Lions Punditry Check: 0-for-20 on Detroit in the NFC, and the Field Is Back at 11-12 Wins | MissedTakes Daily

Detroit has become the league's most comfortable prediction, and the most expensive one. We've tracked 739 calls about the Lions, 243 of which the games have now answered. Twenty of those answered calls were pundits putting Detroit in the Super Bowl or naming them NFC champion. All twenty were wrong.

That's across the 2024 and 2025 seasons, and it isn't spread thin across the industry. Rich Eisen alone accounts for ten of the twenty, restating the same pick nearly every week of last season — "The Lions are still really damn good. Again, I have them winning the NFC" in early November, with Detroit on its way to 9-8 and out of the playoffs. Gregg Rosenthal had Detroit in the Super Bowl four separate times, including a Week 12 refusal to move off it. New England and Seattle won the conferences.

The pattern matters this week because the field has re-loaded the same bet. Nobody's 2026 Detroit call has been settled yet, but the numbers on the board are familiar:

Schein is close to alone in the low lane, and last year the low lane was the right one. The single best Detroit win-total call we have graded belongs to Brady Quinn, who said before the 2025 season that "the Lions missed the playoffs at nine and eight" — exactly right, scored a perfect 100, and beat the naive benchmark by 110 points, the widest margin of any Lions call in that category. The overs on 10.5 that everyone loved graded out between 20 and 60 accuracy.

Week 1 paid nothing, even though everyone was right

Detroit opened by beating New Orleans 31-30 at home. Every straight-up pick we tracked — Albert Breer, Conor Orr, Kirk Herbstreit, Pete Prisco, a dozen more — took the Lions and scored a clean 100. None of them gained a thing: the baseline our grading measures against also picked Detroit, so a correct pick there is worth zero credit.

The score predictions are where the week actually separated people, and it separated them downward. Everyone expected a comfortable win in a game decided by one point. Prisco's Lions 33-21 landed at 73.81 accuracy and cost him 45 points against the baseline; Ross Jackson's 27-20 came in at 85.71. The closest call belonged to Matt Dery at 24-20 (92.86). Prisco's line — "The Saints won't keep up. Lions big" — was the tone of the whole slate.

Detroit's beat-level calls have been shakier. Emmett Matasovsky suggested Christian Izien might be pressed into a starting safety job in Week 1 with Brian Branch and Kerby Joseph rehabbing; Izien did not take a snap, and the call scored zero. Roster projections from Christian Booher and Dery both put Tom Kennedy on the practice squad — he made the 53 instead, another pair of zeroes.

Where Lions punditry is actually good

Mock drafts. Of the club's 57 answered draft-pick calls, accuracy averages 64.2 and the group beats the naive benchmark by 36.5 — the only Detroit category that clears the bar by a wide margin. The offensive tackle calls drove it (31 answered, 68.9 average accuracy), and Detroit did take Clemson tackle Blake Miller at No. 17.

Award picks are the opposite extreme: 16 answered, zero right. Jahmyr Gibbs for Offensive Player of the Year, Aidan Hutchinson for Defensive Player of the Year and Defensive Rookie of the Year, Penei Sewell for the protector award — all whiffed. Eric Williams has Gibbs and Hutchinson atop those two ballots again this week.

Among voices with at least five answered Detroit calls, the accuracy leaders are Daniel Jeremiah (69.6 on five calls, so a lean rather than a record) and Rich Hribar (68.0 on six). Eisen is the most prolific at 26 answered calls and 18.7 accuracy, though his skill number sits essentially level with the baseline — the misses were on picks nobody else got right either.

Thursday night: the field splits

For Bills-Lions, Breech has Buffalo 38-31 and calls it "a possible SUPER BOWL PREVIEW"; Jared Dubin's CBS Sports preview has Buffalo 35-31 and expects Larry Borom to start at tackle; Joe Marino takes Buffalo and calls for 600-plus combined passing yards from Jared Goff and Josh Allen. On the other side, a CBS Sports column listing five favorites on upset alert effectively backs Detroit as a +4.5 underdog, and a co-host on Cowherd's show took the Lions outright.

Fantasy is split on the same game. Derek Brown wants Goff started and both Sam LaPorta and Jameson Williams faded; Mike Fanelli also calls LaPorta a landmine; Andrew Erickson and a FantasyPros roundtable are buying Williams low. Detroit's depth-chart and sleeper talk is by far the club's largest pile of takes — 154 depth-chart calls, 60 sleeper calls — and almost none of it has been settled yet.

The league day in brief

577 calls were answered across the league in the past week — 353 game outcome picks, 105 score predictions, 48 depth-chart calls — against 380 new ones filed.

The cleanest work was in depth charts, where the quarterback questions got settled: Hribar on Malik Willis as a floor-based fantasy QB2 with Kirk Cousins starting for Las Vegas, Warren Sharp insisting rookie No. 1 pick Fernando Mendoza wouldn't start Week 1 or Week 2, and Greg Auman calling Willis Miami's starter all graded perfect. The worst of the week ran the same direction: an unsigned CBS Sports Week 2 odds roundup said Drew Lock would likely start for Seattle with Sam Darnold hurt, and scored zero.

Pat Fitzmaurice still leads the board at 47.24 with 58.03 accuracy over 168 answered calls, with Hribar second (42.71, 77.69 accuracy) and Bucky Brooks third. Full standings on the leaderboard.