Somewhere in the Seahawks’ front office last July, somebody had to look at +6600 odds to win the Super Bowl and just laugh. Sixty-six-to-one. That’s not “dark horse” territory — that’s the number sportsbooks hang on a team they’ve basically forgotten exists. Geno Smith was gone, shipped out for Sam Darnold, a quarterback who’d already been given up on by Carolina, the Jets, and, in the minds of most of the league, football itself. Nobody in Seattle was pretending that trade looked good in August. It looked like a franchise punting on a season before it started.
Then the losses stopped happening. Fourteen and three. The NFC’s number-one seed. A defense that allowed fewer points than anyone in football, chewing through the Rams in the NFC Championship before walking into Super Bowl LX and making New England look like they’d never seen an NFL playbook — 29-13, Kenneth Walker III running through arm tackles all night on his way to MVP, a defensive unit that had turned “Dark Side” from a nickname into a warning label.
Darnold, the guy nobody wanted, hoisted a Lombardi Trophy. That’s the story. That’s the whole premise here. And let’s not forget those odds. Sixty-six-to-one were the Seahawks odds 12 months ago, and they won the thing. Now, two months from kickoff on a Super Bowl LX rematch, the champions aren’t the favorites to do it again. They’re fourth. What does that tell you about who’s chasing them?
Los Angeles Rams
There’s a specific kind of cruelty in losing a shot at the Super Bowl with the league’s best offence already sitting right there. The Rams put up 518 points in 2025, more than anyone, and still walked out of Seattle in January having blown a fourth-quarter lead, undone as much by a muffed punt as by anything the Seahawks’ defense did to them. Twenty-second in the league on special teams, a team that built a title-caliber offence and then handed games away in the one phase of football nobody pays attention to until it costs you everything.
So, what does Les Snead do about it? He doesn’t run it back. He trades a promising 25-year-old pass rusher, Jared Verse, along with a pile of future draft capital, for a 30-year-old Myles Garrett — an all-time great, sure, but one on the back nine of his prime, walking into a defense that already added Trent McDuffie and a rebuilt secondary counting on staying healthy at the same time Matthew Stafford, 38 years old, needs his body to hold up for one more run.
That’s the bet: everybody stays upright, all at once, for one more shot at SoFi Stadium hosting its own coronation. It’s the shortest odds a preseason favorite has carried in decades. It’s also entirely dependent on nothing breaking.
Buffalo Bills
Nine seasons. Sean McDermott built the Bills from irrelevant to perennial, and it still wasn’t enough, because the ending was always the same: another January, another team standing on the wrong side of the scoreboard. This time it was Denver, in overtime, 33-30, and two days later, McDermott was out.
What Buffalo did next says everything about how badly they wanted a different voice in that building — they didn’t go outside, they didn’t chase a big name. They promoted Joe Brady, 36 years old, who’s never called a defensive snap or run a program as a head coach anywhere, and handed him the keys to the most scrutinized quarterback in the sport.
That’s not a small thing. Longtime offensive line coach Aaron Kromer retired in the same offseason — institutional memory walking out the door right as a first-time head coach walks in. Brady at least reunites with DJ Moore, a receiver he got the best out of years ago in Carolina, which finally gives Josh Allen a real number one. And the defense isn’t just getting new pieces in Bradley Chubb — it’s getting a new identity, period, as Jim Leonhard tears down McDermott’s old zone-based 4-3 and installs an attacking 3-4 from scratch. The program is betting its entire defensive infrastructure on a coordinator who’s never had this job before, in the same year the head coach hasn’t either.
Baltimore Ravens
This is the one that actually hurts. Baltimore came into 2025 as the preseason Super Bowl favorite — the team everyone else was afraid of — and missed the playoffs entirely, the whole season coming down to a 44-yard field goal that sailed wide as time expired in Pittsburgh.
Eighteen years, John Harbaugh gave that franchise. A Super Bowl. Six division titles. And it ended two days later with a phone call, because a missed kick in Week 18 is sometimes all it takes to end an era that long.
Jesse Minter walks into that building at 42 years old, having never been a head coach anywhere, and the first thing waiting for him is Lamar Jackson — a two-time MVP who still hasn’t gotten this team past an AFC Championship Game, absorbing a ceiling that keeps getting lower every year he doesn’t break through it.
Minter brought Anthony Weaver back to run the defense, a return trip for both of them. But the AFC North doesn’t care about rebuilding timelines. It’s the league’s most physical division, and a first-year staff doesn’t get a grace period there.
Seattle Seahawks
Here’s the story nobody’s telling loud enough: the defending champions are priced behind three teams that they outlasted last season. Much of that is down to the mass exodus. Kenneth Walker III — the Super Bowl MVP, the guy who authored the signature performance of the entire postseason — left for Kansas City in free agency, and John Schneider didn’t answer with a blockbuster of his own. He answered by re-signing Rashid Shaheed. That’s it. That’s the move. Coby Bryant, Boye Mafe, Riq Woolen — all gone too, all replaced with value plays and draft capital instead of splash signings.
Is that discipline, or is that a front office quietly betting the odds board is wrong? Jaxon Smith-Njigba is walking into a season where every defensive coordinator in the league has had an entire offseason to figure out how to take him away. Devon Witherspoon and Leonard Williams are still there up front. The defense that suffocated New England in February is somewhat intact, but the departures mean that no bookie in their right mind can insert the reigning kings as genuine outright favorites to repeat as champions.
