The Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx
For decades, athletes have genuinely dreaded appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, convinced it curses whoever's featured with an injury or slump right afterward — and statisticians have a well-documented, unglamorous explanation for exactly why that pattern would appear even if no curse exists at all.
The Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx is a popular sports superstition holding that athletes or teams featured on the magazine's cover are subsequently more likely to experience a slump, injury, or other misfortune. Statisticians studying the phenomenon have proposed "regression to the mean" as a well-established statistical explanation, noting that athletes typically appear on the cover specifically because they are performing at an unusually high, likely unsustainable peak.
- →The Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx superstition has circulated among athletes, coaches, and fans since at least the 1950s, shortly after the magazine's founding.
- →The magazine itself published a lengthy self-examination of the phenomenon in 2002, cataloging numerous specific instances where featured athletes experienced a subsequent slump or misfortune.
- →Statisticians have proposed "regression to the mean" as the primary explanation: athletes are typically selected for the cover specifically because they are performing at an unusually exceptional level, which is statistically likely to normalize toward their typical average afterward regardless of any curse.
- →No rigorous statistical study has found a covered athlete's subsequent performance decline exceeds what would be predicted by regression to the mean alone.