Marching on in our quest to preview the more interesting divisions in the NFL through the lens of Madden NFL 26 simulations, the AFC North plays host to both the best and worst teams in the league by Madden’s estimation and a middle pair with intrigue of its own. With a Super Bowl favorite, a team with the top-end talent to always feel hope, a team with the pedigree to demand a winning season, and also the Browns, there’s a lot of fun to be found in the North.
What The Simulations Tell Us
Of all the league’s divisions, the AFC North may have generated the most interesting results. It remains to be seen how accurate the preseason prognostications of experts and gaming engines around the world hold up, but Madden has clearly planted its flag on the AFC North with a level of confidence unmatched anywhere else, so here’s what it had to say.
Madden Is All-In On The Ravens
12.8-4.2 Average Record, 9 Playoff Appearances, 9 Division Titles, 7 AFC Championships
Madden expects the Ravens to be good. Very, very good. Whatever metric you want to go by when the dust settled on ten full-season simulations, the team coming out on top was Baltimore. The most wins. The most playoff appearances. The most division titles. The most conference titles. The most Super Bowl wins.
There’s no round in the playoffs where the Ravens ended up with a losing record across ten years, and the absolute nadir of their accomplishments in ten tries was finishing 10-7 and 8th in the AFC, missing out on the playoffs by nothing more than tiebreakers, which saw the Bengals claim the division and the Chargers the wild card. That second-place finish in the North also represented the only time they didn’t win the division.
Bengals Or Bungles?
8.5-8.5 Average Record, 4 Playoff Appearances, 1 Division Title
No team in the entire simulation drew more varied results out of Madden than Cincinnati, which makes sense for a team that spent last season with both one of the more dominant passing duos of all time and a defense that played like it was allergic to people holding a football. While a first look at the records would show a pretty standard midseason team, winning exactly half their games and the mediocre but not atrocious results that come with that, a deep dive reveals it’s not so simple.
The Bengals did have nearly as many losing seasons, four, as winning, six, but what separates them from other middle-of-the-pack sides is their wild levels of variance. They’re the only team to finish a season above the Ravens, and also posted a twelve-win season in a year they shared a division with a 16-1 Baltimore side. On the flip side, they also turned in a 2-15 year, which was the second worst of 320 total seasons in the simulations.
The Tomlining Is Strong, But Not Irrepressible
7.8-9.2 Average Record, 2 Playoff Appearances, 0 Division Titles
The Steelers enter 2025 not brimming with optimism as a franchise extremely unfamiliar to its position as a team that the oddsmakers consider more likely to miss the playoffs than make it. With Aaron Rodgers under center but well removed from the last time he looked anything like the future Hall of Famer he is, it might be a long season in Pittsburgh, but for that to happen, it would require Mike Tomlin to do something entirely new to him: fail to win more games than he loses.
With even our first attempt at a full tank undone by Tomlin’s 9-win floor, Madden clearly knows that his teams just win games, but it doesn’t hold a lot of faith in their ability to win a meaningful number of them. The bad news for the Steelers is that they actually had more sims with double-digit losses than playoff appearances. The good news is that in both of them, they at least got their first playoff win in nearly a decade. The bad news again is that both ended at the hands of their hated rivals, Baltimore, en route to one of the Ravens’ multiple simulated Super Bowl wins.
Oh, Cleveland
4.8-12.2 Average Record, 1 Playoff Appearance, 0 Division Titles
There are no sure bets in sports, but it’s rarely been a bad bet to put your savings down on the Browns having a bad season virtually any year in the life of anyone reading this. Video games offer a world not bound by reality, however, where anything can happen, so with ten simulations to play with, the Browns had every opportunity to have a breakout or two to give fans some modicum of hope about the impending season.
It didn’t happen. The Browns kept their losses to single digits just twice, with a lone season where their ten-simulation high of nine wins fortunately came in one of the years where that was all it took to make the postseason. Ten passes of the same sim tend to have the effect of narrowing the margins, with most teams averaging just a few wins either side of .500, yet Cleveland still found a way to be nearly two wins worse than the next-worst team in the entire league. A model of consistency, for all the wrong reasons.
A Tale Of Two Browns
It would be bad enough for Cleveland to find itself as Madden’s clear worst team and in the same division as the clear best team, but there’s a special cruelty in that best team being their old team. When the Ravens moved to Baltimore, they left the losing behind and haven’t looked back, and Madden seems dead set on them building on that legacy.
In ten simulations, netting seven chances in the big game, the Ravens won the Super Bowl five times. That’s more wins than the Browns managed in half the simulations, including a 1-16 and 2-15 year in seasons where the Ravens were 15-2 and 16-1 Super Bowl champions, respectively. The most damning statistic: their average position in the division was 3.6, a full spot lower than the Ravens’ average finish in the AFC. The misery in virtual Cleveland was off the charts.
Can Anyone Challenge The Ravens
The short answer here is “it doesn’t look like it,” and the long answer isn’t much more promising for the North’s other three squads. Cincinnati seems most likely to make something happen if Madden is to be believed. Their high volatility means that their peak potential could make them a serious threat if things come together well for them, as evidenced by their one season knocking the Ravens off their perch.
As for the two teams that hate Baltimore more than any others in the league, things look less rosy. Across ten seasons, the Ravens’ worst season was the 10-7 playoff-less year. The Steelers and Browns combined for just 7 wins that season, and never once in their 20 combined attempts matched that 10-win total. Real titles aren’t decided on virtual fields, to be fair, and fans in Pittsburgh and Cleveland best hope that the real world is a lot friendlier, or it’s going to be a long season.
