2024 NFL Season Preview: can anyone supplant the Chiefs or 49ers?
Between the Pipes' model has last year's Super Bowl participants as the top two teams headed into 2024
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Training camp is in full swing and preseason games have gotten under way, so that means we’re less than a month away from weekends filled with NFL football.
Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs will be vying for the NFL’s first three-peat in the Super Bowl era once things kick off in early September. Prior to their title last season it had been 18 years since a team won back-to-back Lombardi trophies. So let’s break down how likely a third Super Bowl in a row for the Chiefs would be, and which teams have the best chance of stopping Kansas City on its historic quest this season.
Now I’m not here to dissect individual offseason moves and what they mean for a team’s chances, rather I want to talk about what the “smart” numbers say about the 2024 NFL season. And since the NFL released its regular season schedule back in May, we can start by opining on who’s got the easiest (or hardest) path to the Super Bowl in New Orleans this year.
Ranking teams based on Elo ratings, a simple system popularized by the old FiveThirtyEight.com1 which judges teams based on head-to-head results, gives us a way to identify which teams will have the hardest schedules; at least based on what we know about team strengths headed into the season.
Neil Paine pointed out in his newsletter last month how the discourse around strength of schedule before the season starts is an exercise in futility. In his words:
“But the bigger takeaway from all of this is that nobody really knows how difficult a team’s schedule is going to be next season. (And that’s because nobody really knows how good any given team is going to be next season.) Knowing that, maybe the only solution is to not talk about or rank future schedule strengths at all.”
I agree with him wholeheartedly, but good luck convincing NFL teams’ diehard fans none of this matters at this point in the calendar. It also gives us an excuse to come up with that pretty chart above2.
So using the Elo method mentioned above the Cleveland Browns look to have the hardest schedule of all NFL teams in 2024. They have to play two of the top three teams in the league — according to my ratings — in the defending champion Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens (twice).
The Ravens for their part will face Mahomes’s Chiefs in the opening game of the regular season on the road Sept. 5. That game alone makes their road to the playoffs the fourth toughest this year. Fortunately for the Ravens they will have 16 more games to make up any falters in that AFC Championship rematch from last season.
Of the top 10 teams headed into the campaign the Philadelphia Eagles have the easiest schedule (sixth easiest), while the Chiefs have an average schedule clocking in at 18th easiest (or 15th hardest if you prefer).
The Chicago Bears — who picked quarterback Caleb Williams with the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft this year — were seemingly dealt a great hand by the scheduling gods in addition to their draft position. Chicago has the fourth easiest slate of games in the league as of today’s rankings. Anything but a .500 record or better would likely be seen as a disappointment in the Windy City this year.
Season Predictions
You can take my word for who’s got the best chances to make the playoffs this year (more on that below) or we can see what the bookmakers in Vegas think.
The Chiefs are most likely to win according to the sportsbooks3, with an average implied Super Bowl win probability of 13 percent4. The Niners are the only other team with a double-digit chance at winning it all this year at 11 percent, followed by familiar teams from last year’s playoffs like the Ravens (seven percent), Lions (seven percent) and Eagles (six percent). If you’re a Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos or New England Patriots fan you better set your sights on the 2025 Draft instead of the playoff race this year.
Despite winning the Super Bowl Mahomes finished last season with career-low values in almost every conventional passing stat, including passer rating (92.6), pass yards per attempt (7.0), pass yards per game (261.4), and touchdown to interception ratio (27-14). That means some analysts believe he’ll regress upwards this season, a scary prospect for the rest of the league.
Meanwhile the 49ers were an overtime away from being Super Bowl champions, and some analysts still had them as the best team in the NFL even after the loss. They’ll be bringing back some of the most important pieces from their 2023 run in running back Christian McCaffrey, quarterback Brock Purdy and tight end George Kittle; as well as guys like Nick Bosa and Fred Warner that have anchored one of the league’s best defenses in the 2020s.
My numbers5 are generally aligned with Vegas’s odds, but I give Kansas City slightly less of a chance to repeat than the bookmakers do. My predictions tend to be conservative compared to other models though as I regress each team back to the NFL average Elo before running 1,000 simulated seasons of this year’s game schedule.
My projections give both the Chiefs and 49ers an 11 percent chance to win Super Bowl LIX in February. Kansas City averages more than 11.2 wins when simulating the season schedule 1,000x based on those power ratings, tops in the league. The 49ers are second with 10.8 average wins in the sims, followed by Baltimore at 10.3.
See this link for the interactive version of the above table on my NFL analytics website, which has plenty more stats and visuals where this came from.
Divisional Storylines
AFC East
Per the simulation, the Buffalo Bills should win this division with a projected win total of about 9.9 wins.
The Dolphins are projected to win about nine games and are nearly break-even to make the playoffs, according to the model. They’re the only team expected to give Buffalo trouble.
AFC North
The Ravens are the clear favorites in the AFC North with the third-best Super Bowl odds in both my numbers and Vegas’s (eight percent and seven percent, respectively.
This division will be featured on Hard Knocks in season this year. That should be fun.
AFC South
Vegas has the Houston Texans’s win total pegged at 8.5 games, while it has the Jacksonville Jaguars at 7.5. Both of those teams average about 8.4 wins in my simulations, but Jacksonville is the ever-so-slight favorite in the division because it has a much easier schedule than does Houston, according to the opponent Elo rating methodology above.
AFC West
The Chiefs will win this division again.
NFC East
The Cowboys are projected to be a top-5 team in my model this season. They’re expected to win about 10 games, which is tops in the NFC East.
Philadelphia shouldn’t be far behind. This is also a very competent franchise that seems to consistently outperform preseason expectations so a division title from the Eagles wouldn’t surprise me.
NFC North
Man, is this going to be a fun division to watch. The Lions had San Francisco on the ropes in last year’s NFC title game on the road. The 49ers has to use a breakout second half to beat the Lions to advance to the Super Bowl in that game, but Detroit’s stock feels like it’s at an all-time high now going into this season. The model thinks the Lions are the sixth-best team in the NFL this year and gives them a 34 percent chance at winning the division.
The model thinks the Packers are their toughest competition, but keep in mind, it doesn’t account for new additions like the beefed up offensive weapons Chicago will be boasting, so I figure the Bears may win more games than the projected 8.2 the model is forecasting.
Speaking of simple-minded models, it doesn’t yet know about the tough offseason Minnesota has had from an injury perspective. Don’t expect much from the Vikings.
NFC South
This has been the worst division in football for years now. I won’t pretend to know anything about it, but the numbers say the Saints (51 percent), Bucs (47 percent) and Falcons (41 percent) have the best chance of reaching the playoffs this season.
Kirk Cousins is in this division now. I still don’t know if he’s a good quarterback.
NFC West
The NFC West is San Francisco’s to lose.
Nate Silver split with ABC, FiveThirtyEight’s parent company, last year but he kept the IP to his politics and sports models. The new ownership group — for better or worse — also rebranded by stylizing the site as 538.com.
You can recreate any of the plots you see here in R. See the code on my GitHub.
Using an average implied probability of several popular sportsbooks using the Odds API. See the odds here.
Vig is removed from these probabilities. To convert sports odds easily use my Sports Odds Converter tool.
I use simulation made easy by the nflverse in R to iterate through the 272-game NFL schedule 1,000 times to produce each team’s estimated number of wins, chances of winning the division, conference, Super Bowl, and earn the number one overall pick in next year’s draft. The team ratings that power the simulation are derived from a combination of publicly available Elo ratings models and previous game results, adjusted for the new season.