What is the least corrupt pro sport (by process of elimination)

http://www.animateit.net/data/media/feb2013/badm19.gif

ah shit I knew I was forgetting a big one

I guess soccer. American Football obviously the most corrupt bc of concussions. I'm only a fan of baseball and I don't care if players use steroids. They used amphetamines for years, what's the difference? it doesn't compromise the integrity of the game. and it's a choice, you can risk your longterm health and use steroids if you want, but you can't avoid getting beat up in football. then again, it got to a point where so many players were using steroids that other players felt pressured to start using just to keep up, but it's not something inherent to the game itself.

I guess soccer.

FIFA...?

I thought soccer was a big writhing mass of bribery scandals with the occasional ball kicked around. I'll pick baseball, but the real answer is probably "Other (ping pong)."

xp

yeah Soccer seems like the worst by some margin

imo it's either baseball or basketball. can't think of too many scandals involving the latter.

w/the NBA seems like scandals are usually of the "players behaving badly" variety

which seems relatively benign next to some of the chronic, broader institutional problems these other sports have

fwiw nomar's gif is badminton.

Some ppl are convinced that juicing is endemic in the nba; also the rigors of high level hoops on enlarged physiology seems to send tall dudes to an early grave.

i noted a stat on one of the hoops threads, and that is that there are so few 7 footers in the united states that 17% of them end up playing in the NBA.

no cricket no credibility

baseball seems relatively free of match fixing and PEDs and it has the best union in pro sports so the only people who get 'exploited' are minor leaguers and rookies..

it does have a problem with being too white and a little bit racist when it comes to enforcing the dumb unwritten rules.

NBA officiating is generally held to be pretty shitty/rigged, right? Also, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_NBA_betting_scandal

The NBA seems pretty slack about PEDs, but no storm around that has ever broken out, so as a sport it looks pretty clean.

idk what a PED is

baseball had congressional hearings about steroids iirc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogenesis_baseball_scandal

baseball is pretty clean and even the PED thing was overblown hysteria. the NBA might have some doping issues going on but i don't find the sport itself problematic and the game is fun to watch, unlike the NFL on the first count (and increasingly the second.)

the NFL is the only sport that recently had a star player who was also a serial killer

that we know of

idk what a PED is

acronym for performance enhancing drug(s)

NBA officiating is generally held to be pretty shitty/rigged, right?

like in the NFL the fouls can be so subjective that fanbases are always going to complain about this, but IMO it's been pretty good the last few years.

meanwhile, I just remembered that the NFL, an organization that makes billions of dollars per year, just recently hired high school refs to officiate pro games cuz they didn't want to pay the real ones. which only ended due to a high-profile, nationally televised game being swung at the last second by a call that was obviously incorrect.

the NFL is the only sport that recently had a star player who was also a serial killer

Wait what?

Baseball has a centaur problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Hernandez

baseball is pretty clean and even the PED thing was overblown hysteria.

this is a pretty interesting read:
http://deadspin.com/5937432/was-mlbs-juiced-era-actually-a-juiced-ball-era

The most glaring finding was the effect of the tolerances. According to the study, "two baseballs could meet MLB specifications for construction but one ball could be theoretically hit 49.1 feet further," which breaks down to 8.4 feet attributable to being on the light side of the tolerance for weight (5.0 ounces, as opposed to 5.25 ounces) and another 40.4 feet attributable to being on the high end for the coefficient of restitution (.578). Given that finding, it's not difficult to imagine how the slightest differences in the balls from batch to batch or year to year could lead to a plethora of towering 425-foot home runs instead of 375-foot warning track fly balls.

BUD SELIG JUICED MY BALLS

What are the big scandals of the hockey world? I imagine there must be some. Also, is non-ice hockey big in the States or does 'hockey' just mean ice hockey?

is there another kind of hockey?

oh field hockey, right. yeah there's no pro field hockey in the states to speak of.

Er, yeah. I think of standard hockey as the game played on normal-type courts (indoor or outdoor) and with a ball, ice hockey is hockey played on ice, hence the qualifier.

Though I have just looked it up on wiki and apparently what I think of as hockey is field hockey, and either field hockey or ice hockey can just be referred to as 'hockey', depending on context. That seems like a recipe for confusion, but then we struggle along with football/football, so, eh.

That was an xp, not sure why I didn't edit my post when I saw the second reply. Oh well.

I bet there are some major lacrosse scandals that none of us know about.

I've heard the air hockey pro league is rife with corruption

no cricket no credibility

― μpright mammal (mh), Tuesday, April 19, 2016 7:28 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cricket belongs on a LEAST corrupt pro sport poll?

golf

my first thought was hockey but i don't know the sport well enough to know if it's true.

Strip Poker

Ice hockey seems innocent until you hear about the recent wave of suicide/OD by ex-players with brain damage.

Also if we extend ice hockey to the KHL/Russian league I'm sure we can find plenty of corruption there.

Are concussions inherently corrupt I ask myself

corruption of the brain

if non-us leagues are included in reference to hockey, then so should baseball.

and if that is the case, baseball players habitually abuse steroids in the dominican republic. it has been reported that steroids is so widespread and easily available that some are not even illegal there. and a lot of the players in the us who were abusing it were actually of dominican origin. i would also pose the low-bar challenge of finding corruption in the cuban and venezuelan baseball leagues, though i've not searched myself.

nhl scandals or corruption, much like the nba, involve physical abuse in and outside the rink. a recent one that comes to mind is the deportation of la kings defenceman slava voynov due to domestic violence. hitting and injuring goalscorers or key players is also controversial with the league issuing varying degrees of punishment that some feel are not warranted.

like someone mentioned above, mental illness is a problem, which maybe manifests itself through violence, and this is encouraged by the use of instigators and reinforcers.

the big five leagues (nfl, nhl, nba, mlb, and english premier league) have equal amounts of corruption, but not all in the same areas, making the thread's question a loaded one. it is a complex issue and if all offences are considered to be equally immoral, then you can pick your least favourite sport and nominate that one. it is also worth considering how much a particular league perpetuates it.

StarCraft

What about tennis? The recent meldonium thing with Sharapova is the only tennis doping scandal I've ever heard of.

Lol

What about tennis? The recent meldonium thing with Sharapova is the only tennis doping scandal I've ever heard of.

Huge tennis match fixing scandal under investigation: http://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/the-tennis-racket#.jbJZkPZp2j

Not shocked at all by another cycling scandal, but the technology to hide motors inside bicycle frames is fascinating in a "whoa, they can do that?" way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/sports/cycling/with-a-discreet-motor-doping-the-bike-instead-of-the-cyclist.html

no cricket no credibility

LOL you can hardly be more wrong!

Is it possible that the answer to this is actually rugby?

Probably :(

It's whichever sport has the least money in it, likely.

Ultimate Frisbee it is then

Unless a sport has a pretty vigorous anti-PED program, it's probably rife with PED misuse. The idea that a sport like basketball would be without PED seems very unlikely to me. They're all corrupt, but some of them are good at hiding it.

Voted soccer, which come to think of it was dumb. Even if they're all corrupt, not all of them are FIFA-level lets-let-them-kill-thousands-of-guest-workers-to-host-this-tournament corrupt.

"corruption" shd be some sort of ratio between amount of money in the sport and amount of notable dodgy dealing so no-budget shit can't count

i don't think "corruption" is the right bag for the wide array of shitty behavior being described itt

well I was tempted to just go with "worst" but that's even more vague

yeah, i don't mean to nitpick, just thinkin bout what it all means etc...

pro league of legends, obviously

hah I assume every one of those guys pops adderal like a fiend

exactly, level playing field

All the scandals tied to golf are because of corruption among its amateur player set, i.e. rich fuckheads? Am I missing something?

oh shit awesome you guys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sporting_scandals

golf stuff off the top of my head:

- augusta not letting women in
- vijay cheating
- anchor putters

guess that's not corruption, just regular lame bullshit

that dude they wouldn't let ride a cart

not a pro sport, but there's probably nothing more corrupt than american college football (and basketball, to a slightly lesser extent)

NCAA football and basketball would definitely win.

I bet there are some major lacrosse scandals that none of us know about.

Ha I was going to name check lacrosse just because there's so little money in it in the US that pro players also have day jobs.

Clocking out early scandal follows last month's devastating reports of using work laundry facilities to wash kit, has this slum sport any new depths to reach

hockey seems least corrupt imo but part of that is prob comparatively less attn on it

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Whoever said "StarCraft" - nope:

http://kotaku.com/match-fixing-report-shows-how-gambling-has-ruined-korea-1772739147

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Football (American) 	1

Very funny crank yanker here.

Baseball is run pretty above-board these days (unlike the out and out collusion that happened in the past), has the strongest union in American sports, huge average and top end salaries though players get a relatively low percentage of overall revenue (~40% IIRC vs 50%+ in the other major sports). It's all built on TV deals that can't last in the age of cordcutting, but for now everyone's winning.

Minor leaguers are exploited but less so than the kids forced into college to play football or basketball.

Shocked that basketball won - between questionable officiating and the owners forcing a lockout even though they were all profitable, the league is pretty fucked up.

ILH wins

the juicemen always come out on top

otm

4 soccer voters really need to explain themselves