Predicting the 2026 NFL playoff field, plus Super Bowl pick - ESPN

Bill Barnwell Sep 9, 2026, 06:25 AM ET

Close Bill Barnwell is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com. He analyzes football on and off the field like no one else on the planet, writing about in-season X's and O's, offseason transactions and so much more.

He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland.

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It's postseason projection time. With hours to go before the first game of the 2026 NFL season, I'm picking the 14 teams that will be celebrating after the league plays 272 regular-season games. There's so much football to come and so many unexpected things we'll see along the way, but like anyone else, I want to lay out the playoff field I expect to see in January before the games kick off in mid-September.

Of course, that would be too easy. If you've read this column over the past couple of years, you'll remember that there's a twist. One of the most common mistakes we make as football fans -- myself included -- is overconfidence in the teams we saw excel last year. We're collectively too inclined to pick teams that made the playoffs a year ago to make it back in the current season. Ask me to pick 2026 playoff teams without any constraints and I'd pick at least nine of the 14 teams that made it in 2025.

History tells us that's underestimating the chaos and variance that comes with 17-game NFL seasons. The league has been using the 14-team playoff format for only a few years now, but if we go back to 2002 and treat the seventh-best team in each conference as a playoff team, about 56% of teams that make it to the postseason in any given season make it back the following year. That's just under eight teams per campaign.

Eight teams in, six teams out. There's no guarantee that 2026 will play out like an average season in terms of playoff returnees, but the evidence says our playoff predictions should start there. I'll take things a step further by looking at division champions and teams with losing records in 2025 to tailor the field even closer to what a historic playoff field typically looks like by the end of the regular season. I'll detail how those play out along the way. And at the end, I'll make my Super Bowl pick for the upcoming season.

Barnwell's Super Bowl pick

Which 2025 division champions will return to the playoffs?

Let's start by splitting last season's playoff teams into two groups. Since 2002, just under 60% of teams that won their division in a given year have made it back to the playoffs the following season. That's 4.8 teams per year, which we'll round up to five. So, of the eight division winners from 2025, I have to pick five to return to the playoffs in 2026.

We can split that even further. About 43% of division winners repeat as champs the following season, with teams such as the Tom Brady-era Patriots and the Patrick Mahomes -era Chiefs as near-perennial favorites to finish first. If we remove the Patriots and Chiefs from the data set, the rate of repeating divisional winners drops to 36%. That's an average of about three division winners retaining their titles each season.

One of the weirdest things about the 2025 season factors in here. In 2024, six of the eight teams that won their division the prior year retained their crowns, which was just the third time that has happened in the eight-division era. In 2025, everything went in the opposite direction. Just one of the eight reigning champs held on to its division title for another year. The one team that did so was the Philadelphia Eagles, who became the first team to win back-to-back titles in the NFC East in more than two decades. Four 2024 division champs -- the Chiefs, Ravens, Lions and Buccaneers -- missed the postseason outright in 2025.

History tells us to pick three division winners to repeat as champions, with two more making it back to the postseason as wild cards. I'll then be left with three division winners from 2025 that I'll need to pick to miss the playoffs entirely. I'm sure that won't upset anyone...