Latest Odds Show Tightly Packed NFC North Race Brewing

The latest NFC North championship odds project yet another season without a division championship for the Green Bay Packers.

The Detroit Lions are the favorites to win the NFC North at FanDuel Sportsbook. They are +150 to win the division after winning it in 2023 and 2024 but crashing to last place in 2025.

The Packers are next at +250. They have not won the division since Aaron Rodgers’ next-to-last season as the starting quarterback in 2021. A five-year title drought would be their longest since a 12-year run was snapped by Mike Holmgren’s fourth team in 1995.

A key for Green Bay will be finishing games. Had it not blown late-season leads at Denver and Chicago, the Packers would have won the NFC North last year. Had they not blown a wild-card lead at Chicago, their Super Bowl hopes would have survived for at least another week.

Instead, they’ll enter the season with a five-game losing streak.

“It comes down to just trying to emulate that in practice,” quarterback Jordan Love said after the first day of minicamp. “I think today we kind of got off to a slow start on offense. We were making some mental mistakes and different things like that, and we brought everybody up as a group, and it’s what we talked about and harped on all offseason.

“We got to find a way to, when it’s not our best early on, we got to lock back in and regroup and find a way to finish the day off. So, I think you just have that mindset going into practice. We’ve got to find ways to finish the day, and those things will slowly, I think, translate into games.”

The Chicago Bears, who won the NFC North last season, are third in the odds at +330. While there are high hopes in the Windy City and/or Indiana for Year 2 of a Ben Johnson-Caleb Williams combo, the Bears could take a step back after leading the league with 33 takeaways last season.

“It’s a hell of a lot more fun for me than it was last year just because it was, ‘Dude, I feel like I was drowning trying to breathe or stay alive and wait for a boat to come around last year,’” Williams, via ESPN, said he told running backs coach Eric Studesville. “Now this year, it’s being able to start where we finished last year. … That’s the advantage.”

The Minnesota Vikings are the long shots to win the NFC North at +490. The Vikings have one of the best defenses in the NFL and signed quarterback Kyler Murray, who is the betting favorite to win the job in his battle against J.J. McCarty. Murray was gifted with arguably the top receiver trio in the NFL with Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison and Jauan Jennings.

“He understands the game,” Jefferson said of Murray on KFAN 100.3 FM. “He understands the defenses. He understands just how to put touch on the ball, just enough to where it gets to where it got to go, without making it difficult for us. So, he understands the game a lot more just because he’s been in the game for a couple of years now.”

Green Bay will kick off the season at the Vikings. The Packers are 1.5-point favorites.

“Excited about it,” coach Matt LaFleur told Packers.com when the schedule was released. “Starting against an NFC North Division rival, it’s always a tough place to play. It’s going to have a playoff-type atmosphere, for sure.”

The NFC North is expected to be the most competitive division in the NFL. Only the NFC South has a smaller separation between the first and last teams in the division odds. However, no team in the NFC North had a losing record last season and no team in the NFC South had a winning record.

The Packers have qualified for the playoffs as the No. 7 seed for three consecutive seasons. This could be a fourth. They have the sixth-shortest playoff odds behind the Rams (-500), Seahawks (-225), Lions (-205), Eagles (-148) and 49ers (-146). Sliding in whoever wins the NFC South, that would put Green Bay at No. 7.

At least they’d reach the playoffs.

The Bears are eighth in the NFC playoff odds at +112 and the Vikings are 10th at +166. The North is the only division in which all four teams are in the top 10 of their conference playoff odds.

Odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.

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