The NFL season is in the books, so it’s time not just to look ahead at what’s to come, but back at what has been. We put Madden 26 to work this year, predicting what to expect from the NFL this year, and it was a bit of a mixed bag. Here are its three biggest hits, and three swings it would love to get back.
The Hits
Positivity is important, so we’ll start by looking at the times Madden was bang on. These teams followed the script laid out by the game’s engine, making it look good in the process:
Nailing The Bucs In A Meta Way
Kicking things off, we have one of the more unique ways Madden was kind of right, and it’s the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. While the NFC South in reality ultimately fell to the Panthers after the most fitting possible conclusion the division could ever ask for, with the title decided by a matchup of the two worst teams in the division, it was the favored Bucs that the game was still oddly correct about.
Sure, they didn’t top the division as expected, but they did perfectly follow the overall simulation arc as our ten simulations saw them come flying out of the gate with wins in our first two sims. From there, things fell off into mediocrity, managing just two playoff wins total in the remaining eight as a team that briefly looked to be among the NFL’s elite instead turned into another mediocre side that was just kind of there. Sound familiar?
Jaguars On The Prowl Down South
Coming off a 4-13 season, prognosticators could be forgiven if they looked at the Jacksonville Jaguars and thought they didn’t look like much of a serious contender. Sure, the AFC South has been among the weakest in the NFL over the last decade, so you can never rule anything out at the start of the year, but it was in that same weak division with its six soft divisional games that the Jags wouldn’t even need to use their whole hand to count wins.
That doesn’t mean that nobody believed that the Jaguars had potential this year, and Madden was definitely higher on them than most in our simulations. With a projected record of 9.7-7.3, the Jaguars were nearly a game-and-a-half clear of the next highest win total in the division (Tennessee: BIG miss.) Even this outlier number of wins was not off the table as the three-seed Jags nearly managed it in one simulation where they posted a 12-5 record. The good news for Jags fans hoping that proves to be the most accurate sim of all? They went on to lift the Lombardi trophy when all was said and done that time around.
You Should Never Believeland
Death. Taxes. The Cleveland Browns being in tanking talks by the time you see your first skeleton in your neighbor’s front yard.
In the real world this season, the Cleveland Browns were who we knew them to be. Entering the season with their own take on a famous quote, the Browns showed that if you have a half dozen quarterbacks, you probably don’t have any quarterbacks. And if you don’t have any quarterbacks, you probably won’t be winning many football games, as a perfectly Cleveland season ended 5-12.
No team in our ten simulations was fully hopeless. Every single one of the NFL’s 32 franchises managed to squeak into the wild card round at least once. That means the worst a team could have as a playoff record is 0-1, which is naturally what Cleveland managed, getting their doors blown off the one time they found their way to bonus play. They finished with three or fewer wins two times more often than they managed to win more than half their games, having hit that 9-win high-water mark twice. Madden did not believe. Madden was right.
The Misses
Even the best prognosticators miss, and Madden was not the best prognosticator this season. After ten simulations, these were the teams Madden was most off about:
Baltimore’s Bullies Bust
One of the biggest themes of the simulations was that you could not rely on anything to be too reliable. Every team made the playoffs at least once. Every team missed the playoffs at least once. Big seasons often ended in flameouts.
Mediocre ones in deep runs. Football is an unpredictable sport, and so it would be maybe a bit foolhardy to believe too strongly in any prediction, so Madden didn’t. Except for one, and it sure was foolhardy. To be fair to Madden, nearly everyone missed on Baltimore this year. To be fair, few did so this hard. Nothing was predictable in our simulations except the Ravens. While the NFC’s top seed was failing to even win one game and make the Conference Championship in four of our first five simulations, Baltimore was racking up nine division titles, seven AFC Championships, and Super Bowls in fully half of our ten simulations. They were sure as sure could be until the games had to be played for real.
Seattle Flies Higher Than Imagined
Perhaps Madden just got its circuits a bit crossed, as there was a major port city with a bird-based mascot soaring this season, but it was just on the wrong coast. In the real world, Seattle is 14-3 and the top seed in the NFC. They enter the playoffs as Super Bowl favorites, albeit with a slight “Sam Darnold In The Playoffs” asterisk hanging over their heads.
In the game, things were less promising, where Madden saw them as competing with Arizona for the title of worst team in the NFC West. Through eight simulations, Seattle had not even managed to hit double-digit wins while posting five losing seasons. A couple of stronger showings in the last two did see Seattle add two playoff appearances and their lone playoff win to their resume, but a 14-3 season was a full three wins above what Madden ever saw them managing.
The Bears Are NOT The Bears
The NFC North has been among the most loaded divisions in football of late, but one team had stood out as an exception, and that was Chicago. Madden saw little room to expect that to change, with their 6.9-10.1 record the second-worst in the NFC, 5th worst in the NFL, over the simulations. With two playoff appearances in ten tries, the Bears managed zero wins. Now, in the real world, they sit 11-6, atop a division where every team won more games than they lost. Not bad.
The Net Gain Or Loss
Given the unpredictability and challenge of predicting a sport with such high variance and small sample sizes, Madden’s performance was decent but unspectacular. Two division winners is exactly what you’d expect to hit picking at random, but when setting aside the biggest shocks nobody saw coming, the game did a solid job of predicting the teams most likely to still be playing in the New Year. Now all that’s left is for it to look ahead again to the games yet to come over the next handful of weekends!
