Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2019 January 27

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January 27

NFL description

On the nfl wiki the organization is listed as a sports league. Yet in numerous court documents it claims to be sports entertainment. The page is locked and should be changed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1702:26B0:30C0:79F3:4E1B:1559:715 (talk) 16:08, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

If you wish to make a suggestion about Wikipedia's National_Football_League article, please post it at Talk:National_Football_League.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 16:58, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

How is the National FOOTBALL LEAGUE not a sports league? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:24, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Also, is it not both? A sports league provides entertainment through sports. It can be both at the same time. I don't see why the OP finds that confusing... --Jayron32 14:40, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't follow the NFL, so I can't really comment, but in answer to Jayron, it seems that you can differentiate normal sports from sports entertainment (at least according to our article). If this is accurate, it may be worth working through, though I agree that the talk page is the place to do it. Matt Deres (talk) 14:07, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

This is apparently in response to the Saint-Rams game. Due to a missed penalty call, the Rams won. People are claiming that the game wasn't an actual game. It was fake, like WWE. So, they are arguing that the league isn't sports, it is just entertainment. I don't see a reason to discuss it. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 14:43, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

AH. Everytime a referee misses a call in any sporting event ever, since the history of time, fans of the team that ended up on the wrong end of the call insist it is because the entire league is fixed, or the referees are being paid off, or whatever. Does that stuff happen? Yes, sometimes the refs are on the take, for example Tim Donaghy or Black Sox Scandal, or whatever, but the notion that the entire sport must be "fixed" because one ref blew one call in one game seems like a teensy bit of an overreaction. If that's what this is about, then yeah... --Jayron32 15:21, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Just a small correction, in the Black Sox Scandal, it was the players who took money, not the umpires. Dick Higham is the only major league baseball umpire ever punished for taking money to fix games. --Xuxl (talk) 15:58, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes. In any case, the games were fixed. And they weren't the only case of "fixing" games in baseball, just the worst one. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:02, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Which would account for the lone entry from that user being this "question". It may be time to box it up. One tidbit: ESPN originally stood for "Entertainment and Sports Programming Network". Also, there's a principle that says don't assume malevolence when it could just be blundering. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:00, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Hanlon's razor. Also, it isn't blundering. The particular specialized usage of "Sports entertainment" to mean "non-competitive athletic endeavor whose results are scripted" is unique and particular to professional wrestling, and as such in contexts outside of professional wrestling, "sports entertainment" doesn't mean the same thing. It can just mean "sports". The OP is clearly mistaken that its use by the NFL means anything. --Jayron32 18:35, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

I know almost nothing about the NFL. But I'm guessing what they call themselves depends a lot on the context and situation. For example, they probably weren't emphasising they were sports entertainment when they were fighting sports gambling legalisation [1] [2] [3] since one of their stated concerns in partnership with other sports leagues was it would "irreparably harm amateur and professional sports by fostering suspicion that individual plays and final scores of games may have been influenced by factors other than honest athletic competition." And they also said "We are asking for core standards, as a crucial element of a federal and state partnership, to protect the integrity of our game and, by extension, the millions of fans who are your constituents." What the NFL called themselves when they were partnering with daily Fantasy football (American) companies to to promote legal gambling not gambling [4] [5], I don't know. Nil Einne (talk) 11:11, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

The point is that a sports league is still providing entertainment. People are, quite literally, enjoying themselves watching it. If they called themselves sports entertainment, it doesn't mean there is some grand conspiracy to defraud the sports watching public. It's a league. Of sports teams. Which people find entertaining to watch. The English language is not that confusing. --Jayron32 11:53, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

That seems completely irrelevant to my point. Whatever the reason NFL emphasises they are sports entertainment sometimes, it's likely there is a reason. This has nothing to do with grand conspiracy but rather that different terms convey different sentiments or different meanings, and the NFL is a multi billion (I assume) dollar organisation which yearly probably spend millions if not tens of millions on lawyers, and maybe tens of millions if not hundreds of millions on PR. They chose what they say and when they say it carefully. This doesn't mean every single usage of every single phrase gets hundreds of people hours of thought. But it does mean it's unlikely it's just random that the NFL sometimes emphasises they are sports entertainment and sometimes just emphasises that they are a sport. I agree the fact that people are convinced the usage means that the NFL is fixed is dumb, but my first response already discredited that idea and so I clearly give it no heed. Nil Einne (talk) 04:02, 4 February 2019 (UTC)