Oliver Stone, call your office. JFK is on the phone and he says that Sonny Bono was murdered!

During the lifetime of every gambler there have always been those times when the thought “the fix is in” has flown through our minds. In the past we would push those thoughts away. We’ve kept quiet about it. Who wants to live life as the Mel Gibson character in “Conspiracy Theory?”  Oliver Stone takes quite a ribbing, even today. People called Jim Garrison a nut till the day he died. Most folks refuse to believe that this stuff actually goes on.

Recently however, with point-shaving scandals everywhere, college students going to jail in droves, and Bobby Knight wondering aloud about the awesome power the officiating crews exercise over the final outcome, paranoia is running rampant. Even the NCAA appears to have caught the bug. Me, I’ve seen too many strange things happen over the last twenty years to even pretend to play ostrich. I have always believed that point shaving is real, but was the exception, not the rule. I still believe that. On Monday January 11^th, the results of a study conducted by the University of Michigan were released. It blew everyone’s mind.

Mike Cross and Ann Vollono conducted the survey for The University of Michigan. They sent out questionnaires to a sample of three thousand division one athletes. 25% percent of the players responded.

The study found, and I hope you’re sitting down…

— There are student bookmakers on every campus.

—72 percent of all athletes have participated in some form of gambling since entering college, and 80 percent of the male athletes had done so.

—35 percent of all athletes, and 45 percent of the men, had gambled on sports since entering college.

And get ready for this….

—5 percent of male athletes had provided inside information for gambling purposes, bet on a game in which they participated or took money to perform poorly.

Now the first thing I asked myself was…. What kind of moron would admit to any of this? The researchers seem to agree. Cross and Vollano say it is more likely the figures underreport rather than over report gambling by college athletes.

"The nature of the topic may have caused some individuals to not return the survey due to perceived threats to their athletic eligibility,'' they wrote. Both are assistant directors of compliance in the athletic department.

So, according to this study, and its conservative findings, on any given Saturday, with as many as 150 teams participating, you can expect to have about 7.5 dirty games occurring. Of course that doesn’t count the games being controlled by the officiating crews…

 And The beat goes on, the beat goes on.