But, as many an athlete has proven, you don't need to cheat, per se; you just need to get creative. Some of the most interesting winning strategies seemingly kick logic, reason, and sanity right in their collective dicks, until you realize that they totally worked and were 100 percent by the book. Strategies such as ...

The rulebook of your average professional sports league is more complicated than the tax code, with every possible scenario covered in excruciating detail. Chances are that if an athlete is thinking of cheating, the league has already devised 20 different ways to severely punish him -- which is of course because someone has invariably tried it before.

5 Both Teams Try Winning a Soccer Game by Scoring on Their Own Goals

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There are few things more humiliating to an athlete than scoring an "own goal," which is when you kick/throw/vomit the ball into your team's goal, scoring a point for your opponent. It's the ultimate sports brain fart, the sort of thing you do in elementary school and never live down. But when Barbados' soccer team did it in 1994, it was pure, evil genius, and it set off one of the most bizarrely hilarious sequences in sports history.

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It's a rare evil genius that can still look sinister in colorful knee-high socks.

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Barbados was playing Grenada in the Group round of the Caribbean Cup and was winning 2-0 with seven minutes to go. Grenada then scored, making it 2-1. Even though Barbados was still winning, they were actually losing. Their win would tie the two teams in the standings, but Grenada would win the tiebreaker based on having scored more in previous matches. Barbados had to win by at least two goals or else they were eliminated.

With three minutes to go and Barbados still only winning by one, the team got desperate. Unable to score, they decided to force overtime. Since they were technically winning, the only way to do this was to score on themselves. Which they absolutely did. They didn't even pretend it was an accident; the kicker just kinda dicked around his own net for a bit and then gently lobbed the ball in, his goalie standing there and picking his nose the entire time.

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So what? If they score in overtime, it's still just 3-2, and they still don't advance, right? Well, here lies the true reason for this move: The Caribbean Cup scoring policy, which was apparently written after a weeklong rum bender, stated that overtime goals counted double. Not just for this match -- for all matches. That must have been some strong fucking rum, because what ensued due to this rule made a mockery of this (and all) sports.