Next February’s Super Bowl LXI will take place at SoFi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams, just as it did five years ago. Back then, the Rams reigned supreme on home turf, with Cooper Kupp’s last-gasp touchdown enough to deny Joe Burrow and his upstart Cincinnati Bengals. Fast forward to now, and Sean McVay’s side is the overwhelming favorite to repeat that success.
The highly regarded head coach now has Myles Garrett, the most disruptive pass rusher in football, wearing his colors. He now has Trent McDuffie locking down the boundary, something the Rams were sorely missing last term. He still has reigning MVP Matthew Stafford, 38, and is hunting down a second ring with superstar receivers Puka Nacua and Davante Adams. This franchise has decided it intends to both host and win the Super Bowl, just as it did five years ago, and the bookies agree.
The latest odds from Sportaza online sportsbook currently position the Rams as a +525 favorite to claim the Lombardi next season, less than half the odds of their closest rival for the crown. The Rams are narrow 3.5-point favorites in Week 1 against the 49ers — the one team that has made a habit of complicating their plans in recent seasons. But while that spread might seem short, three others are tighter still, and all three carry more weight than their spreads let on.
Buffalo Bills (-1.5) @ Houston Texans
Josh Allen is 1-3 against the Texans. He knows the number, and so does everyone in Buffalo’s brand-new Highmark Stadium. It isn’t just a losing record against one opponent — it’s the version of Allen that DeMeco Ryans’ defense keeps finding, the one who looks human against a scheme that set franchise records last year, allowing just 17.3 points and 277.2 yards per game.
Buffalo went 12-5 in 2025, lost the AFC East for the first time since 2019, and still found its way to a wild-card win at Jacksonville — the franchise’s first true road playoff win since 1992 — before Denver ended the season in overtime. Houston’s path was uglier and arguably better: an 0-3 start, a 3-5 hole at midseason, then a nine-game streak that produced a matching 12-5 finish, a wild-card blowout of Pittsburgh, and a fourth straight Divisional Round loss, this time to New England as C. J. Stroud threw four interceptions.
Joe Brady coaches his first regular-season game as Buffalo’s head coach in the building where his quarterback carries that scar tissue. He didn’t inherit a passive roster. Buffalo traded a 2026 second-round pick to Chicago for DJ Moore, finally handing Allen a receiver defenses have to respect, and paid Bradley Chubb $43.5 million over three years to fix a pass rush that ranked 27th in win rate.
Houston answered by extending Nico Collins, retaining Danielle Hunter, and adding David Montgomery — while conspicuously not extending Stroud. Buffalo is better on paper than the last time these teams met, a Week 12 game Houston won 23-19 last term. Whether that’s enough is the whole question. Allen is perhaps the best quarterback in the entire league, and he’s still 1-3 against the Texans — the number he’ll wake up with on the morning of September 8th.
Green Bay Packers (-1.5) @ Minnesota Vikings
Jonathan Gannon makes his Green Bay debut as defensive coordinator without the pass rusher he was hired to deploy. Micah Parsons — the centerpiece of a landmark Dallas trade and a $188 million extension — tore his ACL in Week 15 last season, and Green Bay proceeded to lose each of the five games they played without their defensive behemoth, including blowing an 18-point halftime lead in a Wild Card loss to the Bears.
Across the field, Kyler Murray is walking into a start he’s never had — first regular-season snaps for a franchise that just lived through a genuine implosion. Minnesota fell from 14 wins to 9-8 and missed the playoffs as its turnover margin flipped from plus-12 to minus-9, the league’s third-worst mark. J.J. McCarthy threw 12 interceptions in ten starts, prompting Kevin O’Connell to fire his general manager and bet the offense on Murray instead.
Nobody — not Vegas, not either fan base — actually knows what either team looks like right now. That’s what a 1.5-point spread means when neither side has film on its own identity yet.
Chicago Bears (-2.5) @ Carolina Panthers
Trading DJ Moore is either the boldest roster decision in the league or the one Chicago’s front office spends all winter defending. Caleb Williams set the franchise passing record with 3,942 yards a year ago, the defense led the NFL in takeaways, and Chicago won its first NFC North title since 2018 — and the answer to all of that, apparently, was to send its best receiver to Buffalo. Devin Bush and rookie Dillon Thieneman are the safety net. Whether it holds is the whole Chicago season in miniature.
Bryce Young said something honest before this one, and it deserves to be repeated rather than paraphrased into oblivion: there’s no carryover. That’s a twenty-three-year-old quarterback telling you, out loud, that an 8-9 division title built on an upset of the Rams doesn’t guarantee anything this September — that the fifth-year option Carolina just exercised through 2027 is a bet, not a certainty.
Jaelan Phillips arrives on a $120 million deal to change the pass rush, Devin Lloyd anchors the middle, and Ikem Ekwonu’s knee injury clouds an offensive line that has to hold up in front of a quarterback who just admitted, publicly, how thin his margin actually is. This is a 2.5-point spread that trusts Chicago’s trajectory over Carolina’s ceiling. It’s the largest number of the three, and it’s still not comfortable.