2025 Super Bowl-Era Franchise Rankings

The Philadelphia Eagles are the big winners in 2024 and shoot up the ranks all-time.

Fifty-nine years is a lot of football. The 1966 season produced Super Bowl 1 – a game that wasn’t even called that at the time – on January 15, 1967. It was called at the time the “AFL–NFL World Championship Game” and it was a fair while back.

The stretch from there to February 9, 2025 is the same distance as that date back to August 15, 1906. That, of course, was a few months (April 1906) that the sport of football legalized the forward pass. Seriously. It was illegal, but due to the 19 deaths in college football in 1905, this issue was a solution to try to keep football from being banned by the government. Seriously. The sitting US President, Theodore Roosevelt stepped in as a friend of the game to try to save it. Next thing you know, we have passing in football and things would never be the same.

Now, nearly 120 years later, we spend quite a bit of time arguing about the NFL and who is the greatest of them all. So, as you might expect from an elite-level sports nerd, I would love to figure out how to quantify 59 years of Super Bowl tournaments.

And this is the 23rd annual attempt at doing that. I tried to create something that could answer the question of who has been the best and worst over these 59 years by developing a system to objectively weigh all 32 franchises against each other based on annual accomplishments.

How do you keep it objective? Everyone is always stumping for their favorite team and slanting things in favor of their agenda. How do you keep opinions out of this?

I put together a scoring system 23 years ago that credits teams for making the playoffs, advancing to the final four of each conference’s championship games, reaching the Super Bowl, and winning the Super Bowl.

The system had to be more complex than simply counting Lombardi trophies because some teams have a knack for rising up every few years and winning the Super Bowl despite missing the playoffs altogether for several years in between (shoutout to Eli Manning and the New York Giants). At the same time, it is a very big deal to win one of those trophies — let alone several — so any point system should give a great deal of credit to any team winning it all.