Where Do the 2023-24 Chiefs Rank among the Toughest Super Bowl Paths?
Where Do the 2023-24 Chiefs Rank among the Toughest Super Bowl Paths?
Kansas City went through nearly all of the NFL's best teams en route to the championship.
In this week’s Wharton Moneyball podcast,1 Eric Bradlow brought up an interesting question about the path Kansas City went through to win the championship, and just how difficult it was.
En route to the title, the Chiefs beat the 11-6 Miami Dolphins at home, then went on the road to defeat the 11-6 Buffalo Bills and the 13-4 Baltimore Ravens, before finally beating the 12-5 San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl. If we’re tracking according to a power rating like Pro-Football-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS), K.C. literally beat the most difficult set of AFC — and then NFC — opponents it could have this season:
But that’s just this season. What if we wanted to compare the Chiefs’ path to that of other Super Bowl winners from throughout history?
For that, we can turn to an old favorite — the Elo ratings, which track every team’s strength at any given moment in time, based on their game results. Looking at the pregame ratings for each K.C. opponent, and adjusting for home-field advantage, here was the gauntlet the Chiefs went through to win it all:
Wild Card: vs. Dolphins (No. 8 in Elo, 1509 location-adjusted pregame rating)
Divisional: at Bills (No. 3 in Elo, 1757 location-adjusted pregame rating)
Championship: at Ravens (No. 1 in Elo, 1780 location-adjusted pregame rating)
Super Bowl: vs. 49ers (No. 1 in Elo, 1719 location-adjusted pregame rating)
Average all of those ratings together, and we arrive at a mark of 1690.9, which ranks eighth among all historical Super Bowl winners:
Of course, there is one big issue with using this method to judge each championship path — some required more games than others. The 1968 Jets only had to beat two opponents, the Oakland Raiders and Baltimore Colts, in order to win Super Bowl III. Those teams were incredible, going a combined 25-3 during the regular season, but it is generally easier to win two games than it is to win four like the Chiefs just did.
A fix for this problem is to use a concept similar to ESPN’s strength of record metric from college football, which calculates the probability than a typical “good” team would have a given record against the same set of opponents. In our case here, we can calculate the odds that the average Super Bowl winner from throughout history — which, including the 2023 Chiefs, ended up with an Elo rating of 1736.1 — would run the table against the set of opponents each champ faced in the playoffs.
For the 2023 Chiefs, their path would look like this:
Wild Card: vs. Dolphins (78.7% win probability for average SB champ)
Divisional: at Bills (47.0% win probability for average SB champ)
Championship: at Ravens (43.8% win probability for average SB champ)
Super Bowl: vs. 49ers (52.5% win probability for average SB champ)
None of those games make the typical champ look like much of an underdog, but remember, you have to win all of them — and things get pretty unlikely pretty quickly when you start multiplying together a bunch of probabilities.
In this case, an average Super Bowl champ would have just an 8.5% chance of making it through all of those games without losing. Where does that rank historically? While it’s not the toughest path ever, it’s in the Top 5:
As you might immediately notice, most of the toughest paths now involve wild-card round participants who had to go through four games instead of three or two. That’s no coincidence — again, it’s harder to go through more opponents. (A few of them featured four road games, too, just for good measure.)
By this accounting, the Chiefs’ path was not quite as hard as those faced by the 2007 or 2011 New York Giants, the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers, who faced the toughest path of all. Here’s how their opponents broke down, for the sake of comparison:
Wild Card: at Bengals (64.4% win probability for average SB champ)
Divisional: at Colts (42.9% win probability for average SB champ)
Championship: at Broncos (42.2% win probability for average SB champ)
Super Bowl: vs. Seahawks (58.4% win probability for average SB champ)
Those around at the time might remember that the Bengals lost starting QB Carson Palmer almost immediately to a knee injury when Kimo von Oelhoffen rolled into his leg on Cincinnati’s second play from scrimmage, knocking him out of the game. So perhaps we are understating the odds of beating the Jon Kitna-led Bengals based on Cincy’s season-long Elo rating. That would leave Eli Manning and the 2011 G-Men as the toughest path ever, which I wouldn’t argue against very much.
But the 2023 Chiefs are also in that conversation. Yes, Patrick Mahomes is a space alien and Kansas City is officially a dynasty. But none of this came easy. A lesser team — or even a championship-caliber team — would not have held up against the set of opponents K.C. had to beat along the way. It’s another way in which this Chiefs squad looked at the odds and just shrugged them off.
Filed under: NFL, Super Bowl, Statgeekery
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