World of professional cornhole rocked by 'BagGate' cheating scandal

Foul play is everywhere in 2022, and there’s been yet another scandal breaking in the world of sports.

There’s been major drama in the chess world, high-stakes poker and even competitive angling, and now professional cornhole has been rocked by controversy.

For the uninitiated, cornhole is a game popular in the US which involves throwing bean bags into a board with a hole at the end, and it looks a right laugh in all fairness.

The sport has seen an influx of TV coverage and revenue in recent times. Now, the top-ranked team in the sport has been accused of throwing illegal bean bags at the 2022 American Cornhole League World Championships.

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The event is a pretty big deal and was televised on ESPN back in August, but the accusations are only just coming to light and the scandal has been dubbed “BagGate”.

Devon Harbaugh complained that rivals Mark Richards and Philip Lopez were using smaller than regulation bean bags.

“I thought the bags were too thin,” Harbaugh told The Wall Street Journal.

Officials gathered to inspect Richards and Lopez’s bean bags and confirmed that they were, in fact, not regulation size.

“They’re too small,” ESPN’s cornhole commentator Mark Pryor said at the time. “That’s going to create some drama.”

In a further twist, Lopez and Richards also asked for their opponents beanbags to be inspected and it was also found that the bags didn’t comply with the ACL regulations which state that bags must be six by six inches and weigh 16 ounces.

There was a delay before a judgement was made, before the competition was allowed to continue and the prize money of $15,000 could be contested.

“It’s possible, but I’m pretty confident that it wasn’t intentional,” ACL spokesman Trey Ryder told the Wall Street Journal following the allegations.

Who knows where the next scandal will strike…

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