The Seattle Seahawks opened their title defense on 9 September with a 13-10 win over New England, the side they beat eight months earlier, and lost Sam Darnold to a hip injury within the first five plays. That is a champion’s next season compressed into one evening. The ring buys nothing and the bad luck arrives on schedule.
Philadelphia knows the feeling. Two years on from Super Bowl LIX, they cross the Atlantic to face Jacksonville on 11 October, and the Philadelphia Eagles @ Jacksonville Jaguars Odds price them as just another good team.
The hangover is mostly a myth
The Super Bowl hangover repeats every August, and the record doesn’t back it up. Of the past 10 defending champions, eight reached the playoffs. Only two missed out. Denver went 9-7 in 2016 after Peyton Manning retired, and the Los Angeles Rams fell to 5-12 in 2022, the first champion to post a losing record since Tampa Bay in 2003.
Four of those 10 went back to the Super Bowl. One of them won it. A defending champion is far more likely to play in January than watch it.
Winning it twice is the hard part
The drop-off is not about missing the playoffs; it is about the last two games. Between the 2004 Patriots and the 2023 Chiefs, 18 consecutive champions failed to retain the trophy. Kansas City finally broke that in February 2024, then went 15-2 the next year and lost Super Bowl LIX to Philadelphia 40-22. Nobody has ever won three in a row.
Seattle have been here before. The 2013 side went 12-4 the following year, reached Super Bowl XLIX and lost 28-24 to New England on a goal-line interception. Philadelphia’s defense in 2025 was more typical: 11-6, a second straight NFC East title, and a 23-19 exit to San Francisco in the first round. Jacksonville, their London opponents, finished that same season 13-4 under Liam Coen and went out at the first attempt as well, beaten 27-24 by Buffalo.
March is when champions get taken apart
The pressure is structural rather than psychological. Seattle have already lost Super Bowl LX MVP Kenneth Walker III, edge rusher Boye Mafe, cornerback Riq Woolen and safety Coby Bryant in free agency, keeping Rashid Shaheed on a three-year, $51 million deal instead. Philadelphia watched Josh Sweat and Milton Williams leave in the same fashion a year earlier.
The calendar does the rest. The NFL’s scheduling formula matches first-place finishers against first-place finishers from other divisions, so winning a title guarantees a harder set of fixtures. Champions also pick 32nd in every round of the draft and get the shortest offseason in the league. Anyone weighing up NFL betting in September is pricing that churn as much as anything that happened in February.
What Seattle’s opening night told us
Not much, and that is the point. Drew Lock came off the bench for Darnold and went 16 of 22 for 187 yards. Jaxon Smith-Njigba finished with 122 receiving yards, 69 of them in the fourth quarter, including the 45-yard catch and run that tied the game. New England’s Drake Maye threw three interceptions.
Seattle won ugly against a team that had also finished 14-3 last season. Their run to Super Bowl LX was nothing like that. They took the NFC’s top seed, buried San Francisco 41-6 in the divisional round and edged the Rams 31-27 for the conference title before beating New England 29-13 at Levi’s Stadium.
That is roughly what the history predicts. Defending champions stay good, stay in contention and then run into an opponent playing without the weight of an entire league aiming at them. The last champion to reach the Super Bowl the following season was Kansas City in 2024, and they lost by 18 points.
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