Fallacies in Sports

    Hi there readers! Welcome back to another week of Sully's Moments! Today I will be talking about some fallacies that I found in an online article about the ten biggest fallacies in sports. I will be going over my top 3 favorite fallacies that are in sports. 

    The first fallacy I will be covering today is misinterpretation of regression to the mean. Sport fans might know this better as "The Sophomore Slump". The sophomore slump is the idea that athletes frequently have a slump in their second season stats compared to their rookie year stats. This fallacy is a common belief for regular fans and in sports media. A recent example of this sophomore slump would the quarterback for the Houston Texans, C.J. Stroud. In his 2023 rookie season he won the award for best offensive rookie of the year, but then in the 2024 season he struggled offensively.  

    This kind of story is often used without looking deeper at the stats behind their performance. Fans and commentators might assume that his performance declined after his first season, which it did, but that doesn't mean him being a sophomore was the root cause for this "slump". His stats were not even that bad for the 2024 season, he finished 15 out of all 59 starting Qb's in the NFL, meaning his stats are just averaging out because of the unusual strong first season that he had. The article also mentions how this fallacy helps create false expectations while ignoring basic statistical reasoning. Fans and commentators calling that change a "slump" helps them create drama, which often misleads fans into thinking that they are performing bad even though they are just balancing out. 

    The second fallacy I want to talk about is correlation does not imply causation. The article connects this fallacy to "The Madden Curse".  This curse is the belief that NFL players who are featured on the cover of the Madden NFL game will get injured or have a bad performance that season. The article explains that this "curse" relies on specific examples and doesn't acknowledge cases of players where they were not affected by this "curse". This is a classic false cause fallacy because when two things happen at the same time, it does not mean that they caused each other. 

    An example of a player who dodged this curse is Rob Gronkowski. He was featured on the cover of Madden in 2017, and was not affected by this curse. He actually ended up winning super bowl that year against the Atlanta Falcons, where the Patriots came back from a 28-3 deficit. But there are times where the curse did come into effect, like Christian Mccaffrey. He was featured on the 2025 Madden cover, then later that season he experienced a season ending injury that forced him to miss the entire 2025 season. Examples such as these give the fallacy a convincing appearance, but they also make it misleading. People often ignore the times when the "curse" doesn't occur and only pay attention to the times when it seems to be true. This is where the fallacy starts to take hold, and it uses selectively chosen examples to create a mental pattern.

    The third fallacy I will be covering is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. This fallacy is caused because one event follows another, making people believe the first event caused the second. The article i've been using connects this fallacy to "The Curse of the Goat". People believe the Chicago Cubs got this curse after a man and his goat were removed from a 1945 world series game, causing the 100 year long world series drought that they experienced. The argument for this curse assumes that the Cubs championship drought started after the removal of the goat from the game. This relates to a causation fallacy because it ignores reasonable causes that the Cubs may have experienced like average players, bad trades, bad management, etc. 

   This way of thinking provides fans with a straightforward explanation for a complicated issue. People blame a random incident and label it a curse rather than examining team decisions or performance over decades. This kind of fallacy appeals more to superstition and feelings than to reason. Although the concept of a curse is catchy, it hides the true elements that affect a team's performance. Following to this fallacy transforms chance into "evidence," even in cases where there isn't any true connection.


That concludes this week's post about fallacies in sports. Fans and the media can easily adopt these viewpoints without giving much thought to the real causes of events. Instead of examining the true causes of what is happening, many of these fallacies simply give people something easy to believe, whether it's a supposed curse, a slump, or some fabricated connection. This should have demonstrated the widespread use of these myths in sports and the significance of considering the whole picture. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you on Sully's Moments again next week!


Sources:

    Dubsism. The Ten Biggest Fallacies in Sports. 28 Apr. 2010, https://dubsism.com/2010/04/28/the-ten-biggest-fallacies-in-sports/.

    Williams, Clay COMM 211, Canvas Course Learning Materials, Week 8, “Persuasion Basics.” 20 April 2025.



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