Looking back at what happened to the 2025 NFL preseason favorites

Post-draft NFL win totals for all 32 teams can be released months before the season. Even teams with projected win totals that do not suggest playoff contention can still reach the Super Bowl. Win projections incorporate changes since the prior season, including free agency, the draft, and coaching moves. Sportsbooks also set lines to keep betting action balanced on both sides, reflecting what bettors expect. Bettors often rely on recency bias, assuming recent patterns will continue. Historically, only a minority of teams repeat as division winners, and each year several new teams enter the playoffs. Despite this, many projections can resemble a repeat of the previous playoff field, making the scenario appear unlikely.

"Technically, the post-draft win projections have free agency, the draft, coaching changes, and anything else that happened since the end of the previous season priced in. But much more importantly, the oddsmakers are trying to provide odds where the action from the betting public will remain even on both sides of the bet. And the betting public, by and large, believes that the most likely outcome this year is going to be largely the same as the outcome last year."

"Last year's post-draft win projection. Red marks the teams that missed the playoffs last year, (*) marks the teams that made the playoffs the year before. Six teams missed the playoffs despite being pre-season favorites for another playoff appearance. And that six-team total is perfectly in line with the average of the last 24 years since re-alignment in 2002: Every year, an average of six to seven new teams make the NFL playoffs."

"Yet the win projections look like little more than a repeat of last year's playoff field: 12 of the 14 playoff participants from 2024 were projected to repeat their playoff appearance in 2025. So why would a sportsbook put up such an unlikely scenario? Because they are playing the betting public, and that betting public is heavily influenced by recency bias, the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future."

"We know that in the NFL, less than half of teams repeat as division winners from year to year, and that an average of about six to seven new"

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