Not So Fast

The Rams enter 2026 at +500 to win the Super Bowl, the shortest odds in the league, and it's easy to see why. They finished last season as the second-best team in football, leading the NFL in scoring at 30.5 points a game, total offense at 394.6 yards a game, and passing touchdowns with 46. Then they spent the offseason turning a good team into a super team on paper: they traded Jared Verse and three draft picks to Cleveland for Myles Garrett, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, sent a 2026 first-rounder to land cornerback Trent McDuffie, and watched Aaron Donald come out of retirement to rejoin the defense he used to anchor. On paper, there isn't a roster in the league that compares.
Here's the number that should worry anyone backing them anyway: over the past 30 years, a team has opened the season at +500 or shorter to win the Super Bowl 20 times. Those 20 teams are a combined 0-for-20. Not one of them finished the job. The list includes multiple Patriots teams at the height of the Brady era, a loaded Chiefs roster, and a Legion of Boom Seahawks team that looked unbeatable in August. All of them carried the same kind of hype the Rams are carrying into this season. None of them were still standing in February.
Widen the lens and the picture doesn't get much better. Looking at every team that opened as the consensus Super Bowl favorite going back to 2000, whether their odds were +500 or +900, only three out of 25 actually won it, a 12% hit rate. The rest either lost in the Super Bowl itself, got knocked out earlier than expected, or in a couple of cases, missed the playoffs entirely after being the trendy pick in July.
There's an important wrinkle here, and it actually makes the Rams' specific position worse, not better. Looking just at the last decade, three teams did win the Super Bowl after opening the season as the favorite: the Patriots in 2016, the Patriots in 2018, and the Chiefs in 2023. All three of those teams opened at +600, not +500 or shorter. The favorites who actually delivered were good, but not so overwhelmingly favored that the league had already crowned them in August. The Rams, at +500, are in the tier that's produced zero champions in three decades, not the slightly more modest tier that's produced three.
None of this is really about talent. It's about what building a super team costs and what it invites. The Rams gave up a promising young pass rusher and three draft picks to get Garrett, and a first-round pick to get McDuffie, which means less depth and less margin for the injuries that hit every roster over 17 games and a playoff run. And a team installed as the runaway favorite in August plays every single week of the season as the team everyone else is pointing their best effort at, with a full year of pressure and expectation sitting on top of a roster that hasn't actually played a snap together yet. History's graveyard of preseason super teams is full of rosters that looked unbeatable on a whiteboard in July and were gone by the divisional round.
None of this means the Rams can't win it. Somebody eventually breaks a streak, and this roster, healthy, is genuinely good enough to be the exception. But "good enough to win it" and "safe bet to win it" have not been the same thing for 30 straight years at this exact level of hype, and the gap between those two ideas is where every one of those 20 failed favorites lived. The Rams have built the best team money and draft capital could buy this offseason. History says that's usually the easy part.