Every year, sportsbooks put countless time, money and effort trying to predict who will have the greatest chance of winning a championship in any given season. It's no simple task: Each professional American sports league has at least 30 teams and college sports have over a hundred, all with the ultimate goal of being called champions by season's end.
The process yields future odds, the quantification of how confident a sportsbook feels any team is to win a championship. Most years, the team with the greatest chance to win isn't the one that ultimately comes out on top -- but 2024 was not like most years.
In 2024, three preseason favorites from the four major American professional sports leagues -- the Kansas City Chiefs (+600), Boston Celtics (+380) and Los Angeles Dodgers (+350) -- won their respective championships, the only time in the last 35 years the NFL, NBA and MLB preseason favorites won titles in the same calendar year, according to ESPN Research.
"If you go back and look at these teams, there's a reason why they're favorites," DraftKings sportsbook director Johnny Avello told ESPN, expounding on the rationale behind the Chiefs, Celtics and Dodgers being favored before their respective seasons. "There's a lot of reasons why the favorites peter out and don't make it [in other years]. But this is just one of those times where everything worked out."
Avello details that these teams managed to avoid major injuries or poor play at inopportune times, which is what often leads to a favorite's downfall. That said, the three teams experienced varying degrees of ups and downs.
Boston was the only wire-to-wire favorite, meaning they were never knocked off the top of the odds board at any point during the 2023-24 NBA season. The Dodgers began the season as the favorite, briefly lost that status in the postseason, then regained it before winning the World Series. The Chiefs actually lost favorite status in the regular season and fell to fifth on the odds board entering the 2024 playoffs but, of course, eventually prevailed as Super Bowl winners.
On a game-to-game basis, the teams were extremely popular with bettors. ESPN BET reports that the Chiefs were the most-bet team proportionally across all of the major sports, attracting 6.3% of all NFL bets in 2024. Further, the Celtics were the most-backed team by total bets this year, while the Dodgers and Chiefs came in at third and fourth, respectively (the Dallas Mavericks, who played Boston in the NBA Finals, were the second-most-bet team).
The trio were also very popular in the futures market, but the results worked out well for sportsbooks compared to a typical year.
"We don't always hate chalk, especially when looking at the number of early season favorites that have made championship runs over the last year," ESPN BET director of North American sports trading Adrian Horton said via email. "Teams like the Celtics and Chiefs were priced appropriately out of the gate given their expectations, so while they draw a good amount of action throughout the season, the exposure is baked into the opening price."
Some bettors took those shorter odds and parlayed them in order to create bigger payouts. Bet tracking tool Pikkit reports that, out of 4.2 million futures bets tracked in 2024, only four were a parlay of the Chiefs, Celtics and Dodgers winning their respective championships; assuming such a parlay was placed using all preseason odds, that would create an approximately 150-1 ticket, meaning a $100 bet would net $15,000.
Still, with those bets being so few and far between and bettors generally gravitating towards longer odds for single tickets, the sportsbooks did just fine in the futures market this year.
"Overall for the bookmaker, it's usually a good scenario when the favorites win," said Avello. "Sometimes they turn out to be more of a win than we thought, sometimes a little bit less, but we keep 'em up, we keep adjusting, and 2024, for futures, was a good year."
More Chalk
While the Chiefs, Celtics and Dodgers were the only ones to fulfill the preseason promise of winning a championship, other champions proved themselves to be chalky as their seasons wore on.
In women's college basketball, South Carolina Gamecocks opened as a 15-1 underdog to win the national championship, ceding ground to reigning national champion LSU Tigers and Caitlin Clark-led Iowa Hawkeyes. However, by Nov. 21, 2023, the Gamecocks were favored, eventually entered the tournament at -140 and did not relent until they lifted the trophy.
On the men's side, UConn Huskies actually did open as the favorite (+1100) to win the 2023-24 title, but despite being the reigning national champion itself, fell to sixth on the odds board by the beginning of the season (+2000). The Huskies rolled into the tournament as the favorite (+350) after a strong regular season and completed the repeat, though a notable underdog did almost spoil the party.
"It's often the Cinderella stories that create outsized liability," Horton said. "For example, the run that NC State Wolfpack made to the men's Final Four last season created a ton of excitement and betting interest. An NC State win could have potentially been worse for us than the eventual champion, UConn, given that the Huskies were one of the favorites throughout most of the season."
In golf, Scottie Scheffler won The Masters as a +475 pre-tournament favorite, the shortest since Tiger Woods in 2013, and all four major champions were +2000 or shorter for the first time since 2000.
Moreover, the New York Liberty came into the 2024 WNBA campaign as the second favorite behind the Las Vegas Aces, but as the season wore on, it became clear that the Liberty were the team to beat. They entered the playoffs as a +130 favorite and eventually went on to win their first league title.
A moment for the underdogs
Of course, not every favorite could win it all in 2024.
In its final season with head coach Jim Harbaugh, Michigan was finally able to get over the College Football Playoff hump after beginning the campaign as the fourth-shortest favorites to win it all (+800). Granted, the Wolverines entered the CFP as favorites, but that was in the final edition of the smaller four-team playoff.
Going into the NHL season, the Florida Panthers ranked tied for 10th on the preseason Stanley Cup odds board (+2000) despite narrowly missing out on winning the championship in the 2023 Stanley Cup Final. Florida eventually silenced the doubters, lifting the Cup after entering the postseason with the second-best odds to do so -- albeit, in a very crowded field.
But for those chalky champion underdogs, there were also a few that came mostly out of nowhere to win it all.
In Formula 1, it was long assumed that Red Bull Racing would saunter its way to another Constructors' Championship, but instead, McLaren spoiled the three-peat by winning its first title since 1998; the British team was as long as 100-1 to win it during the 2024 F1 season.
Finally, Lionel Messi's Inter Miami was heavily favored for the MLS Cup going into the 2024 season (+300) and playoffs (+150), but faltered immediately with an upset round one loss to Atlanta United. Instead, LA Galaxy won its record sixth league title after entering the regular season as a 33-1 underdog.