Fantasy Football Fiasco: Podcasters Tackle Cheating Plot In NFFC Playoff Contest
A cheating scandal at National Fantasy Football Championships (NFFC) that involved a user and an administrator teaming up to make post-lock lineup changes in the Post Season Hold’em Contest was uncovered by the crew at the Ship Chasing podcast.
In a broadcast released Tuesday, hosts Peter Overzet, Pat Kerrane, and Ben Gretch detailed the ins and outs of the situation, which was confirmed in a public post earlier in the day by Greg Ambrosius, the general manager of consumer fantasy games for the SportsHub Games Network and founder of the NFFC.
“Recently, with help from reporting by a public source, we successfully revealed a post-deadline move in one of our NFFC Post-Season Hold ’Em contests that was detected and quickly confirmed, resulting in SportsHub being able to take immediate action to resolve the issue without any impact to the results of the contest,” Ambrosius wrote on the NFFC forum page. “As a result of its internal investigation, an employee was terminated and a contest participant has been banned from further play on our platforms.”
What happened was laid out, bit by bit, in the Ship Chasing podcast.
To nutshell: The Hold’em contest is somewhat complicated to explain, but the gist of it is contestants pick one player from each of the 12 playoff teams to start, earning multiplier points for each round of the playoffs you have the player, and as players get knocked out, you get to pick up new players.
As a result of the format, contestants – as the weeks progress – can get a reasonably solid idea of what they may have to do with their lineup choices to be able to move up the standings.
And that’s how the scandal was uncovered.
Uncovering the scandal
A team involving the three Ship Chasing hosts (along with DricoOut and Sackreligious, the two other hosts on the channel) were sitting pretty in the 1,521-person contest (at $200 per entry) entering Sunday’s games. As the day wore on – and after Mike Evans had himself a day – they noticed a team that had leapt above them, but with a very similar roster. With game theory as their guide, the Ship Chasing crew decided to pick up Travis Kelce, hoping the other team would choose Rashee Rice instead.
“We were sweating who he even plays,” Kerrane said on the podcast. “We want to see who this lineup ends up having at lock. It’s a sweat for us. Because we want to be able to get past him with Kelce.”
And as soon as the game locked at 6:30 p.m. ET, the crew checked the lineups, and their gut call was correct – the user had gone with Rice. They took a screenshot, shared in their group chat. They were happy.
And then, an hour and 13 minutes later, Kelce scored the first of his two touchdowns against the Buffalo Bills.
Later, after the game ended, the crew checked the standings, and while they had fallen – they didn’t have Josh Allen, who scored well – they noticed something screwy: The user they had flagged earlier in the day, the user with the near similar lineup, the user who played Rashee Rice instead of Travis Kelce, was still sitting in the top 10.
Except … his lineup didn’t have Rice anymore. It had Kelce.
That’s when the sleuthing started, and looking at the transaction logs, they discovered the user somehow was able to switch out Rice for Kelce – three minutes after that first score.
Digging further back, they found a similar thing happened the week before, where the user – username Red Solo Cup – had switched out Raheem Mostert, who busted, for Aaron Jones, who ran wild for the Packers against the Cowboys.
They were able to find the switches were made by an administrator, and then using the power of Twitter, discovered a decade-long (at least) personal relationship between the user and the administrator.
The same alleged cheater also won $20,000 in the same contest in 2019.
NFFC management takes action
All of this was brought to the attention of NFFC management and Ambrosius, and action was quickly taken. The administrator was fired, the user banned for life.
“We were alerted of this illegal move by a fellow player in the contest because it showed up under transactions for this team with a time stamp that was after two games started,” Ambrosius wrote. “I have no idea why this person would do this for this owner, but it’s as plain as day thanks to the transparency that we provide in our time-stamps. This was so easy for a fellow competitor to detect that someone made a terrible, terrible mistake. But it’s a mistake that can’t be accepted or allowed one minute further.
“NOTHING is more important than the integrity of our contests,” Ambrosius continued.
“NOTHING. Nobody trusts us with their money if anything can happen. I’m sad. I’m disappointed. I’m shocked. I’m mad. I’m so mad. But we can never let something like this happen and we now have safeguards in place to alert multiple people if this ever happened again. Which it won’t.”
The contest continues on, and no other teams were affected, according to Ambrosius.
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