Super Bowl LX
- Updated: February 7, 2026
Super Bowl LX kicks off at 6:30 pm. on Sunday, with the Seattle Seahawks facing the New England Patriots.
New England is looking to make history by becoming the first NFL team with seven Super Bowl wins. The last time the Seahawks played in the big game was against the Patriots in 2015 for Super Bowl XLIX, where Seattle lost a 28-24 heartbreaker. New England entered the playoffs as the AFC’s No. 2 seed, while Seattle entered as the NFC’s No. 1 seed.
We have you covered with everything you need to know, including team previews, a breakdown of Super Bowl MVP candidates and game picks. We also provide advice from our sports betting experts and in-depth statistics from ESPN Research. We look at the two quarterbacks, coaches, officiating, positional advantages and X factors. And scroll all the way down to check out our preview of Bad Bunny’s halftime show.
Let’s dive into this one-stop cheat sheet, starting with a preview of the matchup.
Call it the Explosive Play Bowl. The big play has always mattered, but in the past few years, NFL games have become battles between teams trying to create and prevent explosive plays.
Defenses have raised their rates of two-high safety looks, funneling teams toward the run and short passes. Offenses have accordingly taken what the defense has given. With a league wide increase in willingness to go for it on fourth down, third-and-short has become an opportunity to hit those explosive plays. And the dynamic kickoff and placing touchbacks at the 35-yard line have made it more difficult to play the field position game as a defense.
All this has created a league where explosive plays are the great differentiator. Manufacture one explosive play on offense after a kickoff and you’re probably already in field goal range. Successful defenses either force a ton of takeaways or stall the opposing offense from hitting a big play, trusting that they’ll come up with a sack, force a penalty or produce a negative play to throw the offense off schedule. Great offenses either force teams out of the two-high world by running the football too effectively or reliably hit throws into narrow windows downfield.
In terms of explosive-play differential — the gap between the rate at which teams generated explosive plays and prevented their opposition from doing the same — each of the four teams in the conference championship games ranked in the top five during the regular season. The Patriots were fourth at 2.8 percentage points, buoyed by a league-best explosive creation rate of 13.6% on offense. And the Seahawks’ explosive-play differential of 4.7 percentage points was the best mark in the NFL and the ninth-best figure posted by any team of the past 25 years. They were truly elite on defense, meaning we’ll get the league’s best offense at creating explosive plays versus the league’s best defense at stopping them Sunday.
Of course, one-game variance can swamp regular-season stats. The six best teams by explosive-play differential over the past 25 years made it to the Super Bowl; they all lost. A Patriots defense that was ordinary during the regular season by advanced metrics has allowed just six explosives through three postseason games while playing a series of compromised, injury-impacted offenses. The Seahawks gave up 12 explosives to the Rams in the NFC Championship Game. They won that matchup because quarterback Sam Darnold responded to two months of middling football by playing one of the best games of his life. His opponent, Drake Maye, has followed an MVP-caliber regular season with a wildly inconsistent postseason, mixing turnovers with spectacular plays. In this postseason, we’ve seen individual games decided by unexpected injuries, fumble luck, missed kicks and ill-timed weather systems. One of those unpredictable factors might decide Sunday’s game too. All things being equal, though, this should be a fun Super Bowl matchup of two of the league’s explosive-play kings in 2025. Whoever manages to win that battle should be the favorite to take home the Lombardi Trophy.
Related Posts
About The SFL
