tip the balance and make sure that his team loses the game, with no one the wiser. In this, we were a bit lucky. The 49ers’ young quarterback, Brock Purdy (24), only makes about $3.7 million under his current NFL contract, plus a bonus of about $165,000 if his team wins the Superbowl (compared with about $65 million for KC’s Patrick Mahomes), so we felt he might be amenable to tapping into some real cash in exchange for a couple of underthrown balls over the middle. Simple, right? We never actually got to the point of approaching Purdy with a proposal, but I feel he would have at least listened.
Of course, the bribe would have to be substantial. For Purdy to take this risk, and to forego all of the benefits of winning the Superbowl (which are substantial, from immediate endorsements to higher salary negotiations later on). The bidding would have to start at 8 digits, and go up from there. The problem, of course, is whether Purdy would “stay bought”. There’s nothing to prevent him, after cashing our check, from going on Fox News and telling his story for an even bigger check from them. That’s always the problem with corruption: how to keep things quiet down the road. There would have to be some threatened consequences for Purdy if he revealed the plan, but that crosses over from bribery to extortion, which would be handled by a different team.
In any case, It’s doubtful the benefit of even such a bold endorsement would have translated into a meaningful number of votes, especially this early in the year. In fact, it’s likely there would have been a backlash against using a football game for such a crass political stunt, and rightly so. The cost, in the 10’s of millions at least, weighed against the high likelihood of creating a catastrophic scandal that could bring down the entire campaign if revealed, makes this look like an easy decision, but come on! Travis and Tay-Tay!