Just two teams are left in the race to be crowned champions of the 2023 NFL season, and it's the same two teams who battled four years ago in Super Bowl LIV. In that game, the 49ers controlled the action for three quarters before the Chiefs scored three touchdowns with less than seven minutes remaining to win 31-20. This year's 49ers squad experienced something similar on Sunday, entering halftime down 24-7 to the Lions before scoring 27 straight points to advance to Super Bowl LVIII.

The sportsbooks opened with the 49ers as 2 to 2.5-point favorites for the 2024 Super Bowl, but the market quickly hopped on Kansas City and bet the game down to 49ers -1 as of Monday morning. That shows a reversal of course for bettors, who lifted the Ravens from three-point favorites to -4.5 by kickoff of the Chiefs game only to see them struggle from the jump. That change in market rating should be a lesson in how to approach building your spread power ratings in the postseason.

The playoffs are a different animal than the regular season, where I typically do not make significant non-injury changes to team ratings, moving teams no more than a point for a single surprising outcome. Anything can happen in one week of football during a long season where focus can wane and not as much attention is paid to every game. But if you've missed on a team's rating in the postseason, you have to adjust quickly as you don't have time to slowly adjust their rating week by week to "make them prove" your initial rating was wrong.

Take the Chiefs. I had them rated far lower than I've ever had them entering the playoffs due to my lack of confidence in what I was seeing out of the passing offense. But Patrick Mahomes reaches another level when he's in playoff mode, and the performance against Baltimore, while not exactly the most appealing statistically on a yards-per-play basis, showed that whatever their issues were during the season have been corrected. Couple that with perhaps the best defense the Chiefs have had during their ridiculous run of Super Bowl appearances, and this is a team we have to be careful not to underrate by adjusting too slowly upward from the team we thought they were at the end of the season.

Then you have the 49ers, who looked for much of the season like an unstoppable juggernaut before running into the Ravens on Christmas. While they won their way to the Super Bowl in the postseason, it hasn't been easy, needing that rally described above to beat the Lions after needing a touchdown with less than two minutes to top the Packers in the divisional round. When we rate the 49ers, we have to be sure not to overcompensate for the team they were for much of the season and instead base our rating on the team they are now.

Put those two evaluations together, and that's how you get a quick line adjustment after the 49ers opened as too big of favorites for the market. But is the new line now in the right spot, or should it continue to move? I'll share my spread power ratings and tell you where those ratings would make the line, as well as where I believe the line should actually be.

If you need a refresher on how to build spread power ratings, why they're important for beating the market and how successful I've been with this system at SportsLine, check out the Week 1 version of these power ratings. 

Which line is several points off its power rating projections for Super Bowl LVIII? ... Join SportsLine right now to see playoff power ratings from the expert who's 535-450-30 on ATS picks from 2017-22, returning $3,532 to $100 players!