The 2026 AFC championship game in two weeks will be the first since 2011 that doesn’t feature Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes. This year’s NFL regular season crowned seven new division champions—only the reigning Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles repeated atop their division—and five of the eight division champion quarterbacks have never won a playoff game. With many new teams and players, the Super Bowl race is quantitatively wide open relative to the average year.
We can compare the unpredictability of each postseason using entropy, a measure of a dataset’s homogeneity used in information theory. When analyzing probabilities, entropy can reflect the amount of uncertainty in an event. For instance, if all 14 NFL playoff teams had an equal chance of winning the championship, the entropy would max out at 3.8. But if one team had overwhelmingly large odds of winning the title and the other teams had no chance at all, the entropy would approach 0.
Using sportsbook odds, we normalized teams’ implied championship probabilities at the start of the playoffs so that they added up to 100%, then calculated the entropy for every year since 2008 (the earliest year with this data available). This year’s entropy of 3.43 is the second highest during that span, just behind the postseason for the 2021 regular season, when it reached 3.44.
That year, the Green Bay Packers had the best odds to lift the Lombardi Trophy prior to wild-card weekend at +375, and no other team had better than +500 odds. The Los Angeles Rams ultimately won the Super Bowl over the surprising AFC champion Cincinnati Bengals.
The league added an extra playoff team in each conference in 2020, which further increased unpredictability and gave more franchises a bite at the playoff apple. The aforementioned entropy statistic often used to dip below 3.0 but has not done so since the postseason expanded to 14 teams.
Consider another measure of parity: the odds that a team outside of the top three favorites wins the championship. This year, according to odds from BetMGM, there is a greater chance (53%) of a team outside of the top three winning than one of those teams (the Seattle Seahawks, Rams, and Denver Broncos). That number has only been above 50% in three of the previous 17 seasons.
In many ways, parity is built into the structure of the NFL. Economically, the majority of league revenue comes from national media rights deals, which is shared evenly between all 32 teams. In terms of roster construction, a hard salary cap forces teams’ payrolls to be similar and the annual draft rewards bad teams with better players. Teams also play easier schedules the season following a bad record, and good teams play harder schedules.
This season, however, has been particularly unpredictable from the beginning. Three of the top six teams heading into the regular season—the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens and Detroit Lions—missed the playoffs entirely. The Seahawks, on the other hand, opened the season with 60-to-1 odds to win the 2026 Super Bowl and now stand alone as the favorites.