🏈 Every NFL season since 1920
107seasons, each with every team’s rating week by week, its final standings and its best games. One model runs the whole way through, so a 1925 team and a 2025 team are measured the same way and 2026 is already seeded.
Browse a season
107 seasons, one hub each. Hover a year for who ended it on top.
The belt: the best team in the league, season by season
One square per season, in that team's own colour. Runs of dominance are the point.
How this is measured
A star marks a season where the best-rated team also won the championship. It happens in 81 of 106 finished seasons.
Against expectation, a century of it
Every game priced before kick-off, and scored afterwards against the closing line.
How this is measured
Tap or drag on the chart: the nearest season, the model's score and the market's.
The full method, the market comparison and the metro rollups are on Against Expectation. Each season’s own priced game log is linked from its season page.
When the best team did not win
25 of 106 finished seasons ended with the championship somewhere other than the top of the ratings.
How this is measured
The years two leagues ran at once
Rated in one pool, so the comparison is finally possible.
How this is measured
1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969. Every team in those years is rated against every other, whichever league it played in.
Where these numbers come from
Enough to disbelieve this page on purpose rather than by accident.
Ratings are Neil Paine’s NFL Elo, carried in this site’s own NFL workbook: 48,636 team-weeks across 107seasons, every one with a rating and a league rank. Championships and year-end honours come from the same workbook’s year-by-year record, not from the ratings.
Every league that ran in a season is rated in ONE pool, so the 1946-49 AAFC and the 1960-69 AFL are rated against the NFL of their day. Only the standings on a season page are split by league.
Nothing here is a forecast. The model was not held out from the seasons it rates, so read it as a description of what happened rather than a prediction of what will. Against Expectation is where the same ledger is scored against the betting market, and it loses. Built 2026-09-06.