Life

The One Fumble To Watch Out For This Super Bowl

by Jessica Learish

You're out in the world, maybe grabbing a beer with your friends when, all of the sudden, time slows to a crawl. Everything in the world disappears but one thing — the sight of your smartphone tumbling the never-ending and helpless descent to the cold hard ground, and shattering unceremoniously before your eyes. According to data uncovered by iCracked, an on-demand cell phone repair service, you're not alone. Apparently, fans of the losing Super Bowl team are nearly 200 percent more likely to break their cell phones in the hours and days following the loss.

That's right, when examining data, iCracked CEO AJ Forsythe saw the enormous spikes in repair requests in the cities and states with losing Super Bowl teams. "We first looked at the data out of curiosity, not expecting it to reveal any hugely different patterns," he said in a press release. "We knew sports fans across the U.S. would relate to the frustration of such a crushing loss." No word on whether that "crushing loss" was football or cell phone related.

The data looks like this — after the Denver Broncos lost in the 2014 Super Bowl, iCracked experienced a 184 percent spike over the average repair requests in the Broncos' home state of Colorado. The same phenomenon appeared again in 2015, when there was a 176 percent surge in repair requests in Washington, home of the Seattle Seahawks.

So the moral of the story is, if you have skin in the game for this weekend's Super Bowl and things don't go your way, try to be a gracious loser. And if you anticipate any oncoming sour grapes (fermented or metaphorical), maybe put your phone someplace safe like in a purse so you don't inadvertently become a statistic. But, if you do fumble your phone or tablet, maybe give iCracked a buzz, and have one of their handy roaming techs come and fix it for you.

You've been warned.

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Image: Courtesy of iCracked