The 2026 Rams are the closest thing we've had to a preseason superteam in several years. Sean McVay's group was already a popular pick to win Super Bowl LXI before the offseason began. But then L.A. traded for Trent McDuffie and signed Jaylen Watson, shoring up the secondary at the expense of a potential Super Bowl opponent in the Chiefs. The move to draft Ty Simpson as Matthew Stafford's successor struck a curious tone, but general manager Les Snead responded with the mother of all high-stakes moves, trading Jared Verse and three picks to the Browns for reigning Defensive Player of the Year Myles Garrett.
Unsurprisingly, the Rams have become prohibitive favorites to win the Super Bowl after their aggressive moves this offseason. Picking any other team to win the Lombardi Trophy at this point would almost require coming up with some sort of explanation for what happened to the Rams along the way.
And yet, we have to look back only one year to remind ourselves how NFL seasons can play out entirely differently once players get on the field. In 2025, 68 ESPN personalities picked their AFC and NFC champions, along with an eventual Super Bowl winner, before the season kicked off. Not a single person picked the Seahawks or Patriots. I predicted the Chiefs and Packers, who combined for exactly zero playoff wins. Preseason darlings like the Chiefs, Lions and Commanders each missed the playoffs altogether.
Was 2025 just a weird year? And how often do heavily favorited superteams such as the 2026 Rams actually win the Super Bowl? I decided to take a more comprehensive look through history to get a sense of how confident we can be that Los Angeles will be the last team standing come Feb. 14.
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To do so, I'm going to look at the 15 largest preseason favorites since 1990 and see how their seasons played out. I'll be using the preseason odds compiled at Pro Football Reference from 1990 to 2025 and compare them with the odds posted for this season's Super Bowl at DraftKings. The Rams have odds of +550 at DraftKings to win the Super Bowl, while nobody else in the league is shorter than +1000. After we adjust for the vigorish and convert the betting lines into probabilities, the Rams have an implied 12.5% chance of winning this season's Super Bowl, putting them 5.1 percentage points ahead of the second-placed Bills and Ravens.
While the absolute number might be a better sense of how the market views a particular team, I'm going to use the latter figure to sort through our top 15 teams (well, 16, if we're including the 2026 Rams). There were plenty of seasons in the 1990s where two or three superteams -- such as the 49ers and Cowboys -- were seen as significantly better than the rest of the competition. I want to get a sense of what it was like for the teams that truly separated from the pack before the season began, as appears to be the case for this Rams squad.