We are just a couple of weeks away from the NFL season, which means fans are ramping up for the action and eager to find ways to get a preview of what’s to come in the season ahead. Ever since sports video games reached the level of scouting and realism that allows for realistic representations of teams, fans have seen them as a fun way to see what the experts behind the games think is likely to happen on the real fields.
Perhaps no division offers a more intriguing slate of potential results than the NFC North, which last season played host to three of the best teams in the NFL, and also the Bears were there. In a division where fine margins can be the difference between topping the NFC standings or being third in the division, anything could happen this year, and that’s why we ran ten one-season simulations in Madden NFL 26 to see just how varied things can get.
What The Simulations Tell Us
On the top level, things again look set to be tightly contested in the North, with any of last year’s big three capable of repeating. The ten division titles were split as evenly among the three as possible without the Bears contributing to the count, and the teams were separated by less than one game on average record. Let’s look a bit closer at how each team fared in the regular season.
The Packers’ Floor Is High
10.3-6.7 Avg. Record, 7 Playoff Appearances, 3 Division Titles
Because the Vikings’ best results in our simulations were backloaded, the Packers and the Lions spent the majority of the process trading the best average record back and forth as one or the other managed a few more wins from season to season. When the dust settled, with 103 wins across ten seasons, the Packers proved to be the most capable regular season team by a hair.
Where the Pack stand out from the others is in the high floor EA seems to put on their performance. While a 7-10 and 8-9 season in sims eight and nine dragged them back a bit, those represented the only times in ten where they failed to win more games than they lost, and represented two of just three times they didn’t grab the division or one of the NFC’s three wild card slots.
Detroit Look Set To Contend Again
10.1-6.9 Avg. Record, 7 Playoff Appearances, 4 Division Titles
The Lions’ results mirrored those of the Packers extremely closely throughout the simulation process, with the most notable difference being a slightly higher bit of variance. This is visible in both the positive, where the Lions hit 14 wins twice and added a third season of a dozen victories, and the negative, where they had three losing seasons to the Pack’s two, adding in another 7-10 effort in the final simulation.
The good news for the Lions is that every season they didn’t fall below .500, they also made the playoffs, allowing them to match the Packers with a 70% playoff appearance rate across ten years, which is a strong mark in such a competitive division. While the high danger of playing in such a competitive group means they can’t rest on their laurels, the Lions still seem well-positioned to make another run this year.
A Boom Or Bust Outlook In Minnesota
9.5-7.5 Avg. Record, 4 Playoff Appearances, 3 Division Titles
Minnesota saw its one-year experiment with Sam Darnold look to be broadly successful throughout the season, only for winter Darnold to look a whole lot more like the Sam Darnold we are used to and less like the Pro Bowl-caliber signal caller he was at the start of the year. Now they turn to J.J. McCarthy under center, a man entering his second season of NFL-level study and preparation, but functionally a rookie on the field after losing his entire opening campaign to a preseason meniscus tear.
Befitting of a team with a glut of offensive talent but an unknown passer, the Vikings were far more volatile than their elite peers in our simulations. On the one hand, they were the only team in the division to reach 13 wins three times and to claim the NFC’s top seed three times as a result. On the other hand, they were under .500 in half the simulations, and just 9-8 in the remaining two, and missed the playoffs more often than they made it.
The Bears Are The Bears
6.9-10.1 Avg. Record, 2 Playoff Appearances, 0 Division Titles
Some things in the NFL are hard to predict, others seem like the easiest call in the world. For the better part of the last three decades, the Bears have been the latter, always reliably there to flatter to deceive when things look good and validate the haters when even false hope is hard to come by. Unfortunately for the Second City lot, Madden NFL 26 doesn’t see this year as one brimming with optimism.
It took five seasons for the Bears to make a playoff run, and another two to climb into the top half of the NFC North standings for the first and only time. They never won more than 9 games, and only managed two postseason appearances thanks to 9-8 records that barely secured a wild card spot.
The (Regular Season) Kings Of The North
The Madden NFL 26 simulations we ran pointed to a clear belief in the North to turn out at least one team that is utterly untouchable from September to December. Across the ten seasons, the North’s champion took the NFC’s overall top seed seven times, with win counts in the teens on all seven occasions.
Unfortunately, things went a bit sour once they got to that point. While the overall record of #1 seeds from the North nearly recovered to .500 as the Vikings’ 10th-season Super Bowl win raised the mark to 5-6, they managed just two more wins total in the other six seasons, with the Lions and Packers each falling in the Conference Championship as a top seed once each. Things weren’t much better elsewhere, with a combined playoff record of 15-18, and just two Super Bowl Appearances to share.
The Lovable Losers Finally Win
The division may have struggled to make the most of its top-seed dominance, but the simulations did bring good news to two of the NFL’s most woebegone franchises, as both the Vikings and Lions managed to get across the line in one simulation each. While the Vikings did so in the previously mentioned top seed season, the Lions did so in a season where 12 wins only earned them the 3-seed come January.
The NFC North looks spicy on paper, and it looked just as spicy on the screen, but will reality stack up or is there a shock in store, maybe in the form of a Sophomore surge from Caleb Williams and the Bears? We don’t have long to wait to find out now!
