When the Philadelphia Eagles walked off the field of Caesars Superdome last February, very few people would have said that their Super Bowl LIX victory was undeserved. It wasn’t just the championship game against the Chiefs, either, as the Eagles were a team that grew into the season, constantly getting better throughout the regular season and the Playoffs.
The Eagles, of course, did not start the season as favorites, but they weren’t exactly long shots either. Their preseason odds sat at around +1200, a fair distance behind teams like the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens, and San Francisco 49ers, and around the same price as the Detroit Lions.
2025 Playoffs Odds Are Intriguing
If you look at the NFL Playoff odds for the 2025 season, you will see that there is a clutch of teams tied at the top of the odds: The Bills, Ravens, Chiefs, and Eagles are all priced around +600 to +700. It’s almost a four-way tie, which is almost unprecedented. The Lions are fifth on the list at about +1000. There’s then a significant gap to teams like the Commanders, 49ers, Bengals, and Packers.
It seems logical, then, that the Super Bowl winner is highly likely to come from the first group of four or five (if we include the Lions). Yet, it is worth noting that the average odds of a Super Bowl winner are usually a bit higher. If we look across all 25 Super Bowl winners in the 21st century, for example, you will see that the average odds for a Super Bowl winner at the beginning of the season sit at +1534.
A few years back, FiveThirtyEight, which is a data polling firm most known for its work on US elections, published an article explaining how the preseason favorite is usually a bad bet for the Super Bowl. The data that FiveThirtyEight pulled, along with the analysts’ arguments, could actually be applied to most sports leagues in the US.
If we look at the 25 winners of the Super Bowl this century again, we can only cite four teams that were preseason favorites: the Colts (2006), the Patriots (2016 and 2018), and the Chiefs (2023). That gives the favorites a win rate of about 16%. If you want a comparison: in horse racing, the favorite usually wins around 30-35% of the time.
The 1990s Had One Huge Outlier
If we go back a little further and look at the 1990s, there are certainly specific years that stand out. Most famously, there was the case of the St Louis Rams, a team with odds of +15000 before the start of the 1999 season.
That is certainly an outlier, and it skews the average across the decade, giving the average Super Bowl winner odds of +2105. The 1990s were actually quite kind to short-priced favorites, including a run from 1993 to 1995 when the Cowboys (twice) and 49ers won at odds of lower than +350.
So, if you know this information, what can you do with it? The short answer is nothing. There is no set rule to say the Super Bowl winner should have specific odds, or even fall into a specific odds bracket.
However, it should give anyone who is having a punt a kind of freedom to look beyond the odds. By all means, go for it if you fancy the Bills or Ravens to win this year, but your Super Bowl picks should not be predicated on the price of the team. NFL history teaches us time and time again that the odds-compilers’ guesswork is rarely on point.