Los Angeles Rams: Pundits Missed the Opener Together, Then Undersold the Giants Blowout | MissedTakes Daily
The Los Angeles Rams sit 1-1, and the record undersells how strange the two weeks that got them there have been for the people paid to forecast them.
In Week 1, against the 49ers in Australia, every game-outcome call we've tracked on that matchup — 14 of them, from Richard Sherman to Rich Eisen's NFL Network round table to CBS Sports' straight-up picks panel — took the Rams. San Francisco won 27-7. Nobody we tracked saw it coming.
Week 2 corrected hard, maybe too hard. Every pick we've graded on the Giants game also took the Rams, and this time they were right: Los Angeles won 28-6. But the margin caught pundits flat. Jared Dubin offered two conditional scores depending on whether Puka Nacua played — "Rams 27, Giants 17" if he suited up, "Rams 17, Giants 16" if he sat — and even the better of those two (graded 71% accurate) predicted a 10-point win in a game that turned into a 22-point rout. John Breech's "Rams 27-24" call read the same way: right team, nowhere near the actual gap. Once burned by the 49ers, the field swung to "close win" instead of "blowout," and the Rams delivered the blowout.
Nacua's health is the thread connecting both weeks and still an open question. Blaine Grisak, the most prolific Rams forecaster we track, called him trending toward sitting out the Giants game; Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport both hedged the same way in real time. Now, heading into Week 3 against Denver, a fresh injury roundup has him trending out again, calling the situation "gradually worsening." The season hasn't answered this one yet.
Grisak is worth a closer look on his own. He's filed 83 Rams-related predictions, more than anyone else we track, and 50 have been graded at a 98% accuracy rate. But nearly all of them are roster-spot and availability calls — Puka Nacua making the 53-man roster, a depth linebacker being active — the kind of call a naive guess mostly gets right too. His average edge over that naive baseline on those calls is just 12 points. High volume, high accuracy, low degree of difficulty is a fair summary of his record so far.
Contrast that with the outlets and voices making game picks. Rich Eisen and Colin Cowherd have both been solidly above-average on Rams game outcomes (69% and 65% accuracy across their graded calls), while Nick Wright and the locked-on Rams podcast have struggled (51% and 24% accuracy, though the podcast's sample is only 11 graded calls — too thin to hang much on). Kyle Crabbs' 27% accuracy on his Rams calls is similarly light, at 10 graded takes.
Zoom out to prediction type and a pattern holds across the board: the closer the call, the better pundits do. Game-outcome picks on the Rams have graded out at 70% accuracy across 122 graded calls. Roster-spot calls are even higher, for the reasons above. But the bigger swings have been brutal — division-winner picks on the Rams are 11% accurate across 18 graded calls, and every graded Super Bowl pick on them (17 of them) has missed. By position, quarterback calls have been the most trustworthy (79% accuracy, 40 graded, largely built on Matthew Stafford's season) and defensive end calls the least (38%, 16 graded).
One more Rams-adjacent note: of the 100 MVP ballots we tracked for the 2025 season, Stafford led the field with 26 picks and went on to actually win it — one of this year's cleaner consensus calls.
The league in brief
The site graded 1,768 takes over the past week, most of them (1,477) roster-spot calls from final-53 projections around the league. The cleanest hits came from calls like Nathan Jahnke's PFF preseason recap and Patricia Traina's Giants roster breakdown, both graded a perfect 100. The messiest included Randy Gurzi's full Bills roster projection, which graded to zero. On the win-total side, the Chiefs were the field's biggest 2025 miss, with the collective call landing 6.3 wins off the eventual total.
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