With one regular season week of the 2023 National Football League season complete, we’ve seen it all. The eventual Super Bowl Champion has opened their season, and they are likely one of the 16 teams that won last week. Of the first 57 Super Bowl winners, 47 of them won their season opening game.
Only one eventual Super Bowl winner started their triumphant season with a loss at home, that was the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Jon Gruden’s first year as the Buccaneers head coach landed him in a Super Bowl against the team he had coached the prior four seasons. It was almost unfair, and the Bucs drilled the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII, 48-21.
Twenty-four of the 57 teams that went on to win a Super opened their season at home. They were 23-1 straight-up. If we are to allow tendencies of first week results to guide our thinking on future games this year, we can eliminate a few teams that were serious contenders seven days ago and are now left in a miniscule percentage for the possibility of winning it all this year.
The Kansas City Chiefs loss at home, a one point defeat to the Detroit Lions, can allow us with some collateral evidence to deduce that Andy Reid’s boys are not going to be the first team to win back-to-back Super Bowls since the 2004 New England Patriots.
First week results also knocked out three other squads from serious Super Bowl consideration by virtue of dropping their opening home game. That trio of squads that fall into an unlikely start for a team destined to win the Super Bowl are the Los Angeles Chargers, Minnesota Vikings and Pittsburgh Steelers. Sunday’s results gives rise to the prospects of the Cleveland Browns, who beat the Cincinnati Bengals, and the Jacksonville Jaguars, who downed a competitive Indianapolis Colts squad.
Nine Super Bowl winners lost in the opening weekend on the road, while 24 road teams won. Suffice it to say, a team headed to the Super Bowl most likely won on opening day. If our numbers bear out to be as forecasting as they have in the past, then the teams that were most challenged by their opponent but went on to win are teams to consider most seriously as a viable Super Bowl winning candidate.