Dolphins Punditry Check: A Week 1 Pile-On That Lost Everyone Money, and a Roster Record That Holds Up | MissedTakes Daily
Six different picks. One game. Zero winners.
Ahead of Miami's Week 1 trip to Las Vegas, Chad Millman took the Dolphins outright on the money line — twice, in two separate columns. Simon Hunter liked them as a bet. Jason McIntyre picked them twice more, reasoning "only because Kirk Cousins is starting." An unnamed co-host on ESPN Houston's *John and Lance* penciled the game in as one of Miami's four wins on the season. The Raiders won 13-27. Every one of those calls graded to zero accuracy and a skill score of -200 — worse than simply picking the favorite, which is the bar the site's naive baseline sets.
That result is part of a broader pattern in how pundits have called Dolphins games specifically: of 17 graded Game Outcome Picks on Miami, the average accuracy is 23.5 and the average skill score is -135.65, deeply negative. That's a small sample, but a consistent one — pundits have wanted to like this team on the board more than the results have rewarded.
Where the record says trust the room
Roster-spot calls are a different story. Of 87 graded Dolphins roster projections, 94.3% have hit, with an average skill score of +55.17 — comfortably positive. Most of that volume belongs to Alain Poupart, whose tiered 53-man breakdowns (locks, borderline locks, cuts) account for the bulk of the team's tracked roster coverage: 83 graded calls, 93.1% accuracy, average skill of +49.6. He didn't just get the obvious names right — he flagged Michael Taaffe and Chris Bell as roster locks when the naive expectation was that neither had a spot coming, and both calls graded out at the maximum +200 skill score.
Depth-chart calls follow the same shape: 81.1% accuracy across 11 graded takes, including Diante Lee's August call that Malik Willis would be the Week 1 starter — a call worth +200 in skill, since the naive expectation had someone else in the job.
Where it gets shakier
Mock-draft calls involving Dolphins prospects are more middling: 110 graded, 59.5% average accuracy. Individually, the tracked names split hard. Jaime Eisner's Dolphins-focused mock has graded at just 30% accuracy across 24 calls, and Kyle Crabbs sits at 36.5% over 12 — both dragged down by mock picks (Nyck Harbor, Sawyer Robertson, Logan Fano among them) who simply went undrafted. On the other side, Nick Wright has been sharper on Miami-adjacent positional order calls than most, and his call that a cornerback would go No. 1 among corners in the 2026 class landed with an 87.36 skill score.
Season win totals are the thinnest slice — 31 calls, only six graded. The one clean read from that group: Brady Quinn's 2025 forecast of seven Dolphins wins matched the actual 7-10 finish almost exactly (accuracy 100, skill +50). It's worth keeping in mind now that John Breech has been running an "0-17 watch" on Miami in three straight columns this September — a bold call the season hasn't settled yet.
The league day in brief
Across the site this week: 1,769 takes were graded and 331 new ones were logged. The best-graded calls were all Roster Spot projections that nailed 53-man rosters outright — Nathan Jahnke's preseason usage reads and Patricia Traina's Giants roster call among them — while the worst-graded batch included Randy Gurzi's full Bills roster projection, which missed across the board.
On the leaderboard, Lance Zierlein holds the top overall spot (a 47.39 MissedTakes Score on 43 graded calls), just ahead of Pat Fitzmaurice and Joe Marino, whose 77.71% accuracy across 168 graded calls is the best big-sample number in the current top ten. Kansas City remains the field's biggest 2025 win-total miss in either direction (the field's collective call was off by 6.3 wins), while New England and Seattle were each undersold by five wins.
See the full leaderboard for where every tracked pundit stands.