Sarah Phillips of ESPN

[zman1415]

Because I love controversy, let me partially take Pitch’s side here. It’s a point I was thinking of last night/this morning. I also wrote up a (very long) post on my guess at the inner workings, but I can post that later, after I’ve hopefully trimmed it down, otherwise nobody would read it (if you want the long version, let me know I’ll post it if anyone thinks it’s useful, but it’s just my outsiders parsing of what might connect the dots).

I think this story has taken off and the outrage is huge for two reasons – one she was at ESPN and she’s a girl.  I think way more needs to be on ESPN/Covers for this. Everyone seems to be outraged at Phillips because she’s the easy target (and accessible). Covers/ESPN can hide behind tons of other stuff and tilting at windmills gets boring after a while.  They were the ones that enabled the platform that Team Phillips used to put one over on so many people.

As for her being a girl contributing, if this was an old dude (even a famous one) like Lenny Dykstra that had pulled on over on everyone, it’d be a 1 page article and we’d all forget about it. Tons of people every day scam people out of their money. It happens regularly. Every ad you see saying “punch the monkey win an ipad” is a scam. People sell crappy stuff on ebay, craigslist and amazon every day. What do we tell the guy who buys fake Reds tickets on opening day? “Damn, that sucks, I hope they catch ‘em, but buyer beware”.  Covers is full of scammers, as are half the other gambling services out there. How do people who generally know this fact manage to let themselves get duped like this so easily? A pretty face goes a long way. The vast majority of them are upset that a girl pulled on over on them.  Pitch is wrong because I think this thread is generally different, but the public reaction to it is so strong because a girl pulled one over on them and their manliness is hurt.

As for Team Phillips, none of what she did was good, but holy hell, she stole some twitter pages and web sites. As far as we know right now, the only person who lost actual money was Matt, who donated her 4k because he felt bad after losing wagers he suggested to her and wanted her to help get some advertising on the site?