Jinxed or Punk'd?
Today I bring up the issue of media hexes.
And the Missouri Tigers.
And the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx.
But first, a step back for perspective.
The Missouri Tigers football team has drawn a lot of attention outside of the "Show Me" state this week as they surged to #1 in the college football rankings – a spot they'd only held once before, in 1960, and for just a week at that – with just Saturday's game against Oklahoma standing between them and a national championship game birth.
As today's front page of USA Today read:
As much as Missouri's 36-28 win against Kansas belonged to its once-embattled coach, to its Heisman Trophy hopeful at quarterback, and to an upstart team that began the season unranked, it also belonged to a plumber from Lemay and every other long-suffering Tigers fan — from Blue Springs to St. Joseph to Poplar Bluff and beyond.Having parents who met at the University of Missouri, not to mention family in or near all the towns mentioned in the USA Today story, this writer is far from indifferent or dispassionate on the topic.
But now that Sports Illustrated has put them on the cover, it's raised the issue of the magazine's famous cover jinx. As reported by Michael Klos out for KOMU-TV:
The new Sports Illustrated featuring Missouri Tigers quarterback and Heisman Trophy hopeful Chase Daniel hits newsstands Thursday.My first thought after reading that? Wait, people actually study this?.But people all over Columbia worry that this feature may actually be a jinx . . . not a help. Millions of Sports Illustrated readers believe making the cover is the kiss of death for many athletes.
Players like Nomar Garciaparra, Eric Crouch, and Ryan Leaf have all suffered the wrath of the cover jinx.
One study finds that out of 2500 SI covers, almost 1,000 of the athletes underperformed after gracing the cover.
But before I got too worried that there was grant money involved/wasted, I found that the study – or at least one very similar to the one described – was conducted by Sports Illustrated itself back in 2002:
In investigating virtually all of SI's 2,456 covers, we found 913 "jinxes" -- a demonstrable misfortune or decline in performance following a cover appearance roughly 37.2 percent of the time. One of the most fascinating things we discovered seemed to buttress Loehr's contention that the Jinx is more likely to strike athletes in fine-motor-skill sports like golf and tennis than smashmouth sports like boxing.I'm not a superstitious sort. Over the years, the cover has probably ramped up a bit of pressure and stress on the beneficiaries, while also (likely) adding a competitive incentive for their next opponent along the lines of "Oh yeah? We'll take 'em down." – both of which, in an evenly matched game, can probably tilt things a tad.Golfers were "jinxed" almost 70 percent of the time and tennis players after more than 50 percent of their appearances, while boxers suffered barely 16 percent of the time.
(And anyway, a 'decline' rate of little more than one in three overall? In a field where you are regularly going to have wins and losses? With the other way of interpreting this being '62 percent of the cover subjects keep up the success?' Doesn't sound too convincing.)
Also, in recent memory, the magazine has nearly morphed into somethign along the lines of a 'New England Sports Weekly' due to the successes enjoyed by the Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics – and I haven't seen any of those teams damaged by the so-called jinx.
From this writer's vantage point, the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx seems like little more than a myth, a hook for lazy sports talk hosts -- the sports media equivalent of campfire tales of men with bloody hooks for hands. Fun, sure, but hardly a threat.
Unless, that is, the Tigers go down to the Oklahoma Sooners in San Antonio, Texas. Then the jinx will be an outrage and a deeper investigation would absolutely be called for.
Enjoy your weekend. And enjoy the games.