# Dolphins Punditry Check: A Week 1 Pile-On That Lost Everyone Money, and a Roster Record That Holds Up | MissedTakes Daily

*Published 2026-09-27 — MissedTakes*

Six different picks. One game. Zero winners.

Ahead of Miami's Week 1 trip to Las Vegas, [Chad Millman](/pundits/chad-millman) took the Dolphins outright on the money line — twice, in two separate columns. [Simon Hunter](/pundits/simon-hunter) liked them as a bet. [Jason McIntyre](/pundits/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](/pundits/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](/pundits/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.

![Dolphins Punditry by Prediction Type](/posts/visuals/1ee7b2ce-8c68-4cb4-9953-6a37db758e91.png)

### 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](/pundits/jaime-eisner)'s Dolphins-focused mock has graded at just 30% accuracy across 24 calls, and [Kyle Crabbs](/pundits/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](/pundits/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](/pundits/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](/pundits/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](/pundits/nathan-jahnke)'s preseason usage reads and [Patricia Traina](/pundits/patricia-traina)'s Giants roster call among them — while the worst-graded batch included [Randy Gurzi](/pundits/randy-gurzi)'s full Bills roster projection, which missed across the board.

On the leaderboard, [Lance Zierlein](/pundits/lance-zierlein) holds the top overall spot (a 47.39 MissedTakes Score on 43 graded calls), just ahead of [Pat Fitzmaurice](/pundits/pat-fitzmaurice) and [Joe Marino](/pundits/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](/leaderboard) for where every tracked pundit stands.