King Kaufman's Sports Daily

AFC preview: It sounds crazy, but three division champs will repeat, and the Patriots won't be one of them. OK, yeah, that is crazy.

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Sept. 7, 2006 | In Wednesday's NFC preview, I picked two division winners to repeat and predicted last year's wild-card teams would win the other two divisions, so I had four of six playoff teams returning to the postseason.

I took a little heat for it in the comments section and my in box. "Every year, there's a huge turnover in playoff teams, and yet you picked almost all the same teams to make the playoffs," wrote one reader. "Very boring picks."

Just two years ago I was lambasting this column's readers and the national media for picking way too many repeat winners for the 2004 season, six of them in the eight divisions.

I reminded you that in the NFL's "Wait, I've been away for a year and now you're telling me that what team won the Super Bowl?!" era, teams rarely repeat, how the salary cap and free agency make it difficult to sustain success and possible to go from the cellar to Super Bowl contention in the space of a year.

"Folks, last year is over," I wrote. "You need to get behind some new teams."

So what happened? Did I forget my own admonition? Well, yes. Yes I did. But fortunately I can cover my tracks with a theory and no one has to know.

The theory is that the landscape is changing a bit in the NFL. We all know the New England Patriots have figured out how to manage the salary cap and sustain success over a number of years. They're on a streak of five straight winning seasons, with, as you may have heard, three Super Bowl victories in that stretch.

But I think more and more teams are figuring it out. The Denver Broncos and Indianapolis Colts have four straight winning seasons and they look like winners again this year. The Philadelphia Eagles would have been in the group too if not for the injury- and Terrell Owens-driven meltdown last year, which really wasn't a salary-cap, parity issue. This kind of widespread stability would have been unheard of four or five years ago.

I'm not saying it's becoming easy for teams to sustain success. It's still really hard. But it's possible, and we're starting to see a little more stability in the standings. After all, you all and the commentariat were right about four of your picks in 2004, the three repeat champs that year, the Eagles, Colts and Patriots, plus the Seattle Seahawks.

Last year, three more teams repeated -- the Colts and Patriots made it three straight division titles and the Seahawks won for the second straight time. And another defending division champ, the Pittsburgh Steelers, tied for their division but lost to the Cincinnati Bengals under tie-breaking rules.

I mention all this because I'm about to turn to the AFC, where I'm going to predict that three division champs are going to repeat, bringing my leaguewide total of predicted repeat division champs to five.

And you have to have some theory to back up that kind of dumb picking.

Next page: What are the Raiders doing, how important was the Edge to the Colts, and -- of all teams, not the Pats?!