Football players have a reputation of being superstitious people.
You might think dedicating your life to perfecting your skills as an athlete would lead you to shrug off something as trivial as luck, but that’s often not the case.
Whether it’s Marshawn Lynch’s famous pregame Skittles, Jake Elliott’s meal of pizza and cheesecake the night before games, or Harrison Smith’s shot of Tabasco every Sunday morning, there’s no shortage of superstitious rituals around the NFL.
As the Chiefs prepare to take on the Eagles this Sunday in Super Bowl 57, some superstitious players might actually be hoping their team loses the opening coin toss. Why? Because of the recent Super Bowl coin toss curse.
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The Super Bowl coin toss curse
In each of the last eight Super Bowls, the team that won the coin toss has gone on to lose the game. It’s a streak that dates back to 2014, when the Patriots lost the toss but defeated the Seahawks, 28-24, in Super Bowl 49.
The last time a team won the toss and went on to win the Super Bowl was when the Seahawks pummeled Peyton Manning’s Broncos, 43-8, in 2013.
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Here’s a look at the outcome of each of the last eight coin tosses that have made up the so-called “curse”:
| Super Bowl |
Teams | Heads or Tails |
Toss winner |
Super Bowl winner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
It’s impossible to explain this strange trend. Is it pure coincidence, or is there something more to it?
Pregame coin tosses don’t really seem to have any significant impact on determining the outcome of a game. No matter what, each team is going to have to score points when they have the ball and get stops when they’re on defense if they want to win.
However, one interesting note is that in the eight Super Bowls that have been part of “the curse,” the team that won the toss has kicked off first every single time.
In each of the eight games, the team that won the toss has chosen to defer. Deferring basically just pushes back the choice to kick or receive from the start of the first half to the start of the second half. Virtually every time the team that wins the toss defers, they end up kicking off in the first half and receiving the kickoff in the second half. So when a team opts to defer, it is essentially saying, “we choose to receive the ball to start the second half.”
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NFL coaches have grown increasingly fond of deferring in recent times. The thinking is that it gives your team an extra possession in the second half, the more important of the two halves. The only possible downside would be allowing your opponent to settle into an early rhythm on offense after getting the ball to start the game.
Each team still receives the kickoff to start one half, so any advantage is slim at best. But the team that wins the toss gets to decide how they want to approach things. If you had to choose one team that gained an advantage from the opening coin toss, there’s no doubt it would be the team that won.
So it is truly bizarre that the coin toss loser has gone on to win the game every year for almost a decade now. Would it make a difference if this year’s winner chose to receive the ball first instead of deferring? Who knows.
We’ll have to wait and see what Sunday brings, and if one team can finally snap the coin toss curse.