Jaguars Punditry Check: A Near-Unanimous Field Called Denver Wrong, and Only a Few Voices Have Earned Trust on This Team | MissedTakes Daily
Jacksonville lost at Denver in Week 2, 20-13. You wouldn't have guessed it from the takes we tracked going in.
Every outright winner pick we graded on that game — six of them — had Jacksonville beating the Broncos straight up. Nick Wright made the call three separate times across three appearances, each time repeating that "the Jags are going to win this game outright." Danny Parkins, Chris Broussard and Nick Shook all backed the same side. Every one of those six calls graded to zero accuracy, each carrying a skill score of -194 — worse than simply defaulting to the home team, which is exactly what that baseline measures.
The score-prediction crowd was just as lopsided. Eight separate score picks — from Carter Bahns, James Campbell, Erick Trickel, Dylan Von Arx, Nick Kendell and Pete Prisco, who published the same 23-20 Jaguars pick three times across three columns — all had Jacksonville winning. Those calls landed in the 33-43 accuracy range once graded, closer misses than the outright picks but misses on the only thing that mattered: who won.
That one game is the loudest signal in an otherwise mixed record on Jacksonville. Zoom out to every type of call we've graded on the Jaguars, and the shape gets more interesting. Preseason-style playoff and division-outlook calls on this team have graded out well — 92.9% accuracy on the playoff-berth calls we've settled and 85.7% on division-winner calls, both well ahead of naive guessing, consistent with a team that went 13-4 and made the playoffs last season. But the closer punditry gets to weekly outcomes, the worse it does against a naive baseline: game-outcome calls average 61.4% accuracy but a *negative* skill score (-27.13), and score predictions average 48.9% accuracy with an even worse skill number (-37.2). In plain terms, pundits have been calling Jacksonville games competently by raw hit rate, but no better — and often worse — than just picking the favorite would have done. Award picks involving Jaguars players have been shut out entirely: six graded calls, zero right, including bets on Travis Hunter for Offensive Rookie of the Year that didn't come through.
Position-level, the gap is stark. Calls about Jacksonville's defensive tackles have graded well (86.8% accuracy), and quarterback calls have been solid too (70.8%, with a strong skill bump). But cornerback calls have been rough (22.3%) and wide receiver calls worse still (27.8% on just 10 graded so far, out of 82 made) — exactly the group at the center of the newest chatter, with multiple outlets now arguing Parker Washington has passed the incumbents as Jacksonville's lead target.
Who's actually earned the benefit of the doubt
Filtering to pundits with at least five graded Jacksonville calls, the gap between voices is wide. Rich Eisen has been the standout, at 93.8% accuracy on 11 graded Jaguars calls. Brady Quinn (87.2% on five) and Jason McIntyre (81.4% on five) have also been sharp, though those are thin samples worth treating as leans rather than track records. On the other end, JP Acosta (22.2% on six) and Pat Fitzmaurice (28.3% on five) have struggled specifically on this team. Nick Wright's Jaguars-specific mark sits at 45.7% — respectable in the aggregate, but that number is doing a lot of work to absorb this week's clean sweep of misses on Denver. John Shipley has published more Jaguars coverage than anyone we track — over 100 calls — but only six have graded so far, so his ledger on this team is still mostly unwritten.
The rest of the day
Across the league, we graded 635 takes over the last seven days and logged 379 new ones. The best calls of the week ranged from Bradley Locker's roster-bubble list to Bill Huber's early read on the Packers; the worst included a Fitzmaurice waiver-wire column and a David Harrison path to 8-plus wins for Washington that missed every game it named. Season win-total misses from last year are still the largest hole in the record — Kansas City's field undershot by 6.3 wins, while New England, Seattle and Denver's fields all overshot by 5. None of that involves Jacksonville directly, but it's the same pattern showing up here in miniature: punditry does better projecting a team's overall shape than it does calling its games one by one. See the full leaderboard for where everyone stands.