Football and Magical Thinking

A Moment from this Week’s Football

The Washington Commanders beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday with a last minute 37 yard field goal that “doinked” in off the goal posts for three points. This is their first playoff win in 19 years, thanks mainly to their rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels who exceeded all expectations. Much has been said about the turnaround of the Commanders who have struggled to perform under an ownership marred by controversy, but I want to talk about that field goal, specifically what happened right before it was kicked by Zane Gonzalez.

It was certainly an important kick, as it won them their most important game of the season, but it wasn’t exactly impressive. It felt inevitable; the game was tied, the Commanders got the ball with 4 minutes and 41 seconds left in the game, which in the NFL is plenty of time to get into comfortable field goal range. 37 yards isn't necessarily a gimme, especially for a kicker who was originally on the practice squad, but it would have been a shock for Gonzalez, or really any NFL kicker, to miss it. However right before the kick, the broadcast showed Gonzalez walking on to the field repeatedly starting to put his helmet on, take it off, pat his hair a few times, and start to put his helmet on again. He did this so many times that after the game-winning kick went through, I rewound the game and went down to show my wife.

Plenty of people noticed, with many people in live threads commenting on it, making jokes, and some even armchair diagnosing him with OCD. Which it turned out he has, and has been open about. People quickly started posting links to a 2021 profile where he briefly mentions his diagnosis, some of his compulsive actions and the relief he has after doing them.

I also listen to the podcast “The Ringer’s Philly Special” which covers the Philadelphia Eagles. On a recent episode, producer Cliff Augustin brought up how he might be attending the Eagle’s divisional round game next week, where the team will fight to go on to the NFC championship and hopefully the Super Bowl. His possible attendance was controversial, thanks to the idea of a “curse” where the Eagle’s lose if Cliff is in attendance (pay no attention to the fact that they even won the last time he was there). This is not uncommon. I saw a Reddit comment earlier that day where a fan said they were dutifully skipping the game, as they had all season, as they had found that their team won whenever they didn’t watch. When I started watching football I had a similar feeling that the Eagles did worse when I watched and better on the weeks where I couldn’t. You can find plenty of Reddit threads where people outline their favorite game day superstition.

I’m not trying to say that a fan deciding they need to eat a specific sandwich on game day is the same as Gonzalez’s OCD, but I do think the similarity is interesting. These sorts of cognitive distortions are common outside of football too. I often find myself worrying about jinxing things by speaking too certainly of things that have not come to pass even though I don’t believe in any supernatural mechanisms that could make such a thing happen. Perhaps these just show up in sports because they show up anywhere, although I think it’s also related to the parasocial aspect of being a fan of a sports team. Fans feel a deep connection and sense of ownership of the teams they follow. By encouraging their own superstitions, they get to contribute to the success of the team they feel so connected to. Or it could be that as Jason Kelce says, "Every single thing that every fan does at home or at the stadium makes a direct impact on the game".

Jinxes

I mentioned above that I am susceptible to thinking and worrying about jinxes even though I am generally not a believer in supernatural phenomenon. For me, I think this stems from a type of self-preservation instinct. This is my guess about how the thought process started for me:

1. There is something that I want to happen but I can’t ensure will happen (e.g. getting a specific job).

2. I fixate on how good it would be for that thing to come to pass, how much it makes sense for this thing to come to pass, how inevitable it feels for this thing to come to pass.

3. On some level I recognize that this level of fixation on an uncertain outcome I can’t control is unhelpful.

4. I tell myself to stop fixating because the fixation will keep thing from happening (aka the jinx)

But it didn’t stop there. The last time I remember worrying about jinxes was when my fiancée (now wife) and I were flying across the country for our wedding. There was a huge snow storm the day before we were supposed to fly, tons of flights had been cancelled and cascading delays and cancellations were expected throughout the weekend. I thought our chances of getting out were looking bleak but my wonderful fiancée who is smarter and more stable than me was not deterred. While I was looking into rescheduling our flights she was sure that we would have no problem getting out. I thought that such thinking was going to “jinx” us and that we wouldn’t be able to make it to the airport because the roads would be terrible, or our flight would be delayed or cancelled.

Again what I think was going on was partially that I wanted to plan for the worst. I didn’t want to assume everything was going to work out and then be caught off guard when it didn’t, but for whatever reason I really processed this through this lens of a cognitive distortion. We woke up the next morning, to find the snow had mostly abated. Delays continued but our flight looked OK. Roads seemed clear and we wouldn’t have any problem making it in time. About an hour into our bus ride to the airport, I began to admit that I had been wrong. It looked like everything was going to work out, and we would arrive at our destination on time. And then moments later the snow started pick up. “JINXES ARE REAL,” I told my friends in a group chat. One of them, in part driven by her own self-work on similar cognitive distortions, accused me of magical thinking. We got to the airport with time to spare, and the flight departed on time.

Since then, I’ve stopped worrying about jinxes so much. I had thought of them as sort of a quirky way to guide my thinking, but having my friend say it so plainly helped me realize that I was letting myself live in a type of dishonesty that I feel very negatively towards. Another time I’ll write more about my feelings on truth, honesty, and clear thinking, but it’s probably the single thing I feel most strongly about. And I felt strongly about it even while I happily went around not believing in but acting on the idea of jinxes. Luckily for me it was an easy habit to kick once a friend pointed out how much it contradicted my values.