Cowboys odds for next Super Bowl may be a surprise to Jerry Jones

Vegas thinks it’s going to be all uphill for the Cowboys in 2025

The worst teams in the NFC, according to 2026 Super Bowl odds released by the oddsmakers at BetMGM, are, in order:

1. New York Giants (Soo much “yes” to this)
2. New Orleans Saints (No kidding)
3. Carolina Panthers (Yeah, for sure)
4. Dallas Cow … WHAAAT?

A mere five days ago, the owner assured me the Cowboys are in “win now” mode, but the oddsmakers seem to see next season as more of a rebuild season than anything else.

There are lots of things that can change between now and the end of the 2025 season, but these odds are a strong indicator that the betting public believes the window for the Cowboys to be a Super Bowl contender is firmly closed, and may be for the foreseeable future.

The Cowboys have 22 unrestricted free agents heading into 2025, Stephen Jones regularly goes into a fetal position at the start of free agency and plays “How Soon Is Now” by The Smiths for days on end, their draft record over the last few years is spotty at best, and they continue to “act like a franchise that doesn’t know how to manage the cap.”

Where’s the help for this team going to come from? A first-year head coach and some players coming back from injury and staying healthy? That’s it?

No wonder the oddsmakers are kicking the Cowboys into the NFL’s trash bin of non-playoff contenders.

Of course, the Cowboys could prove all their doubters wrong too. They could add key pieces in free agency, they could draft immediate impact players, they could pry open the salary cap purse strings Stephen is clutching so tightly. They could even pay a running backs coach more than he is making as a college coach – no, sorry, my bad, that’s pushing it too far.

Normally, this is the time of year where you put last season in the rearview mirror and where every single one of the 32 NFL teams gets excited about what they’re doing, and every single fan base starts believing that if things work out just the right way, their team will make the playoffs. This is the time of year where hope springs eternal and everybody feels optimistic about the new season, except that’s very hard as a Cowboys fan right now.

But then again, last year may not matter as much as we think. Recency bias is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future. Because it’s easier, our minds are hardwired to use our recent experience as the baseline for what will happen in the future. In many situations, this bias works just fine, especially if you’re making short-term predictions. Even for highly changeable events like the weather (“It was cold today, it’s probably going to be cold tomorrow again”) or the stock market, making short-term predictions according to events in the recent past works fine much of the time.

Predicting the long-term future based on what has recently occurred is no more accurate than flipping a coin. We know that in the NFL, an average of about six to seven new teams make it to the playoffs every year. That means only half of each year’s NFL playoff participants make it back to the playoffs the following year. Yet every offseason or pre-season team ranking has last year’s top teams still sitting at the top. Why? Recency bias.

Take the BetMGM list. Of the 14 teams with the best odds, 12 are last season’s playoff teams. The only two new teams in the Top 14: the Bengals and 49ers. The two dropouts: Denver and Pittsburgh. But in this case, it’s not the oddmakers with the recency bias, it’s the betting public. The oddsmakers are simply trying to provide odds where the action from the betting public will remain even on both sides of the bet.

Yes, there are some constants between the 2024 Cowboys and the 2025 Cowboys. But there are and will be some significant changes, whether we like them or not.

Anything can happen in the NFL. Every new NFL season is always also a new chance for teams that fell short of the playoffs the season before. The NFL is intrinsically designed to be a parity-driven league; the draft, revenue sharing, the salary cap, compensatory draft picks, even the schedule; everything about the NFL is designed so that every team from every market has a legitimate opportunity to compete year-in and year-out. Even the 2025 Cowboys, at least on paper.

There’s a chance, however remote you feel it is, the Cowboys could end up in the playoffs this year, just as there’s a chance that they could end up behind the Giants in the division. If they do, it has nothing to do with last year’s team, and everything to do with this year’s team.

What happened in 2024 stays in 2024. It has no bearing on what has yet to happen in 2025. In the NFL, last year doesn’t matter. Otherwise the Chiefs would be celebrating a threepeat right now.