# Minnesota Vikings Punditry Check: Zero-for-Eight on the Big Calls, Dead-On on the Modest Ones | MissedTakes Daily

*Published 2026-09-29 — MissedTakes*

Minnesota's most-repeated story of the past week has nothing to do with wins and losses: it's quarterback Kyler Murray's health. After Murray played a total of eleven snaps across Weeks 1 and 2, at least ten different pundits — [Derek Brown](/pundits/derek-brown) (twice), [Trevor Ripley](/pundits/trevor-ripley), [Tom Pelissero](/pundits/tom-pelissero), Bryan DeArdo, Joel Corry, Garrett Podell and Bradley Locker among them — all filed the same call in the days before Week 3: Murray clears the concussion protocol and starts against Tampa Bay. It's a consensus, not a debate, and the season hasn't decided it yet.

That's about the extent of this week's drama. The graded record tells a sharper story about how Vikings punditry performs once it reaches past next Sunday.

## The bold calls keep busting

![Vikings Predictions: Accuracy by Type](/posts/visuals/67b9feb4-dfe0-4949-a236-0c19fa8c9c42.png)

Every graded Division Winner call we've tracked on the Vikings — eight of them — came back at 0% accuracy; Minnesota didn't win the NFC North. Same result on Conference Champion picks (six graded, 0%) and Super Bowl picks (three graded, 0%). Nobody embodies it better than [Jamie Erdahl](/pundits/jamie-erdahl), whose forecast — repeated across three separate columns in September 2025 — had the Vikings sweeping the division, the NFC and the Super Bowl. All eight of her graded Vikings calls came back wrong, the worst mark of any pundit we've graded at least five times on this club.

She wasn't alone in overselling the ceiling. [Rich Eisen](/pundits/rich-eisen) (11 graded Vikings calls, 52.7% accuracy) called Minnesota a "Super Bowl contender" in August 2025 and separately said Kevin O'Connell's team "can absolutely make it to the Super Bowl" that December — both zeroed out. [LaVar Arrington's](/pundits/lavar-arrington) division-winner pick busted the same way.

Compare that with the plain-vanilla calls. Season win-total projections on the Vikings graded 81.8% accurate across 11 calls — the actual was nine wins in 2025, and forecasters like [Gregg Rosenthal](/pundits/gregg-rosenthal) (over 8.5) and [Jason McIntyre](/pundits/jason-mcintyre) (nine) landed within a game. Roster-level calls have been sharper still: depth-chart projections on the Vikings run 98.7% accurate across 26 graded calls, including [Pat Fitzmaurice](/pundits/pat-fitzmaurice) correctly naming Murray the Week 1 starter and Nathan Jahnke correctly projecting Carson Wentz onto the 53.

## Quarterback trusted, cornerback less so

Vikings quarterback calls we've graded run hot — 81.9% accuracy across 29 graded calls, the best-covered position room on the roster, mostly Murray/Wentz/McCarthy roster and depth-chart chatter. Cornerback calls have been the shakiest regularly-covered spot at 42.8% across 13 graded. Ripley's own roster column this month captured both ends of it in one piece: he correctly pegged cornerback Zemaiah Vaughn to stick on the 53 (graded 100) while wrongly betting linebacker Kyle Van Noy would get bumped instead (graded 0 — worse than a coin flip).

![Vikings Coverage: The Extremes](/posts/visuals/cb13b996-f88c-47df-8ba2-a398dc5189f7.png)

Among pundits graded at least five times on the Vikings, Rosenthal's 72.7% accuracy is the best of the group, though his average skill add is thin — he's mostly matching the obvious call rather than beating it. Nick Wright sits at the other end at 38.3% accuracy with a skill delta of -52.32, meaning his Vikings calls have actually done worse than just guessing the boring outcome.

## Elsewhere in the league

It was a heavy grading week league-wide: 1,776 takes settled, the overwhelming majority (1,489) roster-spot calls as final 53-man cuts got confirmed. Blaine Grisak turned up on both ends of that ledger — a perfect projection of the Rams' 53-man roster, and, in a separate preseason column, a batch of Rams practice-squad guesses that missed entirely. Randy Gurzi's Cowboys practice-squad forecast and Brian Peacock's and Tom Jensen's 49ers roster columns landed on the week's worst list too.

On award ballots, Matthew Stafford's 2025 MVP was called by 26 of the 100 picks we tracked, while Offensive Rookie of the Year went to Tetairoa McMillan on just 5 of 29 ballots, tied with Ashton Jeanty — a field that genuinely split. And on 2025 season win totals, the field's biggest misses ran through Kansas City (projected about 6.3 wins too high across 13 calls) and undersold New England and Seattle by five wins apiece.

See where everyone stacks up on the [leaderboard](/leaderboard).