Falcons given long odds of winning Super Bowl LVIII

A great offseason will likely change this in a hurry.

The Super Bowl just ended with a Chiefs win over the Eagles, but oddsmakers are already making it clear who they think will be in the mix for Super Bowl LVIII and who will most emphatically not.

The odds at this point mean very little, and instead offer a snapshot of how teams are viewed after the 2022 season. It will not surprise you at all to learn that the Atlanta Falcons are being given some of the worst odds to win the Super Bowl next February, with DraftKings and others laying +7500 odds (tied for the sixth-worst in the NFL)

Those odds are tied with the Buccaneers, who lost Tom Brady and are plummeting in everyone’s estimation as a result, and are below teams like the Bears and Raiders.

The reason for that is obvious: The Falcons finished the year 7-10 for the second straight season, have a ton of work ahead for their roster if they want to improve on that. The team also wilted badly down the stretch, at one point losing six of seven games, and suffered an ugly loss in their sole primetime game of the 2022 season. If all things were to remain the same, the Falcons would once again be in the bottom third of the league.

The good news, then, is that things are very emphatically not going to remain the same. You know all of this, but the Falcons have the second-highest amount of cap space in the entire NFL, a more or less full complement of draft picks, and several second-and-third-year players who can reasonably be expected to take a big step forward. They’re equipped to take a big leap forward, and at the very least it would be an unpleasant surprise if they were once again among the ten or so worst teams in the NFL.

These odds are a snapshot of a moment and will be wildly different once the season rolls around, and if the Falcons do a good job of spending their resources this spring and summer, they’ll be viewed much more favorably than they are now before they’ve had a chance to put a dollar toward improving the team. I’m not letting myself dream of a Super Bowl in Nevada just yet, but at the very least, Atlanta should leave behind the days of terrible odds and two win predictions soon enough.