Who’s Got the Best Chance to Win Super Bowl LIX?
Let's forecast the 2024-25 NFL playoffs based on three different prediction models.
The 2024-25 NFL playoff field is finally set, which means the path to Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans is in sight. Five weeks from now, we will know which team will be crowned champion of what has been an unusually top-heavy season across the league. But for now, all we have are each contender’s hopes, dreams and visions of how a perfect run through the playoffs might look.
We also have probabilities to help guide us. All season long, I’ve been tracking each team’s odds of making (and advancing through) the playoffs using Elo ratings, a system I’ve employed since the old FiveThirtyEight days. You can find those predictions here, updated through Week 18’s action on Sunday.
But base Elo can be confounded by the tendency for teams to rest starters going into the playoffs, causing the season-long numbers to be distorted by unrepresentative results like the Bills losing to the Patriots or the Chiefs being blown out 38-0. So I also created a new NFL Playoff Predictor section of the Elo page, featuring some tweaks to the ratings to account for late-season results.
The predictor table still contains standard Elo as its default, but it also features an adjusted version of Elo that downweights games featuring resting starters by between 50-100 percent,1 reducing the influence of results that contain non-predictive information. I also have my version of SRS ratings, which adjust each team’s points per game differential for strength of schedule — and also contain a weighting adjustment for Week 18 games with rested starters.
You can click between the different models in the chart below:
🏈 2024-25 NFL Playoff Predictor 🏆
So, what are some of the big takeaways from the models?
The Lions are Super Bowl favorites. No matter which version of the ratings we look at, Detroit comes out No. 1 after their impressive win over Minnesota for the NFC North title on Sunday night. It’s just a matter of degree: SRS has the Lions as a big favorite at 34 percent to win it all (with Baltimore and Buffalo second at 13 percent apiece), which makes sense given Detroit’s domination in that stat all season. Elo is a bit more circumspect, with Detroit only fractionally ahead of K.C. in the Week 18-adjusted version of the ratings.
It’s still a five-team race — but which five teams? Three weeks ago, I wrote that the Super Bowl would likely belong to one of just five teams: the Chiefs, Bills, Eagles, Lions or (maybe) the Vikings. And the systems above still list five teams ahead of everyone else in the field. But the Vikings have been swapped out for the Ravens as Lamar Jackson heated up down the stretch and Baltimore dominated after their bye week. Now there’s about an 80 percent chance (give or take) that one of Detroit, K.C., Buffalo, Baltimore or Philly wins the championship, with the Vikings and Bucs leading the next tier.
The Chiefs are (weirdly) an unknown. One of the big storylines of the 2024 season has been the question of how good the Kansas City Chiefs truly are. On the surface, that seems like an odd thing to wonder about: They’re two-time defending Super Bowl champs, they went 15-2 this year (one of their only losses was Sunday’s meaningless blowout with the backups in), and they have the consensus best clutch QB in the league (Patrick Mahomes). What’s there to doubt? But the team’s reliance on close wins (they went 11-0 in games decided by a TD or less) and its surprisingly middle-of-the-road offense (K.C. ranked 15th in scoring with Mahomes being good but not great in the stats) help explain why the SRS system — which cares about dominance, not grittiness or prior track records — gives K.C. just a 9 percent title shot, versus 23 percent in adjusted Elo — which cares about winning and knows they’ve done it before.
The Bills are good enough to win, but won’t have it easy. Buffalo fans can never catch a break. So of course the year that Josh Allen plays like an MVP and the Bills have one of their best-ever seasons, they draw a sneaky-tough first round opponent (Denver), then probably have to face the dangerous Ravens in the Divisional round, only to most likely find the Chiefs waiting in the AFC title game — played at Arrowhead, Buffalo’s traditional house of horrors. If the Bills can make it through all of that, they should be battle-tested enough to face anything the NFC can dish out in the Super Bowl. But both Week 18-adjusted systems only give them a slightly better than 25 percent chance to get to New Orleans when the conferences are all settled.
The Chargers and Vikings could give us “upsets”. Neither system thinks we’re due for many especially likely Wild Card upsets, though the Chargers have a 60 percent chance to unseat the Texans and the Vikings have a 60 percent chance to beat the Rams, per SRS. (Elo is less certain and lists the home teams as slim favorites in each case.) I put upsets in scare-quotes because neither L.A. nor Houston is rated higher in the power ratings — and it’s not especially close. In both cases, the better team is on the road and seeded lower because of division-championship rules in forming the bracket. But those are your most likely lower-seeded teams to win in the opening weekend; the best of the rest are either the Packers or Commanders, teams I wouldn’t sleep on — especially Green Bay, if Jalen Hurts doesn’t clear protocols for Philly — but both underdogs for now.
The world of Super Bowl possibilities is wide open. As much as this has been a top-heavy season with a clear group of elite teams looming over the rest of the field, we still have little idea of which matchup might actually end up taking place in Super Bowl LIX. Here is the matrix of possible matchups based on the Week 18-adjusted Elo rating simulations:
A 20 percent chance to see Chiefs-Lions is as certain as we’re going to get, but that leaves plenty of room for Bills-Lions (what a matchup that would be!), a Chiefs-Eagles rematch from a few years back, or a bunch of other possibilities floating between 3 percent and 6 percent. Meanwhile, here’s what the SRS forecast’s crystal ball sees for our Super Bowl matchups:
Because the Lions are such a heavier favorite to make the Super Bowl in SRS (54 percent) than Elo (45 percent), all four of the most likely championship battles include Detroit — facing either Baltimore, Buffalo, K.C. or the Chargers. But again, there’s still ample room for other alternative matchups, including some truly bizarre ones (who had Commanders-Steelers before the season?). That means there’s plenty to look forward to as the playoffs begin to sort themselves out, starting this weekend — and I’m here for all of these alternate universes of postseason outcomes.
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