The 5 NFL Super Bowl contenders whose windows are closing fast

When you’re talking about a Super Bowl window, you’re typically talking about teams with really good quarterbacks who are playing on their rookie contract. Once those guys get big-boy contracts, it gets to be a whole lot harder to build an elite team around them.

So when we’re looking at teams whose window is closing, we’re looking at teams whose quarterbacks aren’t on those rookie contracts, and whose rosters are getting older, more expensive, and maybe a little bit fragile. 

Green Bay Packers

The two most important positions on a typical football team are the quarterback and the edge rushers. One of them touches the ball on every single play, and the other guys have the easiest and most consistent path to stopping the quarterback on every play.

For the Green Bay Packers, there’s an argument that Jordan Love is not the most important player on their roster, and that it’s actually Micah Parsons. 

There are two types of above-average quarterbacks. There are ones that you can win with, and there are ones where you can win because of them. The Packers have definitely won games because of Jordan Love, because he’s great.

However, Micah Parsons is even better than that. He’s one of the handful of players who can single-handedly ruin a game … And unfortunately for Green Bay, they felt the exact opposite of that when he went down with an ACL last season, and they lost their last four games (including a meaningless Week 18 game).

If you don’t include that Week 18 game or the Week 16 game where he got hurt, these are some of the nerd stats that show how their defense was doing with Micah (WM) and with no Micah (NM). For reference, you want your defense to have a lower Expected Points Added (EPA). It was a big drop off.

They went from well below average to well above average. That’s a massive change that was caused by one guy not being on the field … and he’s not going to be there to start this season. That’s tough.

ESPN says the earliest that he can come back is going to be September, which would be nine months after surgery. Then you can tack on another few weeks for him to practice and get into shape, and we’ll be looking at some point in mid-October. 

That means we’re looking at six to eight Parsons-less games, and at least two of those are divisional games. Then, when he does come back, you have to hope that his knee doesn’t hamper him at all.

This is all bad in its own right, but then you look at the lack of success that Matt LaFleur has had in the postseason. 

Since he got hired as the Packers' head coach in 2019, he’s gone 76-40-1 in the regular season. A 65.4% winning percentage is great over seven years. However, he’s 3-6 in playoff games. 

As a matter of fact, his only win in the Jordan Love era was against the Cowboys in 2023. Hell, if you want to take away their 32-18 blowout win over the Rams in 2020 (Jared Goff’s last game in LA), LaFleur hasn’t won a competitive playoff game since the 2019 season.

If you want to dumb it down: Matt LaFleur’s Packers are like the Cowboys in that they are good in the regular season, but they aren’t a team that can be taken seriously in the postseason. I’m totally fine saying that and being right until I’m wrong.

If you can’t be taken seriously because of your head coach’s dingdong mentality and his inherent ability to choke, then your Super Bowl window is closing … regardless of the talent on the roster. 

Kansas City Chiefs

Let’s all agree that after this season, we’ll stop assuming the Chiefs have another 2022 performance in them. It’ll be five years since they were the best offense in the NFL, and a whole lot of the team is going to be different … But that’s after this year, so we’re still going to make the comparison. 

The Kansas City Chiefs have been underperforming for the past three seasons. They slipped from 2022 to 2023, fell off a cliff in 2024, and were incredibly middle-of-the-road in 2025.

This year, it’s not looking like things are going to be a whole lot different. They did make a weird change at offensive coordinator by letting Matt Nagy’s contract quietly expire and rehiring Eric Bieniemy, who was their OC from 2018 to 2022 … So that’s something, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be enough because they just don’t have the horses. 

Since they traded Tyreek Hill to the Dolphins after the 2021 season, they haven’t been able to get Mahomes a good and consistent pass catcher. In 2023, they drafted Rashee Rice, and he’s only played in 12 games since his rookie season. In 2024, they drafted Xavier Worthy, and he looks like he’s nothing more than a gadget guy.

Those are their two young, potentially productive pieces of the offense. It’s straight-up irresponsible to act like those two cats are going to be enough for Patrick Mahomes to have a consistent wide receiving corps. 

On defense? SEESH. They lost a safety (Bryan Cook) and a cornerback (Jaylen Watson) in free agency, and traded another cornerback (Trent McDuffie) to the Rams before the draft. 

To replace Cook, they added Alohi Gilman, who is a downgrade. To replace Watson and McDuffie, the team re-signed L’Jarius Sneed and drafted Mansoor Delane. Sneed’s had a bad couple of seasons in Tennessee, while Delane looks to be a real deal … except that he’s a rookie, which means he’ll probably have a rough time right off the bat.

My point is that Kansas City’s defensive backfield is going through a little bit of a rebuild. That can work really well, but it normally takes a minute or just never does. Steve Spagnuolo has gotten the best out of Sneed in the past, and he's gotten a whole lot out of worse players than Delane. However, there are a lot of moving parts that he’ll be dealing with.

Then you throw in a 30-year-old Patrick Mahomes and his injury in the mix? Yikes.

Mahomes is a freak of nature, through and through. We’ve also seen him come back from injuries and look better than ever … But we’ve never seen him come back from injuries that are as severe as an ACL and meniscus tear. Sometimes people just don’t get right after those.

I’m not saying that he won’t come back. As a matter of fact, I think he will come back … We’ve just never seen him come back from something of this magnitude, so you can’t be sure of it.

There are just a lot of actual changes and a lot of potential letdowns that the Chiefs are dealing with right now. If things go poorly for them (which seems likely), then they’re looking at some insignificant seasons.

Detroit Lions

Is it weird to put the Detroit Lions in the category of Super Bowl contenders? Maybe. Their 2023 and 2024 season were really, really good … but then they dropped right back down to the bottom of the NFC North in the 2025 season. 

Their window closing lies purely on Dan Campbell. It’s all about whether or not he has the ability to hire the right offensive coordinator and keep his team healthy. 

In his five years as the head coach in Detroit, Campbell has had three offensive coordinators: Anthony Lynn (2021), Ben Johnson (2022-2024), and John Morton (2025). That’s a bad year with one guy, three awesome years with one guy, and then a bad year where the OC got his playcalling duties taken away from him. 

If the Lions are going to keep their Super Bowl window open, Campbell needs to make the right hire. This year, his guy is Drew Petzing, who is coming off three seasons as the Cardinals’ offensive coordinator. 

He’s not exactly a confidence-inspiring hire … But who knows? Maybe he’ll work out. Maybe that offense looked disjointed because Kyler Murray is a loose cannon, whereas Jared Goff will take exactly what the structure of the offense gives him.

As for the injuries … Woof.

FTN Fantasy has a really good metric where they see how injured teams were. It’s called Adjusted Games Lost, and it measures “how often a team’s starters and other important players are missing games or playing at less than 100%.”

In 2025, the Lions were ranked 31st (the second-most injured). They were ranked 25th in 2024, 18th in 2023, 27th in 2022, and 30th in 2021. Aside from the 2023 season (where they made it to the NFC Championship game), those numbers are terrible. 

Listen, I get that injuries happen, and a lot of the Lions' injuries are from freak accidents, broken bones, and non-contact injuries … But the numbers are there. If you’re consistently ranking in the top 10 of most-injured teams, something is going wrong. 

Is it as simple as saying that Dan Campbell coaches his team hard, has a super intense training camp, and plays his guys too deep into garbage time during the season? Maybe. Is it a training staff that totally stinks? Maybe. Is it a franchise curse? Also, maybe.

Whatever the case, this is his team; coaching and injuries fall directly on him. If he doesn’t prop that Super Bowl window open with some good decisions, it’s going to get slammed shut.

San Francisco 49ers

You would think it’s inherent, but not every general manager knows that youth is important, not just for the season that you’re playing in, but also for the team’s ability to compete long-term. Last year, the San Francisco 49ers’ 22 starters were, on average, 27.5 years old. That’s pretty high up there.

To make that problem worse, it's a whole bunch of their key players. Christian McCaffrey just turned 30, George Kittle (who is coming off an Achilles) will be 33 in October, and Kyle Juszczyk is 35. Then they signed both Christian Kirk and Mike Evans in free agency, and they’re going to be 30 and 33 by the end of the year. And that’s just their offensive skill guys.

Trent Williams will be 38 in July, Jake Brendel will turn 34 the day the season starts, and Colton McKivitz will be 30 in August. That’s three of their starting offensive linemen, and Williams is the cog that keeps the entire run game working. 

Their defense is a little better in this aspect, where Fred Warner is their oldest guy (turning 30 in November). But that doesn’t really take away from the point: this is an old roster that doesn’t have a lot of young stars.

It seems like Kyle Shanahan is headed down the Andy Reid path, and that his time with the 49ers is going to end with a “it’s time for a change of scenery” conversation … and that’s going to sync right up with this iteration of the team getting too old to compete. 

Once they hit that very quickly approaching wall, their window is going to be closed and barred.

Cincinnati Bengals

The Cincinnati Bengals are leveraging their future for wins right now. You don’t trade away a top-10 draft pick for a 28-year-old defensive tackle (Dexter Lawrence) unless you’re sure that he’s going to be a piece that can take you to the next level immediately. 

Now, they did give him a one-year extension to keep him through the 2028 season, but that really just means they’ll be in contract negotiations with him after the 2027 season (star players don’t normally hit the last year of their contract without signing a new one). 

To be fair to the Bengals, this was a good move if you don’t care about what the road looks like in five years. Lawrence will definitely be an upgrade over what their interior defensive line has looked like over the past three-ish seasons. 

However, that defensive line was far from the weakest part of the defense. They have a bad linebacker group that they could’ve upgraded in free agency, but ultimately didn’t. The cornerbacks (Dax Hill and D.J. Turner) can be liabilities, but they’re not the worst. 

It’s the safeties that they needed the most help with. Last year, you could tackle better than Jordan Battle and Geno Stone; they missed a combined 47 tackles. Typically, linebackers lead the league in missed tackles because they’re up in it, but this year Stone had the most and Battle had the third-most … You cannot be a successful defense if you have two of the top-five bad tacklers in the NFL.

Luckily, the Bengals got rid of Stone and signed Bryan Cook from the Chiefs. He’s a good tackler. Battle though? He’s still there. If the Bengals hadn’t traded for Lawrence, they would’ve been in a prime position to draft Caleb Downs, the near-perfect safety prospect from Ohio State.

If you hire a defensive coordinator straight from a college program, one of the upsides is that they should be good at developing young guys. In 2025, the Bengals hired Al Golden, who was Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator from 2022 to 2024. After just one year, they’re showing that they think this cat might not have that kind of upside by not using their premier picks.

Let's tie this all together with the Bengals as a franchise:

We’ve seen quarterbacks take a lot of damage and turn into a shell of what they used to be. It happened with Cam Newton, Carson Wentz, RGIII, Alex Smith, Sam Bradford, Teddy Bridgewater, and Andrew Luck (in a sense) … and that's just some of the guys from the past 10 to 15 years.

It stinks when it happens, but it does happen. That’s football. 

The Bengals are lurking in dangerous territory with Joe Burrow. He’s been in the NFL for six seasons, and he’s missed considerable time in three of them. There was his knee getting evaporated in 2020, there was the calf thing before the 2023 season, and the weird ligament thing during the season, and there was the Turf toe thing in 2025. That’s kind of a lot. 

He’s shown that he can come back from injuries, which is huge because some guys can’t … but woof, it’s a lot for a guy who’s going to be turning 30 years old this year. 

The Bengals need to make sure that they can get the most out of this defense, while also making sure that their franchise quarterback can still actually play football. It really feels like that’s a Death Star-sized window that they’re aiming for. 

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