Which NFL team is closest to winning its first Super Bowl? Ranking all 12 franchises

21 February، 2022

25 1 minute read

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INGLEWOOD, Calif. – The Cincinnati Bengals’ remarkable, worst(since 2018)-to-first 2021 campaign concluded with a 23-20 loss in Super Bowl 56, the closest this organization has come to winning a championship in its 54-season history.

A play here or there, and the Bengals would have become the 21st of the NFL’s 32 franchises to capture the Lombardi Trophy. Yet the future seems bright for a promising roster led by quarterback Joe Burrow, 25, who just completed his second season in the league.

“We’re a young team, so you’d like to think that we’ll be back in this situation multiple times over the course of the next few years,” Burrow said after the loss to the Los Angeles Rams. “So we’ll take and let it fuel us the rest of our careers.”

The Heisman Trophy-winning leader of the 2019 national champion LSU Tigers, Burrow suffered his first postseason loss since high school. “You live and you learn,” he said of his performance, which he deemed disappointing despite how valiantly he fought in the face of a relentless pass rush powered by likely future first-ballot Hall of Famers Aaron Donald and Von Miller.

“It’s gonna propel us into next year, and we’re gonna have a really good offseason. We’ve got a lot of hard workers in that locker room,” said Burrow. “Obviously we’re not satisfied with what we did this year. We’re going to keep getting better and attack next year with the same intensity.”

So (theoretically) will the other 11 team still chasing their first taste of ultimate NFL glory, to say nothing of the 20 others that have scaled the mountaintop. Of the Lombardi-less, it’s easy to see that Cincinnati seems closest to a breakthrough.

“I feel really great about the future.” said coach Zac Taylor.

But so certainly do many of his peers, some quite capable of overtaking the Bengals in 2022. As we begin to think about next season, here’s a ranking – best to worst – of the NFL’s 12 title-starved teams and their viability as contenders for next season: