Who Will Win Super Bowl LX?
Let’s forecast the 2025-26 NFL playoffs using a composite of my two prediction models.
Week 18 is now in the books, with the Steelers outlasting the Ravens in a WILD finish Sunday night, and the 2025–26 NFL playoffs have finally arrived — bringing with them the conclusion to a season of ever-shifting favorites, filled with contenders who are difficult to trust. So which of those teams will be left standing on top of the heap when the final whistle blows in the Bay Area on February 8?
To help answer that, I’m bringing back a version of a feature from last year and the year prior: my 🏈 Playoff Predictor 🔮, which combines the two different rating approaches — points-per-game power ratings (essentially recency-weighted SRS ratings) and Elo ratings (with special rest adjustments applied to Week 18 results) — from my NFL forecast page into a unified model that tracks each team’s odds to advance through the postseason:
Let’s run through some of the big takeaways that stood out the most when looking at the odds:
The Seahawks have planted a flag as pre-playoff favorites out of the NFC. It’s been a season defined by a lack of sustained Super Bowl front-runners — at different times, Philadelphia, Buffalo, the L.A. Rams and even Kansas City had been betting favorites, while others (such as the Texans, Colts, Lions and Bucs) had emerged at No. 1 earlier in the power-rating forecast.
But Seattle has been building its case steadily over the weeks and months, winning seven straight games — and 11 of 12 — with the league’s best PPG differential and no loss by any more than four points.1 By peaking at the right time in ratings that reward more recent form, while their rivals have looked less reliable, the Seahawks’ dominance makes them the best team on paper ahead of the playoffs.That’s not quite as clear in other measures, though. Seattle is also the Super Bowl favorite in the betting odds and the prediction markets. Here are Polymarket’s championship probabilities, for instance:
By this accounting, the Seahawks are much closer to the rest of the pack, with more teams bunched together in or around double-digits but no overwhelming favorite (nor even as much in the way of clear title tiers). This could mean Seattle’s potential is being undervalued — though I completely understand the hesitation to go all-in on any particular contender.
Qualitatively, I think there’s more of a case to be made for a lot more teams this year than usual, since so many of them took turns seeming to distinguish themselves atop the league throughout the season. We always knew the Chiefs’ likely regression would create a vacuum that would be filled by a laundry list of potential challengers, after all. But by the same token, there are just as many cases against the top teams — hence, the feeling of bunched-up odds going into these playoffs.The AFC is truly wide-open. No matter how you look at things, it’s a lot less clear who’ll represent the AFC in Super Bowl LX than the NFC. Like with Seattle, both the playoff predictor and the prediction markets have Denver as the most likely conference champ, but the Broncos are a much more uncertain favorite. That’s because, despite their No. 1 seed and a bye week, Denver is also a highly unimpressive team for their record — they ranked sixth in the AFC in SRS and won three more games than we’d expect from their point differential, the biggest such gap of any team. So this could open up chances for other teams to forge their own path to the Big Game.
In the playoff predictor, the Jaguars, Patriots and Texans are next in line; meanwhile, the Bills are nearly co-favorites with Denver by those Polymarket odds above, followed closely by New England, Houston and Jacksonville. But if things go according to odds-chalk — not seeds — in the Wild Card, Denver would have to face a difficult Texans squad (again) in the Divisional Round, which limits their upside some barring upsets. There are no easy paths out of the AFC!The Rams and Pats have the best chance to escape Round 1. Putting aside the Broncos and Seahawks, who’ll rest a week before resuming their journeys, the best bets to make the Divisional Round are Los Angeles and New England — in no small part because of who they’re set to play.
The Rams won the sweepstakes for the No. 5 seed, which set them up with a very favorable opening matchup (on paper) against Carolina. Yes, it’s a road game for L.A., but the Panthers are easily the worst team in the field, backing their way into the playoffs on a tiebreaker to win the deeply mediocre NFC South. The Rams have a 76 percent chance to dispatch them according to the playoff predictor.
On the other side, the Chargers aren’t nearly as underwhelming as Carolina, but the Patriots have been definitively better than them this season and will be at home. There are valid regression questions over whether Drake Maye and the Pats can sustain their breakout all postseason, but the predictor gives New England a 64 percent chance to move on — no other first-round favorite is higher than the Jags at 58 percent.A lot of these wild-card games are going to be GOOD. Because of how uncertain this season has been the majority of the way — and still is, particularly if we go back to those Polymarket odds — it means most of the first round looks more like a series of coin-flips than games where one team has a decisive edge.
Starting with Jags-Bills, which the playoff predictor sets at 58-42 in favor of Jacksonville at home — but sees a Buffalo team that, narratively speaking, is primed to defy those odds — four of the six games next weekend are that close or closer in the forecast. This also includes Chicago (57 percent) hosting Green Bay, Philadelphia (56 percent) hosting San Francisco and Houston (55 percent) visiting Pittsburgh to face all those terrible towels. Putting aside the Steelers, who aren’t quite the AFC’s answer to Carolina — but aren’t not that, either — the rest of those teams could all very well win the Super Bowl and it wouldn’t be a shock. That tells you what kind of action we’re going to be in for right out of the gates.We may be due for a Super Bowl XLVIII rematch — but don’t count on it. In the predictor forecast odds, the most likely pair of teams to reach Super Bowl LX were the Seahawks and Broncos, at around 15 percent — aka a rematch of Super Bowl XLVIII from the 2013-14 season. That pairing carries nearly double the odds of any other, driven mostly by the Seahawks’ comparatively high odds to come out of the NFC:
But we may also get Seahawks-Pats (itself a rematch of Super Bowl XLIX), or some new and novel matchups like Bills-Seahawks or Broncos-Rams — to say nothing of those involving teams like the Jaguars and Texans, neither of whom have ever played in a Super Bowl before. (Or we could just get Patriots-Rams again.)
That’s the beauty of this looming NFL postseason: Just about whatever ends up happening won’t really feel like a surprise, because so many different teams have laid claim to this year’s championship at various points along the way. But only one of them can ultimately make that claim stick — and we’re about to find out which.
Seattle’s three losses came by a combined total of nine points.