Funny no one brings up horse racing. except for the very biggest races I would say 80% of them have a 'winner' before the race starts. They dont all come in obviously but many races will have a couple horses that are supposed to come in together.

Watch TVG sometime and look at the pay outs. There was just one the other day. Two big odds came in, like an 80 dollar winner and a 15 dollar winner and the double paid less than the winner of the first race. it was explained away as a guy had it 100 times somewhere, or he wheeled a horse in the second leg. And that was only known because it was 'investigated' because it was so obviously bad they had to make a public statement.

We fixed horse races for years back east. But even in a fixed race you dont always win. Just like with sports. NBA is the easiest teams sport to fix because of the way scoring goes. Thats why they say you only need to watch the last two minutes of an NBA game to see who wins. Refs can let it go for 46 minutes for the most part, and in 120 seconds completely change the outcome versus the spread. Boxing is obviously the easiest over all sport to fix. You just need one guy to lay down and take it.

Football all you need are a couple holding calls or a phantom false start or something to take points off the board, kill a drive. Whatever. They build it in too, as announcers are trained to say "well they can call holding on every play'. So that is now embedded into everyone who watches the game. So people are trained as well. So when a hold is called, even a questionable one not many people have a long lasting emotional feeling about it. Another one, the tuck rule. I watched sports for 20 years before I heard that one come up. Now it is the best catch phrase around and a rule that is cited at least 2 or 3 times every Sunday. Where was it before that game?

Baseball you get an ump who messes witht he strike zone. But now a days it is a lot harder since they grade them with the software they have so umps have to be really really good at it. But they can influence totals to be sure.

But that is the thing most guys think the fixes are to get one side to win over the other, which sometimes they are. But the easiest thing to do is manipulate the scoring to make over unders almost automatic. You cant automatically say Lakers will beat Utam tonight (even if lakers were halfway decent) but you can manipulate the scoring to make sure both teams (or maybe even one team) scores X amount of points.

Is it rampant? Probably not. But I would say it is commonplace in NCAA hoops and the NBA. With enough games fixed to make up a clearly definable percentage of overall games. I also think NCAA football has more thana few where the refs are told to make sure certain teams get advantageous calls. Simply bcause if anyone doesnt think the powers that be in the BCS would want that to happen just dont get it. But eben with all that the BCS gets exposed year after year after year for being a joke. But the next year i s all forgotten and people move on. That is the beauty of 'conspiracies' and monopolies not enough people are interested in them to make them worrisome to the guys running the show.