NFL Forecaster

NFL Forecaster helps users predict weekly professional football games. While its depth is impressive, the amount of manual input may scare off some.

The program's interface is a cluttered and confusing mix of charts and statistics. We did ourselves a favor and consulted the Help file, specifically its alphabetized topics list, whenever a hurdle presented itself. The program excels at showing the current week's professional football match-ups and giving the spread (how many points the winner will win by). We were unable to know how accurately the program predicts scores since this was tested before the season, but based on personal knowledge, the spreads seemed reasonable. One fun feature allowed us to produce a match-up by quickly inputting two teams and getting a spread. We were a little more confused by the separate screens that ranked teams by division, by offense and by defense. These dense blocks of statistics were where we made the most trips to the Help file for definitions. Thankfully, these statistics soon made sense. Our biggest problem was that the program required that we input the actual score of every game to get the following week's spread. This requires a little bit of research and effort, and is only worth it for serious football fans.

NFL Forecaster comes with a generous eight-week trial. While it requires manual input, we liked having NFL spreads at our fingertips and recommend this program for download.