The Sports Talk Theory of Conspiracy Theories

On the Super Bowl and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Photo by Jacob Hodgson on Unsplash

I rarely listen to sports talk radio during my work commute. The day after the Super Bowl, however, is an exception. That was particularly true of Super Bowl LVII, because it was a game tailor-made for sports talk. On the one hand, you had a great, see-saw battle between the two best teams in the league. The losing quarterback played the best game of his professional career and the winning quarterback surmounted injury while playing the most disciplined game of his career.

On the other hand, you had a late defensive holding penalty that took the air out of the last two minutes. My initial reaction was that it was a BS call. The Ringer’s Danny Kelly summed up perfectly why it was a frustrating end to the game:

By the letter of the law, it was probably the correct call. And Bradberry even admitted after the game that he tugged on Smith-Schuster’s jersey. But in a critical moment like that, in a game in which referees had been consistently allowing corners a little extra contact and more latitude for physicality (see: a first-quarter third-down throw to Smith-Schuster in which the refs allowed even heavier contact from the defender), it felt like a fickle overreach. It was literally the only holding call in the game, by either team.

So this is the perfect situation for sports talk. The problem is that as I was listening to sports radio on my way in, the hosts were not just complaining about the call — several of them posited a grand NFL conspiracy in which “The League” leaned on the refs to tip the scales in favor of the Kansas City Chiefs and its MVP quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

This is, how you say, insane. First of all, by the numbers that penalty was not all that significant; ESPN’s win probability went from a 75% likelihood of a Chiefs victory to an 80% after the call. Second of all, up to that point most of the 50-50 calls in the game had gone against the Chiefs. The most glaring of these was what seemed to the naked eye like a catch-and-fumble by Miles Sanders that would have led to a Chiefs touchdown before the refs overturned it. That seems like a funny way of rigging the outcome for Kansas City. Finally, even if one thinks the NFL could lean on the scales in this manner, doing so in this way cuts against their interest — which was for an exciting end to the game. The defensive holding call did the exact opposite of that.

To be fair some of the sports radio hosts pointed some of these things out. But this didn’t stop other hosts and a lot of callers from articulating a very weird conspiracy.

I bring this up because one of the common laments about mainstream media coverage of politics and foreign policy is the ways in which it implicitly borrows tropes from sports coverage. Think of the horse-race framing of political campaigns, or the “who’s up, who’s down?” framing of various international disputes.

My worry, to be blunt, is that what is now migrating from sports talk to political talk is the conspiracy theorizing.

In some ways this is a natural extension of Ideas Industry-like trends of the erosion of trust in authorities, experts, and institutions. And there is such a thing as a healthy degree of distrust, because out institutions screw up a lot. Still, folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene are only the craziest manifestation of a trend that goes beyond distrust to absurd faith in the conspiracy-like powers of U.S. government institutions.

Why does this matter beyond intrinsic concerns about the health of the Republic? Well, there’s the weird stuff going on regarding… um… unidentified flying objects.

As CNN’s Peter Bergen notes, the increase in observed UFOs — they’re called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) these days — is worth remembering when considering what has happened over the past week:

In the wake of those actions, the report by America’s intelligence community is worth examining since it may shed some light on what is happening here.

January’s UFO report had a striking finding: The number of UFO sightings significantly increased between March 2021 and August 2022, during which time 247 new sightings were reported, mostly by US Navy and Air Force pilots and personnel. That’s almost double the 144 UFO sightings reported in the 17-year period between 2004 to 2021.

I am on record as taking UAPs seriously. I am glad to see them being investigated. But I do worry that the conspiracy-minded will be using the third encounter of the close kind to posit a cover-up or a huge reveal that I am unconvinced is merited.

My hunch is that what is going on is simpler than that: in response to the Chinese surveillance balloon, U.S. officials are now looking for things they hadn’t been looking for in the sky before, and they are finding a lot of air clutter. Bergen noted that, “the report by the US intelligence community found that a large number of those sightings, 163, were balloons… while 26 were unmanned aircraft systems, i.e., drones.” I have to wonder if that is what is driving the current sightings as well.

Over the last twenty years the government response to UAPs has shifted from suppression to the system working surprisingly well. But I fear that just as crazy conspiracy theories are postulated about the Super Bowl, we will be seeing similar coverage about UAPs over the next few days and weeks.