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As we prepare for the 2025 NFL season and the road to Super Bowl LX, plenty of teams will be looking at the reigning champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, and considering their blueprint for success. That’s normal, but it’s especially pertinent when a team seems to gel as well as the Eagles did. Sure, they had superstars, Saquon Barkley among them, but it was a unit of cohesion and well-drilled players that won the day.
Of course, the Eagles did not start the season as the betting favorites for Super Bowl LIX; they were priced at around +1200 as the 2024 season got underway. Those odds put them in the bracket as contenders, but they were far behind teams like the Chiefs, 49ers, and Ravens.
The 2017 Eagles were massive betting underdogs.
Yet, if you are looking at the NFL betting odds for the new season and worried that your team looks like a long shot, it’s not the 2024 Eagles that you should be looking to for inspiration, but the 2017 vintage. According to Sports Odds History, the Eagles started 2024 as +6000 chances for Super Bowl LII, dipped down to +3000 in April of that year (as the markets moved due to free agency pickups and trades), before finally settling at +4000 before the start of the 2017 season.
If you take those 40/1 odds as a bracket of possible winners, you have a large tranche of teams for this 2025 season that would suddenly become viable contenders. That brings teams like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Chicago Bears, and Houston Texans into the fold. Is it probable that one of those trios could win Super Bowl LX? No, but it’s not outside the realms of possibility.
It is, of course, rare for these things to happen. Indeed, if we take the 2017 Eagles out of the calculation, the average preseason starting odds for a Super Bowl winner are around the +800 mark. This season, we have four teams – the Eagles, Bills, Ravens, and Chiefs, with odds under +800 (relatively rare), so that’s where the money will be concentrated. Still, now and again, we get a team coming from out of nowhere to blow everyone’s predictions out of the water.
The 2001 Patriots Turned Things Around
Some famous examples include the 2001 New England Patriots, coming off a 5-11 season. +6000 was widely available for the Pats that season. The story is well-known, including the insertion of a little-known quarterback, Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jnr, into the Patriots starting team. We all know what happened next. Twenty years earlier, the San Francisco 49ers also started the season with odds of +5000, but the rise of a confident Joe Montana and the clicking into gear of coach Bill Walsh’s season led the 49ers to Super Bowl XVI.
And finally, there was the 1999 St Louis Rams, the biggest long shot in NFL history – perhaps in sports history – to go from preseason chumps to end-of-season champs. The Rams had the worst record in the NFL the previous season, a calamitous offseason by all accounts, and started September as +15000 chances. The rest is history. Fans of teams languishing at the bottom of the betting markets – Las Vegas Raiders, New York Giants, Carolina Panthers – can take heart that there is always hope. It’s a very faint hope, but it’s all the same.
