The matchup for Super Bowl LIX is set: it’s the Philadelphia Eagles against the Kansas City Chiefs (again). The former won the Super Bowl recently, but the latter is going for a three-peat championship. But what did the oddsmakers think of these two teams in August before the season started? Well, the Eagles were the fourth-best option for winning the Super Bowl, tied with the Detroit Lions. We know how that went, sadly.

As for the Chefs (“Great googily moogily!”), they were the preseason favorites by a sliver over the San Francisco 49ers. Another misfire there, of course, in an even worse way than the Lions. Detroit and Kansas City posted the best records in the NFL this season, while the 49ers floundered. The Baltimore Ravens were the third-most likely to win the Super Bowl, according to the preseason odds, but they lost already, too.

So, of the top five teams favored, four of them reached the postseason, and one of them did not. We could argue each of those four teams that did—Kansas City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Detroit—all demonstrated high capability in the regular season, winning a total of 56 games among them, combined. The Cincinnati Bengals were sixth in estimation, thanks to the Joe Burrow Agenda. We know that tanked.

Yet at least the Bungles finished with a winning record despite their 4-8 start to the season, right? The next three teams on the odds list all made the postseason, though: the Houston Texans, the Green Bay Packers, and the Buffalo Bills. The former and the latter both were eliminated by the Chiefs, while the Packers were eliminated by the Eagles. When you lose to a team that was higher on the preseason favorites list? Meh.

Rounding out the Top 10 favorites were the New York Jets and the Dallas Cowboys: these two teams went 12-22 overall, and clearly those odds were established by foolhardy fans betting those perennially overrated teams up. We discussed the Jets here last year and this year, and as for the Cowboys, well … the team has just a 5-13 postseason record since winning Super Bowl XXX in 1995: five playoff wins in 30 years now.

Dallas has not reached the NFC Championship Game since it played in four straight from 1992-1995, actually. Betting on the Cowboys to do it now in any given season has long odds, because that’s the nature of the beast. We’re not going to both going through the rest of the preseason odds for the NFL, but we have two more items to discuss this Sunday evening: first, the team that outdid expectations the most, and then math.

Our winner for most tremendous achievement has to be the Washington Commanders, who were tied for the least-likely team to make the playoffs that did, with the Denver Broncos. But Washington pushed to the NFC Championship Game before losing, while the Broncos got torched in the first round. Both teams went with rookie quarterbacks this year, as did the Texans last year when they made the unlikely turnaround.

[That may re-ignite a trend, but time will tell.]

Lastly, the Chiefs will be favored to win the Super Bowl because of money being bet on them only; the math suggests the Eagles should be 3.5-point favorites on a neutral field. Keep that in mind; this is not the NBA, but it’s still going to be a matchup of money versus math. We know from experience that the money usually wins, so that is all we have to say about the Super Bowl matchup in two weeks; yes, we will watch it this time.