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Tim Donaghy on 60 Minutes

By Jeffrey Standen

It doesn't take much daring to say that 60 Minutes messed up. The seminal investigative news program lost its teeth a long time ago. But still, it would have been interesting and educational if the program had treated the Tim Donaghy story as something more compelling than a banal morality tale about the depths of addiction. 60 Minutes had the first public interview of the disgraced former NBA referee. It consequently had the opportunity for the first serious examination of the scandal that exposed the hidden underside of professional sports leagues, namely that game officials are omnipresent third-players in the game contests and have a mind of their own.

The 60 Minutes interviewer pressed the point repeatedly that Donaghy was guilty of an act of moral turpitude, a description that Donaghy was very willing to concede. Indeed, the one small act of self-preservation on Donaghy's part, coming when he described his conduct as a "bad choice," drew the interviewer's pointed response that Donaghy's choice was more than bad. So let's try "horrible," Donaghy responded helpfully. The one substantive point Donaghy tried repeatedly to make was that the personal vendettas and whims of game referees go so far to determine game outcomes as to render Donaghy's picks correct about 75% of the time. Yet the interviewer's lame follow-up to this telling assertion was a question put to the FBI investigator, of all people, asking whether the NBA had a problem with biased referees. The agent's reluctant agreement was underscored by the interviewer, as if a key point had been conceded. But how would an FBI agent be in position to confirm or deny such a charge? Biased refereeing hardly rises to the level of a federal crime.

I would have preferred that the investigative report have been more thought-provoking. The story about a lone NBA ref who goes bad tells me nothing new, and indeed mimics the NBA's line. But what was the NBA's role in all this? There can be no question that refereeing a game has a strong subjective element, particularly when the game is NBA basketball, which strikes me as the most difficult sport to officiate at its highest level. So many big men collide in such a small space, rendering the constant charge/blocking call all but impossible to make with any practical consistency. Referee calls will be inevitably variable, regardless of whether the referees are motivated by a pursuit of objectivity or base revenge.

Subjectivity in refereeing will always be with us. The question is what to do about it. The NBA did exactly the wrong thing. It made a policy to keep the referee assignments a secret until game time. The NBA did so in order to keep its referees away from the corrupting influence of gamblers, who had they been aware of which referees were assigned to a particular game would have had an opportunity to fix the game. Yet instead of protecting its referees, what the league's policy did was to make it possible for a referee to be corrupted. By keeping referee assignments secret, the league created inside information. Donaghy and the gamblers he tipped used this inside information to gain a betting advantage. In a point overlooked by the interviewer, Donaghy drew this analogy to inside information explicitly.

Had the league routinely released referee game assignments well in advance of the contest, gamblers would have helped the league keep the game clean. Sports bettors leave no stone unturned in seeking even minute competitive advantages. A referee's biases and proclivities (regardless of whether their cause is malign or benign) would likely be detectable in historical game data; certainly sports gamblers would do their best to discover any foul-calling tendencies both for totals bets but also to see if a referee's calls might tend to favor a particular team. How hard could it have been to discover biases? Donaghy was able to pick 75% of the games based on little more than offhand, anecdotal knowledge.

Had the NBA released its referee assignments, it would have negated their importance. Bettors and touts would have competed to use this new information, and in short order the tendencies and biases of individual referees would have been reflected in the point spreads on side bets or in the over/under on the totals bets. I made this point repeatedly on this blog as the Donaghy scandal was unfolding. Interestingly, in its response to the Donaghy episode, the NBA decided to announce referee assignments well in advance of games.

60 Minutes should have investigated why the NBA unnecessarily created inside information, information moreover that was valuable to gamblers and no one else. Why did the NBA make this mistake? As importantly, why do pro sports leagues continue to keep secrets? The NFL won't even release the rules of its game. Major League Baseball keeps secret the formula it uses to rate free agent players; its umpire ratings are guarded like the colonel's chicken recipe. The NBA does not have an NFL-like requirement for teams to disclose injury information. What is going on here? These are games we're talking about. If the NBA had never kept its silly secret, Tim Donaghy would have had no inside information on which to base his bets.

Full post as published by The Sports Law Professor on December 07, 2009 (boomark / email).