Digging Into the History of NASCAR Cover Curses (The Madden Curse for Racing)

For those not in the know, there is an odd phenomenon that floats around in the sports video game community. This phenomenon follows that a cover athlete on such a game will be struck with bad luck. Most prominently, this is referred to as the “Madden Curse” as derived from the Madden football game. However, the trend seems to cross over into other sports as well.

For those who really don’t believe in it, just look at last year’s Madden cover athlete, Antonio Brown. The man is a superstar football player. However, Brown has become a household name for another set of reasons entirely. Instead of making his mark on the field, Antonio has been caught up in a whole plethora of off-field antics that really have brought the Madden curse to life. It’s so bad that the superstar in his prime is currently shopping for a team with no bidders. If Brown’s talent were merged with a better attitude, he would probably be able to ask for record-setting money. Is it a coincidence that all of this happened the same year he was on the cover of Madden?

Another sport that the curse seems to have picked up on is NASCAR. I’m not personally one who’s too superstitious. However, some of these coincidences are simply too substantial to ignore. Even if we don’t fully believe that there’s actually a cover curse, looking into the history of the phenomenon is actually pretty interesting.

This time, we follow along with a feature from the Black Flags Matter YouTube channel. In this feature, we get to hear all about some of the most prominent NASCAR cover curses. Sometimes, cover athletes get into consistent strings of bad luck. It makes us wonder if there’s really anything to this sort of superstition or not.

So what do you think? Is this some sort of trend or are people looking into it a little bit too much?