Debunking Super Bowl conspiracy theories

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Conspiracy experts Barrett & Fetzer argue about whether Super Bowl was rigged

For links to stories covered in today’s False Flag Weekly News, click here

By Kevin Barrett, VT Editor

Conspiracy experts Barrett & Fetzer argue about whether Super Bowl was rigged
Conspiracy experts Barrett & Fetzer argue about whether Super Bowl was rigged

As an all-but-certified (!) expert on conspiracy theories – I’ve been studying them for more than ten years, especially the ones that are true – I can tell you that there are a lot of stupid conspiracy theories floating around this year’s Super Bowl.

During today’s False Flag Weekly News, Jim Fetzer and I got into a heated argument about whether Pete Carroll threw the Super Bowl by calling a disastrous pass play. (Watch the video above – the argument starts after the 20 minute mark.)

Jim’s argument, that Carroll threw the game by throwing the ball, is nonsensical. It’s pure 20-20 hindsight. In retrospect, Carroll’s call looks stupid because it failed so abysmally. Had it gone for a touchdown (roughly a 45% probability) Carroll would be hailed as a genius. Had it been incomplete (a slightly over 50% probability), the next play or two would have determined whether Carroll looked like a genius or an idiot. But through spectacular bad luck, a “black swan” interception occurred – a very low probability event with huge consequences.

Russell Wilson’s interception rate in 2014-15 was 1.5%.  That means there was roughly a one in seventy-five chance of an interception…at most. Actually, the odds were probably much lower, because short yardage situation passes are far less risky. Of all 33 post-1998 endgame goal line pass attempts comparable to Seattle’s at the end of the Super Bowl, not one was intercepted. So Carroll could expect odds of an interception between 1.5% and 0%. By NFL standards, this was not an especially risky call.

When a coach takes a risk, he is setting himself up to look like an even bigger genius, or an even bigger idiot, than if he played it safe. Usually coaches play it too safe, because they’re more afraid of looking like idiots than they are eager to look like geniuses. Unexpected onside kicks, for example, are successful 60% of the time – and the payoff of a successful onside kick is much higher than the loss from an unsuccessful one. So theoretically teams should maximize their onside kicks almost up to the point it becomes expected. But that doesn’t happen, because human nature is irrationally risk-averse.

Carroll took a very slight risk, arguably a smart risk, by passing. Mathematically, that risk could be defined as the difference between the very slight odds of an interception and the even slighter odds of a fumble. At the time, that risk looked minimal. With 20-20 hindsight, it looks much larger than it actually was at the time.

Then there is the larger question: If you were going to throw a game, is this really how you would do it? Innumerable instances of sheer freakish luck, cutting both directions, led to the Seahawks having the ball on the Patriots’ one yard line with less than a minute to go. The Seahawks could easily have won had Jermaine Kearse just lurched in the right direction – across the goal line –after making a wildly improbable catch while lying on his back with about one minute left in the game. If the game had been fully thrown, meaning a Patriot victory was decided on in advance, this situation never would have arisen.

During our debate, Jim falsely claimed the Seahawks had three time outs left at the time of Carroll’s disastrous call. In fact, they only had one time out. You’ve got your facts foxed, Jim!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08va1i6LYPc

Had Wilson’s pass attempt gone incomplete, the Seahawks would still have had a timeout left. Whereas had they handed off to Marshawn Lynch, as everyone including the Patriots defense expected, and been stuffed (as predictable runs often are) they would have had to call their last timeout, locking them into predictable pass plays for their last two attempts.

So Carroll’s smart, gutsy call meant that all three of Seattle’s attempts on New England’s goal line (absent a black swan) would be unpredictable and hence unexpected. Running three unpredictable plays – plays that cannot be anticipated and likely stopped – should have a significantly higher chance of overall success than running three predictable plays – the likely result had Carroll opted for the run rather than the disastrous pass.

Jim’s baseless conspiracy theory is an insult to Pete Carroll, who appears to be a man of unusual courage and integrity. I hope Jim will come to his senses and either withdraw his accusation, or at least admit that the arguments he used during today’s No Lies Weekly News were fallacious, and then offer some less fallacious arguments.

Monday-morning quarterbacks love to second-guess coaches’ calls, and this year’s Super Bowl is no exception. Jim isn’t the only Seahawks fan who has crossed the line from typical Monday morning quarterback syndrome into something akin to paranoia.

The London Daily Mail is promoting the even more bizarre theory that Carroll’s unfortunate call was all about race. According to this thesis, Carroll is a racist who wanted a black guy white people like (Russell Wilson) instead of a black guy white people don’t like (Marshawn Lynch) to be the hero. So in the final minutes of a tight Super Bowl, the coach is thinking about race relations, not about how to catch the other team by surprise and maximize his odds of winning? Would that kind of a guy ever rise to become an NFL coach, much less the best one in the business?

To sum up: All the conspiracy theories about this year’s Super Bowl are utterly implausible…all except one.

Mine.

Et voila:

Did Patriot’s coach Bill Belichick – the ball-deflator who has been caught illegally stealing the other team’s signals so he can anticipate their plays – “intercept” Pete Carroll’s pass call, and “pass” the word to his defense so Malcolm Butler could get into position to make that interception?

As Gary Dzen of Boston.com put it:

By now you’ve probably watched the clip of Malcolm Butler picking off Russell Wilson to seal the Super Bowl for the Patriots. No matter what you think of the call by Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to throw the ball in that spot, it’s an incredible play.

The angle below, shot by someone on the sidelines right next to the end zone, shows just how far Butler (No. 21 at the left of your screen) has to come to make the play. Look at the anticipation. Dude knows exactly what play is coming and gets to the spot faster than seems possible.

Call me paranoid, but it seemed to me that the announcers worked way too hard at hypnotizing us into believing that Carroll’s call was horribly bad, when in fact it obviously was not, for reasons I’ve outlined above. That freak interception could never have happened unless the Patriots knew exactly what play was coming. By whipping up anti-Carroll hysteria, were the announcers blowing smoke to cover up the Patriots’ obvious foreknowledge of the play call?

That could explain why the Patriot’s locker room was so eerily calm after the game. They knew they had won by cheating. In the wake of deflate-gate, and now this, they would feel rather…deflated.

And here’s where one of Jim Fetzer’s arguments may have some substance.

Jim claims that billions of dollars more were bet on the Seahawks than the Patriots. So the Sheldon Adelson mob and their friends badly wanted a Patriots victory. With that kind of money riding on the game, might some form of high-tech spying have been used to intercept the Seahawks’ signals and pass them to Belichik? And might the most important “intercept” have led to the game-deciding interception?

If my surmise is right – and it’s just a surmise – Pete Carroll would be the victim of a conspiracy, not a participant.

And Jim Fetzer would turn out to be as right about the big picture as he was wrong about the details.

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Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr. He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.