Super Bowl curse
American professional football phenomena
The Super Bowl curse is a phrase that refers to phenomena that may occur in the National Football League (NFL) where the team whose stadium will host the upcoming Super Bowl either misses the playoffs or suffers early postseason elimination.
No Super Bowl host team had managed to reach the title game until the 2020 season, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers played in Super Bowl LV and won at their home stadium. The next year, the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals in a home game during Super Bowl LVI.
Super Bowl champions rarely win consecutive Super Bowls, compared to other professional sports leagues such as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League.
The team that loses the Super Bowl often has a less successful following season and may miss the playoffs.
The term was first used around 1992, when The Washington Post used the term in print. Former NFL General Manager Charley Casserly attributed the curse to such factors as "a shorter offseason (five weeks shorter than the 18 teams that failed to make the playoffs), contract problems, [and] more demand for your players' time". Casserly also noted that "once the season starts, you become the biggest game on everybody's schedule," suggesting that pressure from fans and spectators may also affect a team's performance.
The home-field advantage curse
The home-field curse is said to affect a team if the Super Bowl is played at its home stadium. As of 2025, only two teams have played the Super Bowl in their stadiums, the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Raymond James Stadium against the Kansas City Chiefs for Super Bowl LV and the 2021 Los Angeles Rams against the Cincinnati Bengals for Super Bowl LVI at their new home, SoFi Stadium; both host teams won. The Buccaneers are the only team to achieve the feat as the designated home team.
The public source identifies “Super Bowl curse” as american professional football phenomena. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Super, Bowl and curse.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Super Bowl curse”, the useful work is to connect “american professional football phenomena” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7642215. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1992, 2025 and 2021.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Super Bowl curse”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Super Bowl curse primary sources, Super Bowl curse archive and Super research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Super Bowl curse”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Super Bowl curse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.