In many ways, the 2026 NFL season is defined by the one that preceded it: it’s the Year After the Weird Year.
2025 was marked by such unpredictability — the three-time defending AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs missed the playoffs entirely, while the two actual Super Bowl teams (Seattle and New England) were both below 2% to win before the season — that this year will revolve as much as anything else around which of those surprises represented genuine change, and which will simply regress away toward the established NFL order we thought we knew.
Take Wednesday’s Seahawks-Patriots season opener. The Seahawks won 13-10, but neither team went into the game any higher than 8% to win the championship, with Seattle checking in as a distant No. 2 in the NFC title odds even before QB Sam Darnold was injured, and New England arriving tied for sixth in the preseason AFC odds even before WR A.J. Brown was injured. (Yes, the game was marked by injuries as much as performances on the field.) That puts the pressure on both Big Game teams from a year ago to prove they can do it all over again — and they’re not the only ones with a lot to prove.
Even with a potential “superteam” in the mix — for all the good it did them on Thursday — traders are staring at a title race with far more questions than answers. So as the 2026 season gets underway, here’s what the markets know — or just think they know — about the NFL going into the year, starting with maybe the only team being asked to live up to expectations rather than defying them.
Are the Rams really a superteam?
The closest to a sure thing in this NFL season is generally considered to be the Los Angeles Rams, who were (at worst) the second-best team in the league last year behind Seattle and spent the offseason loading up on big names like edge-rusher Myles Garrett and cornerback Trent McDuffie — plus luring their own future Hall of Fame lineman, Aaron Donald, out of retirement. Because they probably had the most uncomplicated story to tell, the Rams spent the summer rising above the fray to establish themselves as title favorites with nearly double the preseason odds of any other team:
Certainly on paper, L.A. probably has the most talent of anybody — both ESPN and Pro Football Focus ranked their lineups as the best in football, and they have stars at just about every position. Amidst a sea of question-marks, the Rams’ pitch is basically, “don’t overthink this.” And that may be right.
The downside of that theory, however, was on display in the Rams’ opener against San Francisco in Melbourne Thursday night, where they came out flat and could neither move the ball nor stop the Niners’ balanced attack. Many will write it off due to the historic travel distances involved in getting to Australia, and L.A.’s now-questionable decision to arrive Down Under just in time for the game (when the opponent had been there for weeks). There are even people making the case for this being some kind of 4D chess to help the Rams weeks down the line.
But maybe L.A. also just isn’t quite as far ahead of the pack as everyone was hyping them up to be.
And besides, no NFL team is really a superteam as we typically understand it from other sports. A team like the Rams, at 17% in preseason, would be third in the NBA title race, and would have trailed the star-studded crosstown Dodgers in MLB every single day of the ‘26 baseball season. That’s more of an apples-to-oranges comparison than anything scientific, but it illustrates how tenuous the superteam concept is in football: Even the closest thing the sport has to one of those is still an 80%+ underdog against the field.
Which version shows up?
Aside from L.A., most of the other leading contenders are basically staking their case on one particular snapshot in time being more salient than another.
In the “2025 was real” camp, we have teams like the Seahawks, Patriots, Broncos, Texans, Bears, Chargers and Jaguars — those who took leaps or otherwise defied expectations to be among the final group of teams standing.
Not all of these teams are equal in terms of regression red-flags looking ahead to 2026: the Bears, for instance, have more factors suggesting a backslide — a sky-high turnover margin last year (which tends to fall back to earth quickly), a mismatch between actual and expected (based on point differential) records, a big uptick in schedule difficulty this year — than, say, the Texans. But all were 2025 playoff squads who met one or multiple of the following qualifications for concern:
Major year-over-year improvement in record (which tends to be given back some the next year).
Heavy reliance on the defensive side of the ball (which regresses to the mean between seasons more strongly than offenses).
Mismatches between actual record and Pythagorean Expectation (i.e., the record a team “should” have had based on its scoring margin, with neutral luck in close games).
Outlier turnover margins (which have very little year-to-year correlation, despite strongly influencing NFL team success).
Above-average health, in terms of man-games lost (unusually injury-free teams tend to not stay that way for very long).
Changes from facing notably easy schedules in 2025 to notably hard ones in 2026 (which obviously makes sustained winning more difficult).
The more of these factors that a team runs afoul of, the more likely they are to suffer a rude awakening the following season — but so many ‘25 contenders fit those profiles that sorting out who takes a tumble will be more difficult than usual.
Meanwhile, we have the teams who’ll argue that 2025 was an outlier and their previous form was more indicative of true quality: the Chiefs, Lions, Ravens, Bengals, 49ers, Cowboys, Eagles and Packers.
The magnitude of underperformance, and reasons for it, vary in each case. The Chiefs saw all of their luck from previous years flip around on them with a vengeance — and then QB Patrick Mahomes was lost with an ACL injury, for good measure — while others such as the Lions are dependent more on full-roster health improvements. Others still, like the Cowboys, Bengals and Packers, are defined by the potential for bad defenses to regress while maintaining strong offenses:
Taken altogether, the 2026 Super Bowl race may depend on who can either stave off regression — or harness it in their favor — than the usual offseason improvements via comings, goings and other transactions.
Will Buffalo earn its wings?
As you might have noticed in the chart above, the Bills are an oddball even compared with their fellow contenders. They did not trigger any of our multi-colored flags — the closest they came was a change from second-easiest in schedule strength to 14th-hardest — and on the surface, they had a similar 2025 (going 12-5) to each of the previous handful of seasons. (Buffalo has sandwiched itself between 10 and 13 wins for seven consecutive seasons, an impressive run of consistency.)
But the Bills nonetheless deserve highlighting because of what hasn’t happened for them yet, despite all of their regular-season winning: a Super Bowl berth.
Buffalo has made the playoffs seven straight years dating back to 2019, winning eight playoff games in that span — third-best in the NFL behind Kansas City (16) and San Francisco (9), both of whom made multiple Super Bowls during that period. But the Bills have only made two AFC title games, losing both to K.C., while bowing out in the Divisional Round four of the past five years.
QB Josh Allen remains one of the league’s best QBs — he’s finished Top-5 in MVP voting four straight years — and the Bills’ offense has ranked Top-5 in Expected Points Added (EPA) per play for six years in a row, helping make Buffalo one of the most consistent contenders in the NFL recently. Traders clearly think they remain an upper-echelon team after swapping coaches from Sean McDermott to Joe Brady (just look at our leaguewide odds chart from above).
In other words, there’s no good reason why the Bills haven’t been able to get their breakthrough yet… or, more importantly, why this wouldn’t be the year it finally comes together. But until we actually see it happen, Buffalo’s ceiling remains unproven — and with Allen heading into his age-30 season, time is starting to run out on the Bills’ chance to capitalize on this current window.
Divisions of labor
Not all paths to the playoffs are created equal. Some teams are strong enough to survive whether they win or lose their division; others are essentially competing for one available route, whether through winning a weaker division, or having the bailout option of the wild card from a stronger division.
To measure which is which, we took the preseason Polymarket playoff odds and decomposed them into what share comes from a team’s chance to win its division versus make the wild-card. The teams with the biggest relative gaps between those shares — compared with the average team — are the teams most dependent on either winning their division or making the wild-card to punch a postseason ticket:
By this measure, the Bills are the team with the most lopsided split between their divisional-path share (57%) and wild-card share (19%). (The remaining share, 25%, is the probability Buffalo misses the playoffs outright.) In other words, if Allen and company are going to make the playoffs, they’re most likely going to do it as AFC East champs, even though they claimed the wild card last season. Others in that category include the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (NFC South), Houston Texans (AFC South), New Orleans Saints (NFC South) and Baltimore Ravens (AFC North).
On the other side of things, the 49ers went into Week 1 as the team most dependent on a wild-card, which speaks to the strength of the NFC West — which accommodated the Seahawks, Rams and Niners a year ago and could easily do so again in 2026. (Especially considering how dominant San Fran looked in Australia.) Beyond the Niners, the Pittsburgh Steelers (AFC North), Tennessee Titans (AFC South), Cleveland Browns (AFC North) and Las Vegas Raiders (AFC West) are also most disproportionately reliant on a wild-card if they are to make the postseason.
Which path is better? Obviously it’s better for your seeding to win a division — but teams like San Francisco also have a good luxury in not being completely division-or-bust.
MVP = AFC QB Royal Rumble
Much like when we looked at the World Cup Golden Boot market in the context of each team’s odds to go deep in the tournament — more games equals more chances to score — there is value in thinking about the conditional probabilities around the MVP chase odds.
Going into the season, our favorites are almost all AFC quarterbacks: Jackson, Justin Herbert, Allen and Joe Burrow, with Maye and Mahomes not far behind.
The only NFC QBs to crack the Top 7 are Dak Prescott and Caleb Williams — not the defending MVP, Matthew Stafford, despite his Rams being the “superteam” we discussed earlier. What gives? Some of that might be banking on voter fatigue: Aaron Rodgers in 2020-21 was the only back-to-back MVP winner since the 2010s (and only the fifth player to do that ever). Some might also just be about the difficulty spreading credit on a team with so much talent — but there is a real mismatch between team quality and MVP odds in Stafford’s case.
The same might have been said for Sam Darnold, whose Seahawks were rivals and foils for Stafford’s Rams all year last season, but his injury Wednesday might make the point moot. Williams is the opposite — he will likely be a strong candidate if the Bears make the playoffs, but traders are not at all sure that will happen (46% playoff odds). In terms of combining playoff certainty and MVP potential, it’s hard to do better than Jackson and/or Allen, adding another dimension to the longstanding rivalry between the two members of the 2018 NFL Draft class.
And what of non-QBs? Each of the Top 18 names on the odds sheet are QBs, and no non-QB has even 1% odds to win the award. (That’s because only one non-QB — RB Adrian Peterson in 2012 — has claimed the award since Shaun Alexander and LaDainian Tomlinson won it back-to-back in 2005-06.) But maybe this is the year that all changes — even if the odds are far higher that a QB from the AFC just walks away with the hardware.
And if the first two games are any indication, the NFL is going to give us answers to all of our preseason questions — and then some — faster than we can even process them. We’ve already seen the defending champs survive an ugly, injury-filled opener, plus the presumed superteam get flattened halfway around the world. In an NFL season built around figuring out which version of reality we should actually believe, that all feels like a pretty fitting start.
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