THE CURSE OF THE BLACK HELMET: CU’S STRANGE STRUGGLE WITH THE DARK SIDE

The Curse of the Bambino (Boston Red Sox).  

The Curse of the Billy Goat (Chicago Cubs).  

The Madden Curse (Team Agnostic).

Curses are everywhere in sports.  These curses can be rooted in events like a fan being ejected with his goat, a team selling a star player, or a player appearing on the cover of a video game box.

But here’s a new one, and it involves the CU Buffaloes.

It’s the Curse of the Black Helmet. 

Picture this: it’s mid-October.  The Flatirons are purple, shaved sharply in a golden sky.  Ralphie sprints across the field, a blur of brown with black cowboy hats littering the field in her wake.  Deion Sanders leads his team onto the field with swagger and glittering jewelry sparkling in the sun

The team is out right behind Deion Sanders..

You hear a fan say, “Look, they’re wearing the blackout jersey!  We look like Darth F’ing Vader!  This is —-’

“Not good..,” you interject.  

“Huh?”

“The Curse of the Black Helmet.”

It’s Time to Talk About the Curse

Colorado’s black helmets are undeniably cool. Matte or glossy, gold decals or silver — it doesn’t matter. They look tough.

But here’s the problem: CU loses in them. A lot.

Let’s go to the data.

Between 2010 and 2024 (a sample covering multiple coaching eras: Hawkins, Embree, MacIntyre, Tucker, and now Sanders), the Buffs wore black helmets in 38 games.

Their record in those games?

9 wins. 29 losses.

That’s a win percentage of 23.7% — which would put you dead last in almost all major conferences over any decent span.

For comparison, in the same stretch, my math skills seem to show that the Buffs went .500 in both white helmets and gold helmets.   

We ran a full breakdown of CU’s offensive and defensive metrics in games wearing black helmets vs. other helmets.

In black helmets:

• Average points scored: 19.6
• Average points allowed: 35.2
• Turnover margin: -0.6
• Sacks allowed per game: 3.3
• Third down conversion: 34.7%

In gold/white helmets:

• Average points scored: 27.4
• Average points allowed: 29.0
• Turnover margin: +0.2
• Sacks allowed: 2.1
• Third down conversion: 41.9%

We’re talking about significant drops across every offensive and defensive metric when CU wears black helmets. It’s not just that the team loses. They play significantly worse in black helmets. Slower. Sloppier. More penalties. More coverage busts. 

If these were just “tough opponent” games, maybe you’d say the uniforms don’t matter. But CU has worn black helmets in cupcake games, in winnable Pac-12 / Big 12 matchups, and in bowl-eligibility clinchers. Still cursed.

There have been a lot of cursed games when CU has worn black helmets, including losses at Oregon in 2023 (CU lost 42-6) and a heartbreaker to USC in 2023. 

The Psychology

Here’s where things get interesting. Because sports psychology does, in fact, support the idea that uniforms affect performance.

According to MG Frank’s article “The Dark Side of Self-and Social Perception,” an analysis of the penalty records of the National Football League and the National Hockey League indicate that teams with black uniforms in both sports ranked near the top of their leagues in penalties throughout the period of study. 

He added:

“On those occasions when a team switched from nonblack to black uniforms, the switch was accompanied by an immediate increase in penalties. The results of two laboratory experiments indicate that this finding can be attributed to both social perception and self-perception processes–that is, to the biased judgments of referees and to the increased aggressiveness of the players themselves.”

The bottom line? Black, traditionally, signals aggression, dominance, control. That’s why teams like the Oakland Raiders lean into it. But it also has a dark side (pun fully intended).  More penalties. And maybe, when you wear black and don’t dominate, it creates cognitive dissonance. 

And then the curse of the black helmet becomes a real thing.

The Deion Sanders Impact

So where do we go from here?

Do we retire the black helmets forever?

Or do we reverse-jinx the jinx? Bring in a shaman, maybe? Smudge the equipment room?

Maybe we just hire Deion Sanders.  In Sanders’ first year at CU, the Buffs went 2-5 in black helmets – just about par for the course.  Last year, though, Sanders tore through the curse, and the Buffs went 4-2 in black helmets. 

That’s a sea change, folks.

Maybe the curse is dead?!!?

Maybe all CU needed to do to break the curse was to hire Deion Sanders?

The Curse of the Black Helmet might not be real in a scientific sense. But it’s felt real. And now it seems like maybe, just maybe, Deion Sanders has figured out how to beat the curse. Maybe all it takes is a little bit of the Ying Yang Twins and some swagger…..

However, the next time CU runs out behind Ralphie with black helmets on, cross your fingers and your toes. After all, a little anti-curse superstition has never hurt anybody.