This week’s Top 7 is inspired by what keeps the Internet going--speculation, hearsay, unfounded rumors, made-up crap, and just enough “facts” to make you wonder if it’s all true.  Who doesn’t love a good conspiracy?  The Internet has also made them easy to research and easy to create. 

Do you think that 7/11 is poisoning their Slurpees?  Great!  Type it up!  I’m sure someone will receive it in an e-mail and believe it.  This also translates to sports, and there are plenty of them out there to keep one wondering.  The newest fad is claiming that any baseball player’s absence is due to a secret steroid suspension, which gained some ground last year with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens missing half of the season.  There are plenty of others out there, so that doesn’t make the cut.

These do.

7. Dwyane Wade
The NBA, needing to create a new star after Kobe Bryant’s rape allegations, encourage the refs to do what it takes to make sure the Miami Heat beat the Dallas Mavericks in last year’s NBA Finals, even going so far as giving him more free throws than the Mavs’ entire team one game.  In another version of the same conspiracy, David Stern hates Mark Cuban so much that he will never allow his team to win a title.

6. Barry Bonds doesn’t break the home run record
This one is staying ahead of the fold, but if something happens where Bonds doesn’t hit home run #756, it could shatter the record for sports-related conspiracy theories, making this entry possibly shoot all the way to #1.

5. New England Patriots
After 9/11, the NFL wanted a team called the “Patriots” to win their championship, so they had the refs help them out against the Raiders (in whose case you also have a similar situation to #7 with Art Shell/the NFL) and the heavily favored Rams.  By the way, never did I say that I believe any of this stuff, but it sure is fun to think about.

4. 6% of college basketball games are fixed
So says Justin Wolfers, a University of Pennsylvania economist, who studied over 44,000 Division I games and found that the stronger teams win, but do not cover the spread, often enough that it couldn’t be just by chance.  Click here for the whole article.

3. Bret Hart
In wrestling, when stuff is REAL, then it’s a conspiracy.  Bret Hart was leaving the WWF and did not want to lose the title to Shawn Michaels, so Vince McMahon told him that he could lose in a disqualification.  When the actual match came, he called for the bell when Hart was in a submission hold, ending the match with Michaels the winner. Afterwards, in the locker room, Hart punched McMahon in the face.  The movie “Wrestling with Shadows” goesinto this in more detail.

2. UNLV threw the 1991 Final Four
UNLV was seemingly unstoppable in 1991, and their loss to Duke in the national seminfinals was one of the biggest shockers of my lifetime. Three players on that UNLV have been photographed in a hot tub with a convicted points-shaver-arranger guy, whose name was Richie “The Fixer” Perry.  Some people believe that the Duke loss was fixed.  A heavily favored team who played in Vegas, hung out with a guy NAMED The Fixer,
and lost in a huge game definitely sounds a bit shady.

1. Michael Jordan
David Stern could have been on this list a few more times (fixed NBA Draft Lotteries, Magic Johnson didn’t really have HIV), but this one is the ultimate, him secretly suspending the greatest player ever for two years for gambling.  The Bulls could have had eight titles in a row.