As you know I pride myself as having the most accurate preseason college football magazine and I’m pleased to announce that after the 2009 season my magazine stills ranks #1 in accuracy the last 5 years and still #1 over the past 11 years!!

Last year, I decided to expand my NFL magazine to 6 pages per team and put it on the newsstands for the first time. Unlike my college magazine I do not write every word for each team but I do write the forecasts for each division and I must say I am pleased with the results.

Overall out of the eight major publications, no one predicted more division winners than me as I correctly forecasted 7 of the 8 division winners with Pittsburgh being the only exception in the AFC North.
 
My division forecast that I am most proud of is the NFC South where coming into the season no one was a bigger Saints fan than me as I was the only magazine to have them winning the division! Some publications didn’t even have the Saints among the Top 20 teams in the NFL however my power poll had them at #6 which was significantly higher than any other magazine!

NFC South

Here are the other preseason predicted division winners by each publication.

AFC East

With Brady back at QB for the Patriots, the AFC East projections were a clean sweep with all of the publications picking New England to win the Division.

AFC North

As you can see the Steelers were probably the biggest disappointment of the '09 season as every single publication predicted them to win the division. There may be no one in the country including Cincinnati fans that would have predicted the Bengals to win the division title after Pittsburgh and Baltimore faced each other in the AFC Championship in '08.

AFC South

The Colts clearly were the favorites but unlike New England, Pittsburgh and San Diego, they weren't the consensus pick with Lindy's picking Tennessee. Also I want to mention that not only did I predict the exact order of finish in the division with the Colts #1, the Texans #2, the Titans #3 and the Jaguars #4, but I also predicted the exact record for 3 of the 4 teams!! (Houston 9-7, Tennessee 8-8 and Jacksonville 7-9)

AFC West

San Diego clearly was the favorite in the weakest division in the AFC. The Chargers lived up to their preseason hype by winning 11 straight games before falling to the NY Jets at home in the playoffs.

NFC East

In the NFC, I had the Eagles winning the East where they finished tied for 1st with Dallas and while I didn't have the Cowboys winning the division, my power poll had them as the #7 team in the entire league! The NY Giants who were picked to win the division by 4 of the publications finished a disappointing 8-8.

NFC North

Only 3 of the publications had the Vikings winning the division however, I correctly predicted the Vikings would win and this was even before Favre had been signed with the team!

NFC West

Finally in the NFC West I had the Cardinals winning the division for the 2nd year in a row despite the Super Bowl loser curse where SEVEN of 8 teams that lost the SB the previous year did not even make the playoffs the next year!

Overall Standings

As you can see I was the only major publication to predict 7 division winners! USA Today came in 2nd with 6 with Athlon and the Sporting News each predicting 5 division winners correct.

When the NFL magazine hits the newsstands this July make sure to pick one up along with my college preview. I have 5 sets of power ratings for the NFL (9 for college) and I believe we have more information than any other NFL preview on the market and hopefully this year we can predict all 8 division winners correctly!

In last year's ACC/Big East regional magazine, I included more than 100 pages of FCS coverage and I am currently working on how my conference predictions turned out. Look for those reuslts in an upcoming blog. I will be back on Monday. Have a great weekend!