The Art of the Fake Win
A Dress Rehearsal Paid in Full
Let’s not kid ourselves. The box score says Cincinnati 76, Tarleton State 58. A comfortable win. A nice little tune-up before the big, bad Crosstown Shootout against Xavier. Kerr Kriisa dropped 20, Day Day Thomas added 19. All the pieces moved as they should. The local news will call it a solid performance, a momentum builder. But that’s the story they sell you, the one printed on the ticket stubs and splashed across the broadcast. The truth is far uglier, far more cynical. This wasn’t a basketball game. It was a business transaction, a carefully constructed piece of theater designed to give the illusion of competition while ensuring a predetermined outcome for the benefit of the university’s athletic department, its broadcast partners, and the gambling lines that feed off this manufactured drama. A total sham.
This is what the insiders call a “buy game” or a “guarantee game,” and it’s one of the dirtiest open secrets in college sports. The University of Cincinnati, with its massive athletic budget fueled by television rights and booster donations, effectively paid Tarleton State University a hefty sum (we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars) to fly their team across the country for the express purpose of losing. Tarleton State, a smaller program from the Western Athletic Conference, needs that money. They need it to fund their own athletic programs, to pay for scholarships, to keep the lights on. So they agree to be the Washington Generals for a night, the designated punching bag for a Power Five program looking to pad its record, boost its stats, and sell a few extra tickets on a sleepy Monday night. It’s a predator-prey relationship disguised as sportsmanship. Disgusting.
Think about what that does to the integrity of the sport. It renders the regular season, especially the non-conference portion, a near-total farce. Teams aren’t building a schedule to test themselves; they’re building a portfolio of guaranteed wins to bolster their resume for the NCAA Tournament selection committee. It’s financial doping. Every uncontested rebound, every easy layup against an overmatched and undersized opponent is tainted by the knowledge that this contest was bought and paid for. The players know it (even if they can’t say it), the coaches absolutely know it (they arranged it), and the fans, if they’re being honest with themselves, know it too. They just choose to look away because it’s easier to cheer for a lopsided victory than to confront the rotten foundation upon which the entire enterprise is built.
The Only Game That Matters
All for the Crosstown Cash Grab
So why orchestrate this charade? Why bring in a team you know you’ll beat by double digits? The answer is simple and always the same: money and marketing. The entire purpose of the Tarleton State affair was to serve as a flimsy promotional vehicle for the only game that actually matters on the Cincinnati schedule: the Crosstown Shootout against Xavier. That game is the real product. That’s the blood feud, the crosstown rivalry that ignites a city and, more importantly, draws massive television ratings and sponsorship dollars. Everything else is just noise. The win against Tarleton State is a manufactured talking point, a way for the broadcast team on Friday night to say, “Cincinnati is coming into this rivalry hot, fresh off a dominant 18-point win.” They conveniently omit the part where that win was purchased from a catalog of willing victims.
This is the modern playbook of college athletics. You don’t risk a loss, and the potential hit to your brand (and ticket sales), right before your marquee event. No. You schedule a patsy. You create a false narrative of momentum. It’s a cynical marketing strategy that treats fans like fools and devalues the very concept of competition. The pressure on these programs, particularly one with an “ex-Kentucky coach” lineage somewhere in its history or culture, is immense. At places like that, winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing that keeps the river of money flowing. A loss to a nobody school could dampen enthusiasm for the Xavier game, which would mean fewer viewers, lower ad rates, and less merchandise sold. It’s a domino effect that starts with a single, corrupt scheduling decision.
The Crosstown Shootout isn’t just a game; it’s an economic engine for two universities. It’s about bragging rights, sure, but it’s more about alumni donations, student applications, and the multi-million dollar media rights that ESPN and others pay for access to this kind of tribal animosity. They aren’t selling basketball; they’re selling conflict. And to make that conflict as juicy and profitable as possible, they need both teams to look like titans. So Cincinnati gets to beat up on Tarleton State, and Xavier gets its own guaranteed win, and they both march into the arena on Friday night with puffed-up records and a storyline curated by athletic directors and television executives. It’s a brilliantly executed, morally bankrupt spectacle.
The Mercenaries in the Middle
Players as Depreciating Assets
And caught in the middle of this grotesque financial machine are the players themselves. Look at Kerr Kriisa, Cincinnati’s leading scorer in this farce. He’s a talented player, no doubt. But he’s also the perfect embodiment of the new college athlete: a journeyman, a mercenary for hire. He started at Arizona, then bolted to West Virginia through the transfer portal, and now he’s at Cincinnati. The concept of playing for the name on the front of the jersey is a romantic fairy tale from a bygone era. Today’s players are free agents chasing the best opportunity, which almost always means the best NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deal. They are professionals in everything but name, their careers managed like any other high-value asset in a corporate portfolio. Their loyalty isn’t to a school; it’s to their brand and their bank account. Can you blame them? They’re just playing the game by the rules the system created.
When Kriisa or Day Day Thomas are racking up points against a team that was paid to be there, are they honing their skills, or are they just fulfilling a contractual obligation? They are pawns in a much larger game, their individual performances used to prop up the financial viability of the program. They are given scholarships and NIL money not out of some altruistic commitment to education, but because they can help the university sell tickets and win games, which in turn fuels the entire corrupt cycle. The moment they can no longer provide that value—due to injury, a slump in performance, or simply a younger, cheaper model coming along—they’ll be discarded. The transfer portal giveth, and the transfer portal taketh away.
This system isn’t building character; it’s teaching young men that their talent is a commodity to be bought and sold. It strips the soul from the sport, replacing it with the cold, hard logic of a balance sheet. The win over Tarleton State wasn’t a testament to the Bearcats’ skill. It was an entry in an accounting ledger, a necessary expenditure to ensure the profitability of the next, much larger venture against Xavier. So go ahead, celebrate the victory. But know that what you were watching wasn’t a sport. It was just business. And business is booming.
