The NFL season starts in just a week as we fly through the summer and into the best time of the year. Football season is a special time in America, not just at the pro level but also with College football starting week one this weekend, and high school football having begun in a lot of places in the country already, it’s an all-encompassing pastime. It’s not just the real-life activity of football that has captured the hearts and minds of people around the world, but also the video game world as well, with Madden 26 being released just mere weeks ago and already accruing millions of players globally.
With the anticipation building for this year’s annual football season and Madden 26 already being out, we here at Operation Sports have been utilizing Madden to help people get excited about the upcoming football season, particularly in the NFL, where we’ve simulated Madden seasons to determine rookie performances, tanking timelines, and which teams overperform in Franchise mode simulations. Last week, we looked at how the NFC North (and the NFC West yesterday) shook out in ten different one-year simulations, and this week, I decided to take that same idea and apply it to another competitive, albeit less talented, division in the AFC South.
The AFC South Summary
Consisting of the Texans, Jaguars, Colts, and Titans, the AFC South has been at the bottom of NFL divisional power rankings for nearly a decade. They’ve basically been a laughing stock, only given some slack because of the current state of their counterparts in the NFC South, who have had to rely on the slightly above-average play of the Buccaneers to keep their division above water. In the AFC, they are clearly at the bottom of the barrel, with the Texans cruising to an easy playoff berth last season despite a statistical underperformance by C.J. Stroud and the rest of their offense outside of Joe Mixon.
Outside of the Texans, the Titans were abysmal last year, but are banking on the No. 1 overall draft pick Cam Ward to lift them out of irrelevance this season and back into the playoff conversation within the next few years, I don’t think it’s reasonable to believe that they’ll have a Commanders-esque turnaround, but they may be able to put themselves into a good spot moving forward just like the Patriots have done over the last season or two. The Colts are likewise also in no position to compete for a playoff spot as they are in a horrific situation at QB (although I’m one of the few Danny Dimes believers out there, even I can see that he’s not the guy) and don’t have much of a better situation on the rest of their roster.
That leaves the Jaguars, who are the big question mark this year. The Jags will depend on the play of Trevor Lawrence and whether or not their Travis Hunter gambit pays off, which are both good bets in my opinion, but I guess it doesn’t matter what I think; this article is about what Madden thinks. So without further ado, here is what Madden thinks about this division.
The Kings Of The Jungle
The Jaguars win the division in seven of the ten simulations with an average record of 9.7-7.3, which is 1.4 wins better than the second-place team. The Jaguars were so good that they actually won a Super Bowl in one of the simulations after a 12-5 record and a win against the Ravens in the Divisional round, then a dominant 18-point win against the Bills in the AFC championship games, and finally a three-point win in a low-scoring 20-17 win against the Lions in the Super Bowl.
Overall, Madden believes that Trevor Lawrence will finally come into his own, averaging roughly a seventh-place finish in the MVP race in the majority of simulations. It also has faith in Travis Etienne, who tallied 1000+ rushing yards and 8+ touchdowns in nine of the ten simulations. The most surprising performer on the team was Dyami Brown, who earned over 1000 receiving yards in more than half of the simulations.
A Dynasty Begins?
The Titans were the shock for me in these simulations, winning the division twice and earning a wildcard spot in two other instances. They averaged a record of 8.3-8.7, slightly under .500, but easily in second place in the division. They rolled to solid years under rookie QB Cam Ward, who played solid in the simulations, winning the AFC Offensive Rookie of the Year in four of the ten simulations.
Another great rookie who earned an AFC Offensive Rookie of the Year award on the Titans was Chimere Dike, a standout player in my rookie simulation article that you can find here. Another standout player in that article is also a Titan in Oluwafemi Oladejo, who won the AFC Defensive Rookie of the Year award in half of the simulations, putting up truly video game numbers, including two 20+ sack seasons as he helped the Titans exceed my expectations.
Houston, We Have A Problem
If Madden is to be believed, Texans fans may be in for some serious disappointment. The Texans didn’t win the division in any of the ten simulations, only making the playoffs twice as a wildcard. Once, they went on to beat the Jaguars in the playoffs, but then got mollywhopped by the Ravens in the Divisional round. The Texans’ average record was just 7.4-9.6, which was nearly one whole win below the Titans and nearly two and a half wins below the Jaguars in the division.
For a team expecting to dominate this division for the foreseeable future, this Madden prediction is a bad sign for a team hoping that last year’s sophomore slump by C.J. Stroud was just a one-year thing. Madden 26 definitely did not have that attitude, as the simulations were very consistent in their portrayal of C.J. Stroud as a bottom-ten starting QB in the league, with some of the simulations actually putting him at the bottom of QBs in passer rating (amongst QBs with over 100 pass attempts)!
The Colts Hit Rock Bottom
It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me that the Colts landed in last place in the division in eight of the ten simulations. What comes as a surprise to me is that they actually managed to win the division in one of the sims. With a 10-7 record, they managed to squeak by the 9-8 Jags and 9-8 Titans for the division title in sim number nine, which was a strange outlier year for the entire league that culminated in a Seahawks Super Bowl victory over the Patriots as Tariq Woolen won the SB MVP. The Colts lost to the Chargers in the wild-card round of that year, ending their only winning season in any of the ten simulations. The Colts ended up with an average record of 5.5-11.5.
The game ended up giving Anthony Richardson the starting QB job in each of the simulations, and while I could have altered his overall rating to force Daniel Jones to be the starter, I figured that it likely didn’t matter much and may have actually benefited the Colts at the end of the day, given Daniel Jones’ abysmal Madden ratings.
What About The Future?
In order to give you a more accurate picture of where this division sits going forward, I dimmed past 2025 in a number of the sims I did, and what I found was fascinating. If you’re a Texans fan, you may want to stop reading. The Texans averaged a three-year record of 12.2-38.8 between 2026 and 2028, which boils down to roughly a 4-13 record per year. DeMeco Ryan is always out after 2026, as is C.J. Stroud, and the team is forced to draft a first-round QB that never seems to pan out.
As for the rest of the league, the Colts tend to play well, usually under the leadership of a new head coach and, surprisingly, Anthony Richardson, who Madden seems to think will have a bounce-back year in 2026 before leading the team to a playoff berth in 2027 and 2028. They tend to average roughly nine to ten wins a year after 2025. The Titans are in a similar boat to the Colts, winning roughly nine to ten games a season and making the playoffs approximately every other year, but usually as a wildcard team because the division gets a true king in the Jaguars moving forward.
The Jaguars averaged one Super Bowl win between 2026 and 2028 in my five long-term simulations and won the division in 12 of the 15 seasons in total. Madden really loves this Jaguars team and seems to have a lot of faith that Trevor Lawrence will realize his college potential, which made him the number one pick all those years ago.
