Every February when the Super Bowl rounds the corner, I am reminded about the hours I’ve spent over the past season with eyes glued to a screen watching my football team.
I think about the days I’ve spent fretting about an upcoming game or lamenting a terrible loss.
I’m not alone in this self-inflicted misery. Roughly half of the United States is a fan of the National Football League (so says a 2014 Associated Press poll, as well as 2021 data from Statista). The stronger the fan loyalty is, in my experience, the more severe the self-torment.
I’ve endured a buffet of ups and downs following my team over the years (which will remain unnamed because I’m superstitious). The years my team dwelled deep in the basement, I grabbed hold of any glimmer of success, like the time they ruined another team’s perfect season. I defended their worth vehemently.
The seasons my club advanced to the Super Bowl, I’ve performed rituals. I rubbed my dog’s belly during critical moments. (It seemed to work at some point.) I progressed to patting my baby’s head, but stopped when my team started losing.
Why did I think these behaviors would have any effect on a game played hundreds of miles away? Why did I feel that my team, and their successes and failures, were somehow a reflection of me?
The Science Behind Sports Superstitions
Thankfully, research points to some answers. Survey-based data out of Murray State University indicates the more a fan identifies with a team, the more likely they were to take part in superstitious behavior related to that team.
An earlier study from the same research group found that fans who strongly identify with a team are more likely to attribute a win in part to their own fandom, as compared with those who don’t care as much.
Supporting this, qualitative data gleaned from University of Kentucky basketball fans illustrated that the enactment of superstitious behaviors (like wearing a team hat, or turning it backwards to spur a rally) was done due to beliefs that these actions would help their Wildcats win a game.
That still begs the question: Why?
Some research suggests it’s a way of coping when we feel stressed. Seminal research indicates superstitions are pursued to exude a sense of control during stressful situations when control is elusive. That extends to the world of sports fandom (per another study), and explains why superstitious activities become more frequent when games are close than during blowouts (another study finds).
‘My Team Is Part of My Identity’
The days after watching my team lose in stunning fashion, I would walk in a gloom, less productive than I usually am, naturally wondering what rituals I could have enacted differently.
Weeks following a big win, I’m riding high, mentally mapping the exact outfit I wore during that game so I can wear it again for the next game.
Researchers have theorized these feelings as indicative of the relationship between supporting a team and its connection to our social and psychological health. The teams become a “valued, core component of the social identity” of ourselves, essentially as extensions of our personhood. When they lose, we lose. When they win, we do too.
Experimental data supports this phenomenon. One study found that when people watched their team win they had both improved mood and self-confidence in specific mental and social skills (their ability to solve a word puzzle or ask someone out on a date), as compared with people who watched their team lose.
The group out of Murray State University surmised these personal, self-reflective connections to our teams would then link back to carrying out our superstitions, reinforcing each other in a feedback loop.
If we win when our team wins, and we feel our superstitions helped our team (and us) to win, then we would probably continue those golden superstitions. But if we felt like a specific set of rituals failed us in a heartbreaking loss, then we will probably toss them out of our formula. Which is why I hung on to a hole-riddled T-shirt from 2006 worn specifically on game days (it was magic), until a couple years ago when the magic (and my team) was lost.
Is This All Worth It?
On days after particularly painful losses, I wonder why I pour so much of myself into a game I don’t even play in. And with the NFL’s very visible issues that span from health inequities (as documented by Harvard Medical School research) to player safety (the prevalence of brain injuries has been well reported; Damar Hamlin’s terrifying cardiac arrest earlier this year is another glaring example), I struggle at times to justify why I follow the sport.
I’ve periodically tried to give up watching football, but have begrudgingly crawled back. After every devastating loss, in light of the much bigger concerns, I ask myself why.
Still, over the rest of this postseason, I will be watching my team, probably wearing some scrap of the aforementioned T-shirt I saved, embarking on a random ritual to “help” them win.
