ELWAY NFL projections: Super Bowl
Team ratings, playoff and Super Bowl probabilities, and forecasts of every upcoming game from Silver Bulletin's exclusive NFL model.
🕒 Our latest NFL team ratings
Monday, February 2
Happy Super Bowl week. We’ve updated our projections with the latest injury information. Although the Seahawks were already favored, this helps them further at the margin as the Patriots have a longer injury list. That includes QB Drake Maye, who is officially listed as questionable with a shoulder injury. To be honest, I’m not taking that entirely literally: it’s the Super Bowl, and he’s probably going to play unless he’s missing a limb or falls into the Springfield Mystery Spot. Instead, I have Maye listed as “probable”, which implies a 90 percent chance of suiting up (“questionable” would be 70 percent). But not being able to throw the deep ball reliably could considerably limit the Pats’ big-play potential.
ELWAY has had a pretty good postseason after a regular season in which, like a lot of prognosticators, it was disappointed by the Chiefs’ and Lions’ demise. (Annoyingly, also my favorite teams.) When the playoffs began, it had the Seahawks as the most likely Super Bowl champion by some margin, not necessarily because they were all that much better than the Rams — they weren’t last night — but because they’ve consistently been very good and getting a first-round bye plus getting to play at home in a stadium with a larger-than-average home-field-advantage is a huge positive.
In the AFC, we had the Broncos as 1a and the Patriots as 1b, though there was a gap between them, again mostly coming down to a bye and home-field advantage. Empirically, home field is the largest under worse weather conditions, which you’d think would help the Broncos in a literal blizzard. (Sean Payton should probably have checked the weather forecast.) But Drake Maye actually has more lifetime experience in cold weather than Jarrett Stidham, Bo Nix’s replacement, who had only four lifetime starts of any kind prior to Sunday. QBERT, our QB rating model that plugs into ELWAY, actually liked Maye’s performance, giving him a 96.9 rating for the game despite just 86 passing yards. Maye’s 6 rushing first downs were basically the thing that either team had going for them the entire game.
ELWAY updates its ratings after each game based not just on the final score but also lots of underlying data. Both the Seahawks’ and the Patriots’ ratings were essentially unchanged after last week. The Seahawks certainly had the conventionally better performance — the Patriots averaged just 3.2 yards per play — but it’s going to be very forgiving to a road team playing in a blizzard (yes, there’s a weather adjustment). The system actually thought the Rams had the best performance of the week, but they’re stuck watching the Super Bowl from the sidelines.
It’s no huge secret what either team’s biggest question is. For the Seahawks, Sam Darnold is a perfectly fine quarterback; his 86.6 QBERT rating is (slightly) above average. Still, this ranks just 108th of 120th Super Bowl starters all time. Meanwhile, the Patriots had the league’s softest regular-season schedule. And the QBs they faced in the playoffs — injured Justin Hebert, slumping C.J. Stroud, and Stidham — are not exactly a murderers’ row, although they faced three very tough defenses and the Pats’ own D has been outstanding.
Since our overall ELWAY ratings are public, you can see that we rate the Seahawks higher. While there are other factors the system considers that can sometimes complicate the forecast, the most important of these are 1) rest and 2) various elements of home-field advantage, not a factor in a neutral-site game after an extra week off. (Although the Seahawks will be playing in their natural time zone.)
So, yes, we have Seattle favored, although paid subscribers can scroll down to the “ELWAY future game projections” section for a more detailed forecast (including, yeah, a point spread, win probabilities, and an over/under line). Soon, we’ll also have a separate Super Bowl analysis coming for paid subscribers, with more analysis and even a guide to the most valuable Super Bowl squares.
The rest of this page contains:
Different versions of our ELWAY ratings;
Odds for each remaining stage of the playoffs and winning the Super Bowl
Detailed projections for this week’s games, and conditional projections for next week, including point spreads and totals (yes, there is gambling in this casino);
And a series of 32 mini-graphs that track each team’s ELWAY rating from week to week.
The ratings themselves are free for everyone, while the other features are exclusive to paying subscribers. -NS, 2/2/26
See also: QBERT NFL quarterback ratings.
The best (and worst) teams in the NFL
The default version of ELWAY ratings includes adjustments based on a team’s projected starting QB for the upcoming game and current injuries. You can click the tabs in the table to view the other versions. “Healthy QB1s” backs out injuries completely for both QBs and non-QBs; the Bengals magically get Joe Burrow back. This might be a good indication of a team’s intrinsic strength later in the season. Meanwhile, the “team performance” version is most comparable to traditional NFL power ratings. It accounts for offseason roster movement and carries over a portion of the ratings from one season to the next, but otherwise takes a more “set it and forget it” approach.
ELWAY’s offensive and defensive ratings are essentially projections of how many points a team is expected to score and allow in forthcoming games. (Lower defensive ratings are better since it means a team is projected to allow fewer points.) By design, these ratings tend to be correlated, as you can see from this scatterplot:
Why such a strong relationship? Well, it’s because in a very literal sense, “a good offense is the best defense” in the NFL. Holding onto possession of the ball prevents the other team from scoring — defensive TDs are rare — eats up the clock, and leaves them with worse field position.
ELWAY projected records and playoff odds
We simulate the remainder of the season 10,0001 times based on these ratings, projected injury timelines, and a whole series of other adjustments. A team like the Packers will tend to have a bigger home-field advantage later in the season, for instance, because winter weather tends to help home teams that are accustomed to it. (There’s a reason that luxury housing is relatively affordable in Green Bay.)
Here are our projected playoff odds.