Super Bowl Rematches: Does The Regular Season Winner Usually Win Again?

February 4, 2021 - by Jason Lisk

This year’s Super Bowl features two teams that already played each other during the 2020 regular season.

In Week 12, Kansas City went on the road and beat Tampa Bay 27-24, with the most common closing point spread for the game favoring the Chiefs by 3.5 points.

More importantly for the interests of a fan or Super Bowl bettor, though, is the question of what’s happened in Super Bowl rematch games. Does the team that wins in the regular season usually win again, or not? Are there any other performance trends worth noting?

In this post, we’ll examine the data.

Frequency of Super Bowl Rematches

Super Bowl rematches from the regular season aren’t common, but they do occur. Given the current four-division format of the NFL, in which teams from one conference play all the teams from one division in the other conference, one would expect a Super Bowl rematch to happen about once every four years.

That’s roughly what has happened so far, with this year marking the 13th Super Bowl rematch in a 43-year period (since 1978, when the NFL went to the 16-game schedule).

However, it’s been nine years since the last time it happened, and the fact that this year’s Super Bowl is in Tampa Bay, the same exact site as the regular season matchup, is a unique twist.

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Historical Results of Super Bowl Rematches

Here is every Super Bowl involving two teams that played in the regular season, with only one of the matchups happening before the expansion to the 16-game schedule in 1978.