ESPN Magazine recently had a "conspiracy theories" issue, in which it explored (among other things) the long-held, popular theory that basketball is fixed. College basketball, in particular. IIRC, the preconditions for a fixed game tended to be:<p>- Non-tournament, regular season play (b/c not as many bettors and media would be paying attention)<p>- The favorite team is favored by 11 or more points<p>- The favorite team is dominated by one or two very strong players<p>If one player controls his team's play, and he's favored by 11+ points, he has the incentive, the ability, and the margin to shave points without risking losing the game. With a smaller point spread, on the other hand, it's too risky. For reasons I can't recall, an 11-point spread was the magic number. It provided just enough cushion to cover shaving, without jeopardizing the nominal win.<p>When analysts looked at the history of games that met these criteria, they found consistently abnormal distributions of outcomes in favor of the winning team, but just south of the spread. They estimated that about 3-4% of games in the study sample are quite likely to have been fixed.<p>At any rate, it would be interesting to see bigger data sets plied for this sort of thing.