2026 The Super Bowl-Era Franchise Rankings
The Seahawks won the trophy and shot up the charts – we also have a new overall leader.
SIXTY SEASONS! The Super Bowl era is now old enough to start getting retirement benefits and discounted meals at all sorts of different eateries. What an accomplishment for the little league that is surely no longer very little.
Officially, of course, the NFL goes back a lot further. Football itself goes back even further than that, but there is a certain symmetry about 60 years of the Super Bowl – especially for anyone that calls themselves a Dallas Cowboys fan.
The 1966 season produced Super Bowl I – a game that wasn’t even called that at the time – on January 15, 1967. Instead, it was the “AFL–NFL World Championship Game” and it set the stage for a full merger of the two leagues. That would officially happen in 1970 and give us the bones and skeleton of what we are obsessed with today.
This piece is about identifying the teams that have done the most in those 60 years.
For those who are new, I have been doing this for quite a while. In fact, this is the 24th annual attempt at showing my math. I tried to create something that could answer the question of who has been the best and worst over these 60 years by developing a system to objectively weigh all 32 franchises against each-other based on annual accomplishments.
But, how do I keep it objective? Everyone is always stumping for their favorite team and slanting things in favor of their agenda. How do I keep opinions out of this?
Well, I put together a scoring system 24 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 there is more to the sport than just one team per season. We want to recognize consistent excellence and that is not always just about winning the Super Bowl. On the other side, 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. It is a very big deal to win one of those Lombardi Trophies — let alone several — so any point system should give a great deal of credit to any team winning it all.
My database is updated every off-season after the Super Bowl because, of course, things change. Less and less each year, mind you, as the longer we do this, the more it resembles icebergs racing each other as sample sizes grow: One year is not enough to move very far, but they do, in fact, move. I have adjusted the system over the years, but have settled on this one because it seems to work the best. This objective scoring system (remember, this is all math) includes the following annual point values:
• – Winning the Super Bowl: 11 points
• – Losing the Super Bowl: 5 points
• – AFC/NFC Championship Game: 3 points
• – Making the playoffs: 1 point
To be clear, you only get one point threshold per year—you don’t collect on multiple levels. We add up the points from each year in existence (adjusting for expansion), which leads to the overall standings (you can see season-by-season point totals here). Ties? There are no ties. We break them with Super Bowls, then Super Bowl losses, then championship games, as necessary. Additionally, we provide rankings for “points per year” at the bottom of this piece, grading on a curve for teams that have not existed for all 60 seasons.
