The Seattle Seahawks are favorites to win Super Bowl LX, says ESPN

A Black Swan Event is an occurrence that takes place with the following criteria.

The event occurs, with no one or very few people having predicted the occurrence.
The event has a tremendous impact.
The event is viewed as inevitable, or at least likely to happen, in hindsight.

If the Seattle Seahawks win Super Bowl LX in a month, does that qualify as a Black Swan Event?

The first criteria definitely seems to be in place. There’s a metric ton of receipts out there of people who didn’t see Seattle’s 2025 campaign coming, predicting the team to be mediocre or worse, prognosticating a fourth place finish with the division. You can find a few more positive takes, but by and large the Seahawks were viewed as a throwaway team this season.

If you use DraftKings as a guide, a Super Bowl shouldn’t have even been in consideration for this team. According to ESPN, the Seahawks were +6000 to win Super Bowl LX before the season started. That comes out to 60-to-1 odds. Some of the highest odds in the entire league. So I feel comfortable saying that the first criteria is met.

All of that has changed in the last four months, of course. DraftKings lines now have the Seahawks as the favorite to win it all, currently sitting at +330. It’s a massive turnaround that reflects just how much better the team has been than expectations. Those odds will probably get better next week, just by virtue of six teams getting eliminated this weekend.

On DraftKings, The Los Angeles Rams sit in second, with +425 odds, the first time in fifty seasons that the top two Super Bowl favorites are in the same division entering the postseason. The Denver Broncos are the highest-ranked AFC team, at +650, with the New England Patriots sitting at +900 and the Philadelphia Eagles rounding out the top five at +950.

Now, if the Seahawks win the Super Bowl, the tremendous impact goes without saying. It’s one of the biggest sporting events of the year, and one of the hardest things to do in sports. Any Super Bowl champion has a big impact.

But how would that Super Bowl Championship run be looked at in hindsight? Would the 2025 Seahawks be remembered as an underdog story, a squad that came out of nowhere to make a shocking run to the NFC’s top seed, the Super Bowl, and eventually the Lombardi Trophy? Or would everyone retroactively act as if they should have been favorites before the year started?

I suspect it’d be the latter. The 2024 Seahawks won ten games, missed the playoffs by an esoteric tiebreaker, and then revamped in the offseason. They got a quarterback that had just won fourteen games and been a fringe MVP candidate the previous season. They signed obvious impact free agents like DeMarcus Lawrence and Cooper Kupp.

They made a massive improvement on the coaching staff with the hiring of Klint Kubiak, who might get a head coaching gig this offseason. They had a successful 2025 draft, pulling clear day one contributors as well as pieces for the future. I suspect a lot of analysts will look back on their preseason takes and wonder what they were thinking.

Year two of Mike Macdonald, several juicy draft classes in previous years coming to full bloom, and many other things coming together. In hindsight, it feels like something that you could have seen coming. So call it a Black Swan Event, should it go down this way. Maybe it already is one, given the team has the NFC’s top seed and has won the toughest division in football.

But don’t let them forget just how few thought it was a possibility before the year started. It’s a big part of this story, and when it’s all over, may be the most compelling part.

Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.

If you or someone you know has a gambling problem and wants help, call 1-800-GAMBLER.

How could you not have seen this coming with Mike Macdonald? — Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike MacDonald speaks in a press conference. | Kevin Ng-Imagn Images

More Seahawks on SI stories