Home Field Advantage, Super Bowl Curses and Psychology
The Los Angeles Rams will host the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI, only the second time a home team will play in the Super Bowl. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were first in Super Bowl LV in 2021. There are definitely advantages to playing at home, most notably not having to travel, players using their own locker room and sleeping in their own beds. Last year, the Kansas City Chiefs decided to stay home until virtually the last minute, flying to Tampa the night before. The Chiefs lost Super Bowl LV to the Bucs, but despite this precedent, home field advantage is not as much of a factor as it once was.
Home field advantage disappeared during last year’s COVID-19 protocols, when teams played in front of empty stadiums as fans couldn’t attend the games. This season, the crowds were back, but the home team’s edge didn’t come with them. Home teams posted a paltry .510 winning percentage in 2021, only slightly better than last season’s .498. Coaches have pointed out that NFL teams have improved winning on the road, citing factors such as no huddle offenses, calling plays at the line of scrimmage and more visiting fans attending games.
Neither L.A. nor Cincinnati’s QB led the league in passing yards, yet both are playing in the Big Game. Superstitious people believe it’s because it’s one of several Super Bowl related curses. One is that the season’s leader in yards per pass will never win that year’s Lombardi Trophy. Tampa Bay QB Tom Brady, who led the league with 5,316 yards this season, lost to the L.A. Rams in the NFC Divisional round.
The other three times Brady led in yards per pass as the New England Patriots QB, in 2005, 2007 and 2017, the Pats were either eliminated in the playoffs or lost the Super Bowl. Brady is not the only quarterback to be afflicted by this supposed curse. Five quarterbacks, including New Orleans Saints QB Drew Brees, led in passing yards but failed to win the Super Bowl that season. The year that Brees brought home the championship in 2009, Matt Schaub was the season’s leading passer (believe it or not).
Another curse-related explanation is that the previous season’s Super Bowl teams won’t go back the following year. Known as the Super Bowl Hangover, more than a few Lombardi Trophy winners have purportedly suffered from this ailment. Only eight teams in NFL history have returned to the Big Game two years in a row, and of those, only three, the Dallas Cowboys in 1971, the Miami Dolphins in 1972, and the New England Patriots in 2018, won the year after they’d previously lost.
Psychologists and algebra fans have a rational explanation for this Super Bowl curse, known as regression to the mean. Anytime an individual or group does well at something, they’ll do worse the second time. In other words, they’ll perform the same task closer to average if they do it twice. While this may make sense to psychologists, few people are more superstitious than athletes meaning they tend to put more stock than most into things like “the Madden Curse” or the “Super Bowl Hangover”.
-Jeff Dahlberg
Twitter: @JeffDahlberg3