"Fight Doctor" Ferdie Pacheco on fixed NFL games

This was poted by patchyfogg on BBI at 1/16/06 9:50 PM

So, we had "The Fight Doctor" Ferdie Pacheco on with us the other night on my totally commercial-free, absolutely no one makes a dime from it, Long Island Sports Talk radio show. He's had a fascinating life from pharmacist to doctor to Ali's cornerman to Emmy-winning boxing analyst. But, we did not expect him to get onto the topic of football. Well, he did.

He's written 17 books and hundreds of short stories. His latest short story apparently involves Vince Young, using gambling in the NFL as its plot device.

Dr. Pacheco alleges that a lot of NFL games are fixed, both by the players and the refs themselves. Among other things, he claims that George Blanda would openly brag about all the games that he was throwing, when he was an active player.

And, most importantly, he claims that several of the Baltimore Colts were his patients and told him that he could take the game "flat, no points" in Super Bowl III and that the biggest bookmaker in Vegas told them to "leave the game alone...because it's rotten." He then discusses that game (at which he was in attendance) in detail to make his point.

You can listen to the football-specific stuff (11 minutes) or the whole interview (49 minutes) at http://hosted.filefront.com/patchyfogg

Follow up comments included doubters with opinions like "fixing games would require getting multiple people involved, and countless would have to remain silent, its just not possible." If you need an introduction to NFL football betting, you can find basic sports betting information on Sportsbook information for beginners.

Some people said it is possible. From the Colts kicker missing his field goal like he was trying to miss it 15 yards wide right, but then even if he made the field goal and the game gose to overtime the Colts still don't cover the spread. The Over/Under was 43. Thats a real hard bet to fix though. Much easier to do the points or an actual straight up bet.

Well fixing point spreads would just be hard. One poster thinks the NFL is capable of wanting certain teams to win for financial reasons. He didn't smell a rat in the Steelers/Colts game until that missed field goal. He turned the game off after the INT despite the replay call by Dungy. It was so clearly an INT he assumed the game was over. When he flipped back he saw 21-18 and was lost as to what had happened. Maybe the Steelers coughed it up? The overturn wasn't even a thought.

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