Broncos Punditry Check: 31 of 45 Calls Took Denver at Arrowhead, and the Field Is Still Selling 12 Wins | MissedTakes Daily
Denver's trip to Kansas City settled 45 graded calls. Thirty-one of them had the Broncos winning.
The Chiefs won 31-10. Every straight-up Denver pick from that game scored zero, and every one of them came in at −200 on our skill measure — meaning the pick was worse than simply defaulting to the home team, which is the baseline those numbers are graded against. Danny Parkins went "five chips on the Denver Broncos. Another upset." Shannon Sharpe said Kansas City "ain't going to beat that defense the Broncos got." Albert Breer, Conor Orr, Gilberto Manzano, Mitch Goldich, Eric Mangini and Leonard Fournette all landed on Denver too.
The two best marks on the game belonged to Pete Prisco and Mike Florio, who each called it Chiefs 20, Broncos 17 — 57.1 accuracy and a modest edge on the baseline. Nobody was close to a three-score Kansas City win. The best Denver-side score prediction, Matt Hamilton's 27-17, graded 23.8.
Why everyone was on Denver
Last season the field badly underrated this team. Six tracked win-total calls on the 2025 Broncos averaged nine wins; Denver won 14. That was the field's biggest collective underestimate of any team in 2025 outside of Kansas City's collapse — and it is directly relevant to what is being said now, because the correction has been aggressive. Of the Broncos win-total calls we've tracked for 2026, nearly all sit at 11 or higher.
Cody Rourke and Sayre Bedinger both had Denver at 13-4 back in July, including a Week 1 win at Arrowhead and a season sweep of the Chiefs. Nick Ferguson put the floor at 10. John Breech had them 12-5 as the AFC's No. 1 seed on Sept. 7. The low voice in the room was Warren Sharp's schedule model at 9.7 wins.
Breech's own numbers show how fast the picture moved: 12-5 and the top seed on Sept. 7, 10-7 and the No. 3 seed in a Sept. 9 simulation, and by Sept. 16 Denver is the seventh seed in a post-Week 1 re-run. Chris Brockman now has them 2-4 over the next six games, with the wins coming against the Chargers and the Rams. None of these has an answer yet; the season is one game old.
Who has actually been right about this team
We've graded 219 Denver calls out of 774 tracked. The pundits with at least five of them:
Manti Te'o is a perfect 7-for-7 and Rich Eisen sits at 88.9 on nine — real but thin, so read them as leans rather than records. Brockman's 81.8 on ten comes with the best skill margin in the group (+84.6), which matters more than the raw accuracy: it means his Denver calls beat the naive baseline by a wide margin, not just that he picked chalk. At the other end, Nick Wright grades out at 27.9 on seven Denver calls — though he was one of the few who took Kansas City in Week 1 and has Denver second in the division at 11-6.
The type breakdown is blunter than any individual record. Denver as a division winner: 15 graded calls, all correct. Denver as a playoff team: 93.3. Denver game picks: 71 graded at 62 accuracy but a negative skill margin, meaning the field's Broncos game calls have collectively been worse than a coin flip on the home team. Denver win totals: eight graded at 22.5.
Where the current disagreement is
The live argument is in the skill positions, and it's genuine. Nathan Jahnke's PFF recap of the Kansas City game has J.K. Dobbins ahead of RJ Harvey as the early-down back and Courtland Sutton still the top receiver by playing time. Andrew Erickson's Week 2 waiver column says sell both — Dobbins is "touchdown-or-bust" without receiving work, Sutton managed two catches for 11 yards on five targets — and prefers Harvey's PPR floor. They agree on one thing: get Pat Bryant.
On credibility there, Jahnke's roster-spot work is strong (85.2 accuracy across 50 graded calls), but his broad preseason depth-chart roundups have graded badly, including two that scored zero this past week. Erickson is tenth on our overall board at 57.0 accuracy over 143 graded calls. Pundit-wide, Denver running back calls have graded at 78.2 accuracy and receiver calls at 46.2 — the backfield reads have been the more reliable ones.
The league day in brief
- 577 calls were graded in the last week, three-quarters of them game outcomes and score predictions, with 373 new ones filed.
- Pat Fitzmaurice took three of the five best grades of the week, all on depth-chart calls, including Kyler Murray as Minnesota's Week 1 starter. He leads the overall board at 47.24 with 58.0 accuracy over 168 graded calls.
- The bottom of the week was concentrated in preseason projection pieces: two PFF fantasy recaps and John Shipley's full 16-man Jaguars practice-squad projection all scored zero.
- Bucky Brooks (41.38, 77.9 accuracy) and Derek Brown (35.62) hold second and third.
Full standings are on the leaderboard.