Acme Packing Company
There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in here since the Micah Parsons injury, for good reason, but let’s look for optimism for the Green Bay Packers this year. There are still three more games left in the regular season, with the potential for the Packers to secure a playoff spot as early as Sunday. So how bad are Green Bay’s Super Bowl chances, actually?
Let’s take a look at the two largest sportsbooks to see how the Packers stack in Super Bowl odds after the Los Angeles Rams lost to the Seattle Seahawks, giving Seattle the lead in the NFC West and the NFC overall.
For the most part, books seem to like the Packers’ chances more than the power rankings right now. In general, Green Bay is hovering around 8th to 10th in power rankings, while these books have the Packers ranked as the sixth- and eighth-most probable Super Bowl winners this year.
So here’s the question I wanted to answer: Which teams that actually got it done in the postseason had a worse shot, at least in the mind of books, than the Packers? Well, Sports Odds History has a list of Super Bowl odds going into Wild Card Weekend dating back to 1980, so we can actually answer that.
Yes, Eli Manning pulled off the two longest Super Bowl champion tickets in the history of the sport. In 2007, the 10-6 Giants were given just a two percent implied probability to win it all. They won three games on the road to win the NFC, capped off with an overtime win in Brett Favre’s last game as a Packer, before beating a previously undefeated New England Patriots team in the Super Bowl.
Four years later, Manning’s Giants did it again, turning a 9-7 regular season record into another improbable Super Bowl run that again featured a win at Lambeau Field (this time in the divisional round) and the Patriots in the Super Bowl.
This is your Jordan Love Toyotathon dream comparison. The 10-6 Ravens scored 124 points in the playoffs (31 points a game) after averaging just 21.5 points a game during the regular season.
During that run, quarterback Joe Flacco threw 1,140 yards on 126 passes (nine yards per attempt) with 11 touchdowns and zero interceptions for a passer rating of 117.2. At +2000, Baltimore had a five percent implied probability to win the Super Bowl going into the postseason....
