Professional Cornhole Sacked by #BagGate Cheating Scandal

Irish dancing, fishing, chess, Fat Bear Week, Adam Levine, the Try Guys, and now professional cornhole have all been afflicted by the viral societal ill of the year: cheating. Cornhole athletes have been accused of thinning their game bags and using non-compliant bags to give them advantage in America’s favorite backyard sport. The scandal even has its own moniker: #BagGate. Is nothing sacred? Our country’s holes have been tainted by non-regulation bags.

In August of this year, at the American Cornhole League National Championship in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the top-ranked cornhole duo was found to have illegal beanbags. Not only were their bags illegal—so were their opponents’ bags!!! Officials at the ACL championship, seemingly struck stupid by the disgrace, sort of just shrugged off the weight discrepancies of the bags and let the game continue. They declared that the bags’ size inconsistencies were “not intentional.” Then what were they, ACL officials?! Divine cornhole intervention? It’s almost as if no one has respect for the game’s prestigious history as the recreational activity to play with your high school friends when you’re home for a holiday weekend.

Lighter and thinner bags apparently are easier to get in the hole, and players have found creative ways to skirt around the clearly not well-regulated ACL guidelines that a resin-filled bag should be 6 inches by 6 inches and weigh approximately 16 ounces. Washing bags with fabric softener, boiling the bags in water, and driving over them with a car are some of the creative ways players have tried to find an advantage, according to the Wall Street Journal. #BagGate has prompted the ACL to take a cue from the TSA handbook and in 2023 they’ll start doing random bag checks. ACL spokesperson Trey Ryder told the WSJ that the league is “exploring infrastructure for automated bag testing.” I am not a standards and practices professional by any means, but I am sure that a few of the players have some pocket scales lying around the basement apartments they live in that they use for, uhm, other recreational activities.

For those surprised that the official game of townies has been professionalized, I’ll paint you a picture of the league: The ACL’s motto is “Anyone Can Play, Anyone Can Win,” which is actually a perfectly apt description of a game easy enough to dominate while completely wasted. However, Jay Corley, one of the league’s stars, recently decided to stop drinking while playing after studying the legacies of athletes like Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter. I can only imagine this gives him an absurd advantage to maintain his supremacy of the sport. ACL sponsors include elite BBQ brands like Bush’s Beans, Bacardi spiced rum, Johnsonville beef sausages, and Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

One time I caught a professional cornhole match on ESPN 5000, or some channel like that, and was delighted by the aerial cam view that highlighted the hole in the wooden boards to let us know where the bag was supposed to go in. When a bag didn’t make it into the hole, red highlighter would show us the distance between the bag and said hole. Televising this sport has elevated it in no way, and that’s not something other sports can say!

#BagGate held up the cornhole championships for about an hour, but according to the WSJ, the scandal has played out in the sport’s premier Facebook group, Addicted to Cornhole. There, a commenter wrote, “I think it’s funny that anyone believed it would be all friendships and rose petals forever in cornhole – Now the dirty underbelly is being exposed.” I tried to scroll back on the page to find discussion of the corruption, but after a solid six minutes of scrolling, I was still on posts from the last 24 hours. For a professional sport that is not lucrative enough for its top-tier athletes to not have day jobs, I was at first impressed by the sheer number of posts this page was racking up. But then I remembered, what is a day job if not dedicated time for argumentative white men, presumably ACL’s top demographic, to log on and post passionately on Facebook. Just today, a sunny November Wednesday, there have been 188 posts, mostly of people selling custom bean bags. Of course, no word on if those are regulation size and weight or not.