We are barely a week away from the first action of the NFL season, so we’re continuing our look at what to expect from the upcoming year. Previously, we’ve looked at the NFC North, but today we take a look at the NFC West, which has quietly dominated the NFC in recent years, producing four of the last seven NFC champions and seven Super Bowl representatives in the last 13 seasons.
With a new year set to dawn, does Madden NFL 26 expect the West to maintain its place as the most successful division in the NFC, or will it be another year where none of the four quite manages to extend itself beyond the closely-contested dogfight of merely pretty good teams?
What The Simulations Tell Us
To take out some of the variance that comes with a video game simulation we ran ten one-year simulations of the NFL and compiled the stats from all ten to find the teams who excelled and the teams who too often missed the mark. Here is what our ten passes at the 2025 NFL Season tell us to expect from the teams in the NFC West:
The 49ers Are The Class Of The West
10.1-6.9 Average Record, 7 Playoff Appearances, 6 Division Titles, 3 NFC Championships
The 49ers have been one of the stranger teams in the NFL of late, simultaneously a seemingly constant presence as one of the NFC’s top contenders while also being a team that has had multiple teardowns and implosions in that time, as well. That can often make them one of the hardest teams to predict coming into a season, and that’s made all the more true when they have Christian McCaffery, a man equally likely to be MVP or sidelined by Week Three.
As far as Madden is concerned, there is a lot of reason to be optimistic in San Francisco. They fell below .500 just twice, with 7-10 representing their absolute low. They captured the division crown more often than not and led the NFC in Super Bowl appearances. A sad season isn’t totally off the list of possibilities, but good times in San Fran seem more likely.
Can Matthew Stafford Lead One Last Ride?
9.1-7.9 Average Record, 6 Playoff Appearances, 3 Division Titles
The other team responsible for half of those four NFC Championships in recent years for the West, the Rams, isn’t viewed as quite as sure a thing as the 49ers. While they won the division only once for every two Niners titles, they were nearly on par in terms of playoff appearances, making the postseason in 60 percent of our simulations.
Once in the playoffs, it was a bit of a mixed bag for the Rams. Half the time they exited at the first time of asking, and only once did they manage to win more than one game, advancing to the NFC Championship game as the two seed in the penultimate simulation. They also held a lower floor than San Francisco, twice managing just six wins and finishing 13th in the NFC.
The Seahawks Are A Model Of Mediocrity
8.3-8.7 Average Record, 3 Playoff Appearances, 1 Division Title
Geno Smith is out in Seattle after reviving his career, and in his place is a man looking to continue his renaissance in Sam Darnold. Unfortunately for Darnold, he will now have to do so without the benefit of Justin Jefferson catching anything and everything within arm’s reach.
While the outlook for the Seahawks improved over the course of the simulation, with the later sims proving to be the more fruitful for Seattle, they still fall to a clear step down from the top two. They did manage to make the playoffs 30 percent of the time, but only once were they able to find a solitary playoff win across ten seasons.
Madden Is Out On The Kyler Murray Experience
7.7-9.3 Average Record, 4 Playoff Appearances, 0 Division Titles
There’s good news and bad news for Cardinals fans from our simulations. On the bright side, with four playoff appearances, the Cardinals actually made the playoffs slightly more than average. Similarly, with two wins as a wild card team, they actually reached the final eight more often than the Seahawks.
The downside is that’s about as good as things get. They finished in the bottom two of the division seven times, won the fewest games in the division, and hit a high-water mark for wins of just 10 twice, contrasted against four seasons with double-digit defeats. Things may not be totally hopeless in Arizona, but they’re not particularly hopeful, either.
Deja Vu All Over (And Over, And Over Again)
The standout performance from the NFC West, and arguably the NFC entirely if we only assess for performance within the conference, is that of the San Francisco 49ers. They reached the second round of the playoffs in all but one of their seven postseason trips despite never locking down the top seed, meaning they rarely went home without at least one playoff win once getting there.
Then there is the three different trips to the big game as the NFC’s representative. While this is still a performance level that tops all but the two-title Bucs, things were less golden once there. While San Francisco started its Super Bowl record with five straight wins, they’ve since fallen one game short of the goal three straight trips ever since losing to the Baltimore Ravens at Super Bowl XLVII. A repeat performance is Madden’s most confident prediction, with the Ravens topping San Francisco all three times they made it the Super Bowl in our simulations.
The NFL’s Most Mid Division
The ultimate verdict on the NFC West remains one that has been true of many of its teams in many recent seasons. It’s fine. With an average record of 8.8-8.2, the NFC West had the third-highest overall winning percentage among the league’s eight divisions. This was largely buoyed by a high floor, however, more than a high ceiling. While the Cardinals were the only team to drop below six wins, and only twice, the teams also combined to win a dozen games or more just three times across their combined 40 seasons.
Come the playoffs, the mediocre teams did what mediocre teams do in January more often than not and bowed out meekly. With San Francisco removed rest of the division combined to win just seven postseason games across ten years, and three of those came in West-on-West clashes where somebody had to win the right to be comfortably brushed aside in the divisional round.
The West is often one of the most intriguing divisions going into a new season, and 2025 appears to be no different if Madden is to be believed. While it’s clear that the game views San Francisco as a favorite, they are not prohibitively so to such an extent that a tumble down the table would be shocking. What do you think of Madden’s findings? Is this the 49ers’ year, or will one of their chasers prove to be the real champions of the West Coast?
