I generally think FO does good analysis, and can see a few things that will way heavily against us in their computer projections:
1) End of year collapse… teams that are improving at the end of the year often are teams that finally “got it”, and improve the following season. What they don’t calculate in their projections is WHY the collapse happened… in our case it was a) screwball players no longer with the team, b) lack of depth on d-line (fixed), and c) injuries to o-line and rookie RB hitting the wall (we’ll see).

2) They always have a semi-subjective rating of team stability… it improves the analysis, but is subjective and given they know almost nothing about the AFCW, its likely wrong. So we’ll get penalized for losing Nolan and the hub-bub around Marshall and Doom’s contract, even though IMO these are kinda non-issues in reality.

3) Age decline… they will continue to project our DBs to suck, and eventually they will be right. But because they don’t look at backup quality, they’ll ignore the fact that we have promising players like McBath, Cox, Jones, etc. in reserve.

Last year for many of these same reasons they predicted us with 4 wins… my guess is we can add 2-3 wins to whatever they are projecting for us this year based on things I know they are underprojecting us for, and it will be relatively accurate… My guess is they have us at ~6 wins, so that would be about right.

Also remember their projections only explain about 40% of the variability in a season… so all their projections are basically +/- 50% just on randomn craziness like fumble luck, injuries, etc.

Its interesting that KC is getting the boost in the projection… but understandable too… they had a lot of young guys last year that we realistically should expect to improve, though my guess is they are overrating Weigman, etc. who to me looked totally toast last year, which will hurt both their pass and particularly the run game. In addition, they will give KC a boost for stability, and us a penalty simply because Nolan left, even though I expect both teams to be improved on that front.

Most significant is the projected SD decline… which could make things real interesting.

I expect the division to be very competitie…