History says the Giants and Jets should dread playing co-host to Super XLVIII next February.
Doing so can be hazardous to your entire season.
While the fact no team ever has won or even played in The Big Game on its home field is now part of NFL lore, that uncanny hex has gotten deeper and more corrosive in recent years.
Since the start of the new millennium, playing host to a Super Bowl has meant not making the playoffs at all, and — in the case of the 2011 Colts — finishing with the worst record in the league.
The 2000 Buccaneers were the last Super Bowl host to qualify for the postseason in the same year. Each of next 12 hosts watched both the playoffs and that year’s Super Bowl from afar.
No wonder it’s difficult to get the Giants or Jets to even talk about the potential Blizzard Bowl at MetLife Stadium next Feb. 2, much less their hopes of ending a 47-year streak that’s become one of the most famous in league history.
“We definitely look over there sometimes and understand how monumental it would be to make it, but you can’t think about that too much,” Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz said. “We all know doing that hasn’t worked out too well for anybody over the years.”
Theories to explain that, of course, seem as plentiful as the number of Super Bowls played.
What has made the streak even more difficult to parse in recent years is the fact the NFL has spread the game around to so many locales, using it as a carrot to pry expensive new stadiums out of reluctant cities.
As a result, a game that essentially rotated between Los Angeles, Miami and New Orleans during its first 20 years has been moved around to Jacksonville, Detroit, Indianapolis and Arlington, Texas, over the past decade.
You would think with parity in the salary-cap era that began in 1994 and the roster of Super Bowl hosts greatly expanding in that time that a streak-buster would have finally broken through.
But no.
Despite all that movement and diversity, the Joe Montana-led 49ers in 1984 are still the only team to even come close to a home-field title. San Francisco put a 38-16 beating on Dan Marino and the Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX that season at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, Calif., just down the road from Candlestick Park.
Now, for the first time, there are two teams in the same year with the chance to end The Streak thanks to the NFL’s gamble on a Super Bowl in the potentially frigid, open-air home of the Giants and Jets.
Could this finally be the year?
“I don’t really see it happening,” Marino told The Post recently. “The Giants are a possibility with Eli [Manning], obviously, but the Jets are rebuilding. And take it from me, there’s a lot of pressure when your stadium is hosting a Super Bowl. If you’re a good team, a lot of your fans just expect you to get there because it’s your home field. But it’s just not that easy.”
Marino would know. The Dolphins played host to the Super Bowl three times during his Hall of Fame career, but Miami missed the playoffs entirely in 1988 and couldn’t get past the division round in 1994 or 1998.
Super Bowl host teams also have been victims of some bad luck that derailed potential streak-busting seasons.
The Cowboys and Colts lost their franchise quarterbacks to season-ending injuries (Tony Romo in 2010 and Peyton Manning in 2011), while the Bountygate investigation wrecked Drew Brees’ chances of leading the Saints to a home-field Lombardi Trophy last season.
The 1999 Falcons looked like an even better candidate to host a Super Bowl, considering they had gone 14-2 and reached the Big Game the previous year. But their hopes of winning a crown in the Georgia Dome were wrecked in Week 2 by star running back Jamal Anderson’s season-ending knee injury, and Atlanta instead staggered to a 5-11 finish.
In the case of the Chargers, the hex has been downright embarrassing. In the three Super Bowls played in San Diego, a division rival ended up representing the AFC — the Broncos in 1988 and 1998 and the Raiders in 2003.
Ouch.
In some ways, though, the streak of no home-field Super Bowl winners isn’t entirely mystifying.
Not only was the game played six times in stadiums without an NFL team during the early years, but it also was held eight times combined in New Orleans and Tampa from 1970-1991 — a stretch when the Saints and Buccaneers were perennially among the league’s most hapless franchises.
On the other hand, the inability of the powerhouse Dolphins of the early 1970s to reach the Super Bowl when the game was so frequently held at the Orange Bowl remains a head-scratcher.
Miami’s famed back-to-back world championships came in the 1972 and ’73 seasons — right in the middle of an unusual four-year drought of Super Bowls held in the Dolphins’ since-demolished stadium.
Though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the sport who thinks the streak will last forever (especially no team evening playing in a home-field Super Bowl), it somehow endures despite the game’s 50th anniversary being just around the corner.
“I think it’s going to happen,” famed Chargers quarterback-turned-TV analyst Dan Fouts said with a laugh recently. “But don’t try to pin me down [on a year], because nobody’s gotten that prediction right yet.”