The Ethics of Cheating

“Now just a minute!” I hear some of you saying. “How can you possibly have an Ethics post about cheating? It’s the most unethical thing anybody could ever do! What can you possibly say about it other than ‘Don’t’!”

Unfortunately, like most destructive behaviors, cheating tends to impact everyone associated with whatever is being cheated on; the grade curve in the case of an exam; the profession as a whole in the case of a professional examination; the lives of the other people involved in the case of a relationship, and the lives of the other players, other team owners, fans, agents, merchandisers, broadcasters and the families of all of the above in the case of professional sports. The sad fact is that even if you have never cheated on anything in your entire life, and never will, you can still be affected by the ethics of such an event – which makes it worth taking a closer look at.

Consider, for example, if you were the Commissioner of a major professional sport, and one of your teams (one of your best teams, in fact; one highly touted to win that year’s championship) was caught cheating on the first game of the season. Blatant cheating, in fact; not just something that is banned under the rules of your game and the regulations of your league, but the sort of thing that any six-year-old child would recognize as cheating. If you don’t take swift and decisive action, not only do you run the risk of other teams trying the same dirty tactics, but the confidence of your fans will erode, and your organization may even be called in front of Congress and investigated in order to divert attention from more important issues facing the country. What do you do?

You could, of course, suspend the entire team for the entire season, or at least some part of it. But this would have the effect of punishing not only the guilty parties (in this case the Head Coach, the video operators involved, and possibly the Owner of the team) but also the members of the team who were blameless (and even unaware of the offense), the members of the other teams whose games will be cancelled because their opponent is on suspension, and all of the people who make their living off of those games. It hardly seems fair, and it may not actually punish the guilty parties involved (if their contacts do not specify a penalty for forfeited games).

You could ban the team from post-season play, the way they do in college sports. If the team wins its division, the second-place team goes instead, and if they win a wild card berth, the next best team goes instead. It’s still a bit harsh to some of the players, but there’s no guarantee that your team is going to get to the post-season in any given year anyway. Still, this will probably be bad for the sport in general, since many otherwise exciting games will now be rendered meaningless.

You could require that the cheating team terminate their Head Coach and any members of his staff who were involved in the cheating, and void their contracts. Actually, you could probably require a clause in all coach’s contacts that specify that if their team is caught cheating they will be fired, and their annual salary will be forfeited. But in that case I can almost guarantee lengthy civil trials about what the team owners knew and when they knew it, and Congressional investigations are almost a certainty.

Or, you could apply some completely meaningless penalty, such as making the cheating team give up one or more of its draft picks in the next draft following the affected season, when they’ve already got plenty of good players and can always buy more on the free agent market anyway. I’ll give you three guesses which one of these choices the NFL decided to hit the New England Patriots with after they were caught cheating on the first game of the just-completed season, and the first two don’t count…

That should be the end of it, of course, but now get ready for a new twist. It seems that some of the players from the 2002 St. Louis Rams team that was defeated by the Patriots in the Super Bowl are suing for the differential in pay that they would have received if their team had won, claiming that the Patriots cheated in that game, too, and if the NFL had stopped them (followed its own rules, in fact), the Rams would have won the game. The Rams players are claiming they have evidence…

So if you were the Commissioner of Football, what would you do about the situation? Despite the fact that you personally have never cheated on anything in your life, you have a cheating scandal that may affect your entire sport, and even your own bank account, if you are named as a party to the lawsuit (which you will be), and you need to take some action – but what? It’s worth thinking about…