It's worse than a black cat crossing your path.

It's even more perilous than breaking a mirror.

Walking under a ladder? This curse scoffs at such a triviality.

Sports curses are nearly as old as sports themselves.

And many are famous.

The Curse of the Bambino.

The Curse of the Billy Goat.

The Curse of Rocky Colavito.

All well-known and all deeply ingrained in sports lore.

Even they fail, however, to live up to perhaps the most destructive curse of them all.

The Madden Curse.

John Madden was a great coach for the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s. He left the sideline and became an equally accomplished announcer.

In the 1980s, he offered his name and expertise to a football video game that has thrived for three decades since.

Madden himself had graced the cover of the game until 1998.

That's when the carnage began.

And a curse was born.

I'm not one to indulge in curses. I believe many of them to be self-fulfilling prophecies. Think you're cursed and things are going to go awry? Watch as things go very badly.

But the Madden Curse is as real as a curse gets.

The first cover to feature an NFL player was in Madden 1999 when 49ers running back Garrison Hearst kicked off the whole curse thing in grand fashion.

Hearst suffered a grizzly broken ankle in a playoff game that season. It was so bad, he nearly lost his foot and he missed the next two seasons.

The next year Barry Sanders graced the cover.

He promptly and unexpectedly retired.

The curse has reared its ugly head (with a few exceptions) every year since.

It's quite an impressive list of stars and careers gutted by the Madden Curse:

Daunte Culpepper. Torn ACL.

Marshall Faulk. Rushed for fewer than 1,000 yards.

Michael Vick. Um ... ahem.

Donovan McNabb. Sports hernia.

Shaun Alexander. Broken foot.

Vince Young. Injured and benched.

Brett Favre. Appeared in a Packers' uniform but ended up with the Jets and had a poor season.

Troy Polamalu. Two knee injuries in the same season.

Peyton Hillis. Who? Perhaps the most famous one-hit-wonder in NFL history, the Browns' back was on the cover of Madden 12 and was never heard from on a non-pixelated field again.

The last two covers have been a study in why the curse is real.

Antonio Brown was the cover boy last year. We all know how that worked out.

This year, it was Patrick Mahomes' turn.

The Chiefs quarterback got off to a typical Mahomes start, then had his right kneecap rearranged.

With that much evidence, even th ebiggest skeptic has to admit the Madden Curse is real.

Sure. Some players avoided the curse.

Calvin Johnson had a record-setting season when he was on the cover.

And nothing bad happened to Tom Brady (does anything bad ever happen to Tom Brady?)

One could say he cheated the curse.

Still, if I'm an NFL player, I pass on the Madden cover.

No one needs that bad juju.

That reminds me. JuJu Smith-Schuster, pass on the Madden cover, buddy.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.