Vegas Can't Quit the Chiefs
After being exposed by the Eagles, Kansas City was immediately installed as Super Bowl favorites again.
The Kansas City Chiefs didn’t end the 2024-25 season the way they wanted, losing Super Bowl LIX to the Philadelphia Eagles in decisive fashion this past Sunday night. It was the first time since falling to the Cincinnati Bengals in the 2021-22 AFC championship game that K.C. didn’t finish an NFL season with confetti raining down on them as they hoisted the Lombardi Trophy.
But there was a silver lining for the Chiefs, too, even while they processed the loss.
As the Eagles celebrated, the oddsmakers released their preseason lines for the 2025 season. And instead of the new champs sitting atop the rankings — or many of the other dominant statistical teams who defined this past season — the Chiefs team that just lost big was installed right away as a co-favorite (alongside the Baltimore Ravens) to win it all next season.
It’s not uncommon to see the losing team open as the “next-day” favorite in the immediate wake of the Super Bowl. A few years back, I dug into the phenomenon of these day-after odds, and I went ahead and updated that data to include the seasons since. Going back to 2009 (and including 2025), the previous Super Bowl loser has been a solo or co-favorite to run it back and win nine times, whereas the freshly crowned champion was only anointed next year’s favorite five times:
This is the fifth time in six seasons that the Chiefs were either outright favorites or co-favorites to win on the morning after the Super Bowl since 2020, as their 2019 championship came in a season — Tom Brady’s last with New England — when the Patriots were favored. Clearly K.C. has now taken the mantle from those Pats when it comes to perennial next-day favorites; New England had been favored seven times in 11 seasons from 2009-2019 before the Chiefs’ current run began.
This makes sense on a lot of levels. Brady is the greatest QB in NFL history, while Patrick Mahomes is generally regarded as the greatest threat to chase him down. When it’s the wee hours of the morning after the Super Bowl, and you’re in doubt about things like free agency and offseason moves — for whatever difference they actually make — you bank on the elite QB with a long track record of playoff success, and hope the rest takes care of itself.
But it’s interesting how Vegas flocked back to Kansas City after this particular season. Let’s sort our table above based on each team’s Simple Rating System (SRS) score from the previous year, the one that just ended a day before these odds came out:
Aside from the 2009 Patriots, who were widely expected to reclaim their scary 2007 form after a 2008 season in which Brady played a grand total of one quarter before being lost to injury — so their SRS was based on Matt Cassel being at QB instead1 — the 2025 Chiefs are coming off by far the lowest SRS of any team who was immediately installed as a favorite the day after the Super Bowl.
They did not fit the profile of a team whose performance declined because of a key injury. They didn’t fit the profile of a team who narrowly lost the championship in a few plays on Super Sunday, and they didn’t fit the profile of a dominant team who happened to get upset by a lesser team in the playoffs, either.
I don’t want to relitigate the matter of how good the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs actually were. We talked about their penchant for winning ugly all season; about Mahomes’ reputation far outpacing his numbers at this point. Fellow Substacker
just dropped one of his patented 10,000-word stories about just how lucky K.C. was to win as many games as they did, which I would encourage everyone to go read:
But all of this has been to say that I was still a little floored to see K.C. set as favorites again after a season when there were many teams with significantly better predictive metrics than the Chiefs had.
This isn’t the team you expect to immediately leapfrog a bunch of others despite being thumped in the Super Bowl. Especially when we consider that K.C. has holes across the roster, little cap space to fill them with in free agency, and a Travis Kelce-sized retirement question hanging over their offseason. As always, the only rationale for having them as next-day favorites is a version of “never bet against Mahomes”.
Right after the Super Bowl ended, The Ringer’s Bill Simmons cheered on his podcast the prospect of K.C.’s betting mystique being shattered. “The analysis didn’t matter,” he said. “It all came down to, ‘Welp, the Eagles are better everywhere, but you can’t go against the Chiefs.’”
“Now I feel like we’re back, now we can analyze football games correctly again, because the Chiefs had kind of ruined it.”
If anything, though, Kansas City’s status as instant favorites yet again proves that we’re not out from under the Chiefs’ sway just yet — no matter what the numbers say, or what just happened on the field.
No, Cassel wasn’t solely responsible for the Pats dropping off from 2007 to ‘08 — the defense gave up more points as well, and regression was always going to happen after a scorched-earth season like the one New England had in ‘07.
Things like this remind me that odds are based on perception (equal betting action) instead of statistics.