The 2026 NFL Season, Simulated 20,000 Times: Standings, Super Bowl Odds, and Award Races
Way-too-early predictions, on the record before a single camp opens: projected standings and Super Bowl odds from 20,000 season simulations, award races from a model trained on a decade of actual voting — and exactly how all of it works.
15.8%Rams, win the Super Bowl
23%Josh Allen, MVP favoriteNFL training camps open in three days — Cardinals and Panthers veterans report July 22, and all 32 teams are in by July 28. I’m an actuary, and I love predicting things before I really should. Not because the predictions are at their best in July (they aren’t — we don’t even know all the starters yet), but because setting a baseline now is the only way to honestly measure how close I was after the fact. So consider this my “way too early” NFL preview: everything below is on the record, timestamped, and waiting to be graded in February.
The headline: the Rams enter 2026 as the most likely Super Bowl champion. That sentence would have sounded strange two years ago, but it’s where the math lands after Matthew Stafford’s MVP season, a market that has moved Los Angeles to the top of the win-total board, and a schedule simulation that likes their path through the NFC West. The model gives LA a projected 11.7 wins, an 88% chance to make the playoffs, and a 15.8% chance to win it all — the clear No. 1 in a league without a dominant favorite.
The 2026 projections
| Team | Proj. record | Playoffs | Division | Win range | Win Super Bowl |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles Rams | 11.7–5.3 | 88% | 59% | 9.0–14.0 | 15.8% |
 Detroit Lions | 11.5–5.5 | 86% | 60% | 9.0–14.0 | 9.7% |
 Baltimore Ravens | 11.4–5.6 | 87% | 57% | 9.0–14.0 | 10.8% |
 Cincinnati Bengals | 11.0–6.0 | 82% | 38% | 8.5–13.5 | 6.5% |
| Buffalo Bills | 10.8–6.2 | 82% | 65% | 8.0–13.0 | 9.1% |
 Seattle Seahawks | 10.6–6.4 | 72% | 24% | 8.0–13.0 | 7.6% |
 Philadelphia Eagles | 10.4–6.6 | 72% | 56% | 8.0–13.0 | 5.1% |
 San Francisco 49ers | 10.2–6.8 | 66% | 17% | 8.0–13.0 | 4.3% |
 Kansas City Chiefs | 10.2–6.8 | 70% | 38% | 8.0–12.5 | 4.8% |
 New England Patriots | 10.0–7.0 | 69% | 35% | 7.5–12.5 | 4.2% |
A few storylines the simulation surfaces:
The NFC West is the league’s gauntlet. Three of the top eight teams — the Rams, defending champion Seahawks, and 49ers — share a division. Seattle projects to 10.6 wins yet wins the division in only 24% of simulations, and one of these three playoff-caliber teams will regularly find itself sweating out Wild Card weekend.
The AFC North is a two-horse race with real kick. Baltimore (11.4) and Cincinnati (11.0) both project among the AFC’s top three. A healthy Joe Burrow — limited to eight games last season — is the biggest single upside variable in the conference.
Kansas City is the widest error bar in football. The Chiefs project to 10.2 wins, but that number carries our largest health discount: Patrick Mahomes is returning from the ACL/LCL tear he suffered in Week 15 last December, and our projection prices him for roughly 12 games. If he’s fully cleared in September, the Chiefs’ true number is closer to 11 wins — and their 4.8% Super Bowl odds are the cheapest of any contender on the board.
Last year’s Super Bowl teams both stay in the hunt. Seattle and New England project to 10.6 and 10.0 wins — and they open the season against each other in Week 1, with the 49ers and Rams meeting the next night on a neutral field in Melbourne.
At the bottom, Arizona (3.1 projected wins) and Miami (3.5) are the early leaders in the 2027 draft-position race — though Arizona fans at least get to watch the most exciting rookie in this year’s class (more below).
MVP: Josh Allen, but it’s open
| Quarterback | Proj. pass yds | Proj. total TD | Team proj. wins | MVP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Josh Allen BUF | 3,689 | 39 | 10.8 | 23% |
| Matthew Stafford LA | 4,158 | 34 | 11.7 | 16% |
| Lamar Jackson BAL | 3,449 | 34 | 11.4 | 15% |
| Joe Burrow CIN | 4,017 | 37 | 11.0 | 14% |
| Jalen Hurts PHI | 3,169 | 34 | 10.4 | 12% |
| Jared Goff DET | 4,315 | 33 | 11.5 | 9% |
Allen leads at 23% — his combination of passing touchdowns, a league-best 13 projected rushing scores, and a Bills team that wins its division in 65% of simulations is exactly the profile voters reward. History says look hard at that second tier: the winner has come from outside the preseason favorite more often than not. Projected stat lines assume roughly 16 games — the average starter misses about one per year — with steeper health discounts where they apply (that’s why Mahomes, priced for ~12 games, sits 19th).
The other award races
| Award | Player | Position | Chance to win |
|---|---|---|---|
| OPOY | Christian McCaffrey SF | RB | 19% |
| Jahmyr Gibbs DET | RB | 15% | |
| James Cook BUF | RB | 10% | |
| DPOY |  Myles Garrett CLE | EDGE | 17% |
| Aidan Hutchinson DET | EDGE | 5% | |
 Brian Burns NYG | EDGE | 4% | |
| OROY |  Jeremiyah Love ARI | RB | 20% |
 Carnell Tate TEN | WR | 11% | |
 Fernando Mendoza LV | QB | 9% |
Rookie race: the unnamed field is the collective favorite at 60% — this award goes to a surprise more often than any other. Bars share one scale across all three races.
Offensive Player of the Year: the running back award again. Christian McCaffrey (19%) and Jahmyr Gibbs (15%) top a board that has gone to a non-QB in seven straight seasons. Puka Nacua (9%) is the top wideout, and reigning winner Jaxon Smith-Njigba sits at 5% — repeat wins here are rare.
Defensive Player of the Year: Myles Garrett’s three-peat bid. Garrett (17%) is chasing a third straight. Aidan Hutchinson (5%) and Brian Burns (4%) lead the challengers. One honest caveat: our model sees pass rush far better than it sees coverage, so an elite cornerback season — like Pat Surtain’s 2024 — is exactly the kind of winner it will miss.
Offensive Rookie of the Year: watch Jeremiyah Love. The Cardinals made Love the highest-drafted running back since Saquon Barkley at No. 3 overall, and a featured role on day one makes him our top named candidate at 20%. Carnell Tate (11%) and No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza (9% — he opens behind Kirk Cousins, and rookie QBs need starts to win this) follow. The field, collectively, is the favorite at 60%: this award goes to a surprise more often than any other.
How the model works
The game engine. Every projection starts with a possession-level Markov simulator built on eleven seasons of play-by-play data. Rather than predicting final scores directly, it simulates games drive by drive — field position, clock, timeouts, end-of-half urgency, overtime rules — with team offensive and defensive ratings and a quarterback adjustment layered on top. Each of the 272 regular-season games is simulated 2,000 times to produce win probabilities.
The preseason ratings. In July there are no 2026 games to learn from, so preseason ratings come from the sharpest available source: the betting market. We take season win totals from four major sportsbooks, strip out the bookmaker’s margin, and convert the prices into continuous expected wins — so a team priced at “over 10.5, heavily juiced” is correctly rated ahead of one at “over 10.5, even money.” That distinction matters: eight teams share the same posted win total this year, and the prices are what separate them.
The season simulation. With per-game win probabilities in hand, we replay the entire season 20,000 times — every game, every tiebreaker, every playoff bracket through the Super Bowl. Playoff seeding uses head-to-head, division, and conference records. The probabilities you see are simply counts: the Rams win the Super Bowl in 3,160 of 20,000 simulated seasons.
The award models. Award races are a different problem — they’re about voters, not just performance. We fit a model on ten-plus years of actual voting results to learn what voters reward: for MVP, it’s team wins and total touchdowns, with interception avoidance mattering more than raw yardage. Each 2026 candidate gets a projected stat line built from their recent per-game rates (with health discounts where they apply), and the MVP calculation is run across all 20,000 simulated seasons, so a quarterback gets credit for his team’s upside scenarios, not just its average. Back-tested against history, the model would have had the eventual MVP in its top three in ten of the last eleven seasons.
What we won’t pretend. These are probabilities, not predictions. A 15.8% Super Bowl favorite loses 84% of the time. The quarterback map is preliminary until camps settle. And award voting has a narrative component no stat model fully captures — that’s why the “field” is the honest favorite in the rookie race. We publish the numbers, we track how they perform, and we update them when the information changes.
Projections update after the late-August quarterback refresh and weekly during the season.
Disclosure
Analytical and educational content about model performance. Not betting advice.