Each week we will bring you the weekly game picks from our staff. However, our group of senior writers decided to take things a step further making predictions for the season. Here is what they came up with:

Matt Camp

AFC

East: Patriots (13-3)

West: Chargers (13-3)

North: Steelers (11-5)

South: Texans (12-4)

Wildcards: Jets (12-4), Ravens (11-5)

Championship Game: Chargers over Patriots

NFC

East: Eagles (10-6)

West: Rams (11-5)

North: Packers (13-3)

South: Saints (11-5)

Wildcards: Lions (10-6), Falcons (10-6)

Championship Game: Packers over Eagles

Super Bowl: Packers over Chargers

MVP: Philip Rivers

Matt Brown

AFC

East: Patriots (13-3)

West: Chargers (12-4)

North: Steelers (11-5)

South: Texans (12-4)

Wildcards: Ravens (10-6), Jets (9-7)

Championship Game: Texans over Patriots

NFC

East: Eagles (12-4)

West: Rams (9-7)

North: Packers (13-3)

South: Saints (12-4)

Wildcards: Falcons (11-5), Lions (9-7)

Championship Game: Eagles over Packers

Super Bowl: Eagles over Texans

MVP: Aaron Rodgers

Joe Dolan

AFC

East: Patriots (13-3)

West: Chargers (13-3)

North: Steelers (12-4)

South: Texans (10-6)

Wildcards: Ravens (12-4), Jets (10-6)

Championship Game: Chargers over Patriots

NFC

East: Eagles (13-3)

West: Rams (10-6)

North Packers (12-4)

South: Saints (12-4)

Wildcards: Falcons (11-5), Lions (10-6)

Championship Game: Eagles over Saints

Super Bowl: Eagles over Chargers

MVP: Aaron Rodgers

Note: Matt Camp’s Weekly MATTchups will be posted on Saturday, but every Friday after that.

As we continue our series of analyzing poll results, we asked our subscribers perhaps the most pertinent question left for the fantasy football season: who is the #1 pick? We have exactly one week until the season kicks off, and there is still no clear-cut answer:

Among the five options, we had a convincing winner, but not a majority winner (think the United States Presidential Election of 1992!). It appears that Guru subscribers just feel best about Adrian Peterson at this point, and it’s hard to argue with them. Peterson had a thigh injury that limited him to 15 games last year, but he was still incredibly productive. Peterson had over 1600 yards from scrimmage and 13 total TDs, even behind an atrocious Minnesota offensive line with an ineffective and injured Brett Favre playing QB (later Tarvaris Jackson and Joe Webb). At the very least, the addition of QB Donovan McNabb will provide a stabilizing element to the Viking backfield. Peterson has asked Viking coaches for even more touches – it’s the last year of his contract, and perhaps he wants to prove his importance to the franchise, if they don’t know already. But he won this poll because he might [...]

As we did last week, we are going to continue analyzing our poll results as part of our blog. Recently, we asked FG.com subscribers which of four different players (two rookies and two veterans) we’ve taken a liking to this preseason is their favorite sleeper:

As I was certain our subscribers have taken notice to Brown WR Greg Little just as much as we have this preseason (perhaps because we’ve been so demonstrative about him), it was no surprise to see him win this “election” comfortably: he ended up with a 24% margin on the other players, more than doubling the next highest vote-getter’s ratio. Little is a converted running back who has had some problems with his hands, but it’s clear he’s an excellent fit in this system for QB Colt McCoy. Little has an understanding for route running, and his big, tailback frame means he’s a strong receiver in the intermediate area and can overpower CBs, safeties, and even some LBs in a matchup. Remember, the Browns traded out of the slot where the Falcons ended up drafting WR Julio Jones, and we believe there is a good reason for that. Looking at Little from a skillset standpoint, he [...]

I will be honest: the lockout jaded me. I was never particularly concerned about losing the 2011 season, or even a few games, but I did not go actively searching for mock drafts to whet my appetite for fantasy. What was the point? Everything would change anyway. Instead, I focused my attention on everything that’s gone up on this site over the last few weeks, namely the player profiles, and several things that have yet to come.

But – and I knew this would happen – draft season has descended upon us quickly. I like to draft as late as possible every year, but I’m sure I’ll be doing at least one draft within the next week. We don’t even have time to digest free agency before we have to assign values to the players that moved on. Hell, soon after I started throwing this post together, the Lions signed Jerome Harrison and Mike Bell to replace the injured Mikel Leshoure. No sooner did we bump up Jahvid Best’s value than we had to speculate on what the arrival of Harrison, in particular, means.

Of course, the mid rounds always have uncertainty. Even in a normal, non-lockout year, we’re either going to [...]

If you were lucky enough to avoid what happened in the labor fiasco on Thursday, congratulations. Yesterday was essentially a microcosm of the hideous standoff that has plagued us, and all NFL fans, since March. But when the dust settles from it, are we actually closer than ever before to labor peace? Will the locked doors of the NFL finally open this weekend? It is possible.

Owners send ratified proposal to players, but… At about 7 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, the whooping and hollering could be heard from a meeting room in the Westin Atlanta. The NFL owners had passed a new CBA, 31-0 (with Al Davis abstaining, of course), paving the way for the four-month-old lockout to end. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell held a press conference celebrating the new “agreement,” and all of us on the periphery were left to believe the NFL players’ approval to be a fait accompli. The lockout was over! Only one problem: the players insist there was no agreement, and were taken by surprise by the fact that they were expected to vote on a proposal they hadn’t seen. And an 8 p.m. conference call with NFLPA director DeMaurice Smith and the 32 NFL [...]

Is today going to be the last day we have a Fantasy Guru Daily without a labor deal imminent or an agreement in principle reached? We sure hope so. As the players and owners come down the home stretch in labor talks, we are preparing for the free-agency period, which could start as soon as Monday. What does this all mean?

CBA talks take another big step… Nearly nine hours of meeting on Monday brought the NFL and the decertified NFLPA even closer to a settlement in the Brady v. NFL case when NFLPA head DeMaurice Smith followed through on a promise to get increased benefits for retired players. While Smith is still looking for $320 million in lost benefits because of the uncapped 2010 NFL season, he did manage to lock up nearly $1 billion in improvements to the benefits program over the course of the next CBA, which is expected to last up to 10 years. The hope is that every big issue will be resolved by Wednesday morning, so the NFLPA can vote on approving a settlement via email or conference call with the 32 NFL team representatives, a vote that will likely also include the decision to [...]

There is no labor deal yet. We think there will be one soon. The two sides are meeting again today. Yesterday probably could have been better, but it could have been worse. That is all we will mention about this situation.

Randy Moss not happy with the way 2010 went down… WR Randy Moss’ agent, Joel Segal, was doing his job this week and is talking up his client, who had the worst year of his roller-coaster career in 2010. “He is determined, motivated and quite frankly has a huge chip on his shoulder,” Segal said. Of course, we’d think representatives from the Vikings and Titans would disagree from the start, as Moss made just a handful of catches after being traded to Minnesota early in the 2010 season. Segal, then, has his work cut out for him to secure Moss a job once the open market is, well… opened. In his 30s, Moss is probably going to want to play with a contender, but is any contender going to be willing to take the risk that he’s a total dud like last year? The Jets would seem like a solid fit if they don’t re-sign Braylon Edwards, and we figure [...]

When plotting out this upcoming week, I knew I would be writing the Guru Daily today. I vowed to stay away from the labor situation, because the media (including us) has overreacted to every up and down, thanks to a dearth of anything else to report on. But we start Monday with some optimism, including a potential calendar for the start of the 2011 league year.

Deal is potentially on the horizon… Yeah, we’ve been hearing this week is huge for a while so it shouldn’t come as a total surprise, but there is apparently real optimism around the NFL that a framework CBA could be in place and voted on by the time the owners meet in Atlanta on July 21, as reported by ESPN. What’s funny is that it appears the rookie wage scale, essentially a slotting system to prevent deals like JaMarcus Russell’s from ever happening again, has become the major point of contention between the two sides. In short, the owners want longer and cheaper deals for rookies, while the players are willing to go cheaper so long as the young players can get free agency a year sooner (four-year deals as opposed to five). On one [...]

The NFL and NFLPA lawyers got back to work on Tuesday, hammering out the legal mumbo jumbo that would be a part of any final CBA deal. The two sides met for nearly eight hours, so while they cannot tackle the revenue split issue without the owners and the players present in negotiating sessions, they can get done some of the more tedious legwork, allowing a verbal/handshake agreement to turn into a signed, sealed, and delivered CBA more quickly than we might expect once that agreement is reached. They’ll continue that work today, and we continue to wait…

Legal teams go back to work on the new CBA… As mentioned above, the lawyers on both sides of the debate are hammering out the little details while we wait for the owners and players to rejoin talks on Thursday, presumably to try to wrap up the revenue split issue, and in turn the final CBA. Once again, different sources have different ideas on exactly how “close” or “not close” the two sides are to reaching a deal. But the one agreement all sources seem to have is that there is a deal to be made and it’s certainly possible that deal is [...]

Over the last four months, we have become junior experts on labor law, simply by having a horse in this NFL lockout race (that horse is called “actual football”). And if there is one certain thing we have learned about labor law, it’s that there are two stages of deals: “done” and “not done.” Despite growing optimism over the last few weeks, the NFL still resides in that latter category, and until all the major parties finally put their John Hancocks on a finished product, there’s still a chance things can go awry. But we’ve also learned that ebbs and flows happen: positives can happen on bad days and negatives can happen on good days. So despite what we would call a “bad day” in labor negotiations yesterday, some interesting stuff went down.

Crazy day in lockout talks… Yes, we felt it too. At about 6 p.m. Central (the talks are taking place in Minnesota), when the NFL and NFLPA had already been meeting for nine hours, reports started to leak to the media that the talks had suffered a major setback, concerning the owners asking [...]