# Saints Punditry Check: The Field Picked New Orleans Over Las Vegas, and Every One of Them Was Wrong | MissedTakes Daily

*Published 2026-10-01 — MissedTakes*

New Orleans is 1-2, and its clearest data point this week is a game almost nobody saw coming: heading into Week 3, at least ten pundits who put an exact score on the Saints-Raiders game had New Orleans winning. Las Vegas won, 35-27.

The group wasn't sloppy about it, either. [Chris Simms](/pundits/chris-simms) had Saints 26-17. [Pete Prisco](/pundits/pete-prisco) and [Lance Moore](/pundits/lance-moore) both had New Orleans by three. [Darrion Gray](/pundits/darrion-gray), [John Hendricks](/pundits/john-hendricks), [Tyler Sullivan](/pundits/tyler-sullivan), [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech), [Ross Jackson](/pundits/ross-jackson) and [Nick Wright](/pundits/nick-wright) all called it the same way. Because our score-prediction grading gives partial credit for how close a guess lands even when the winner is wrong, several of them still scored in the 40s and high-30s out of 100 — better than a coin flip's worth of credit for reading the game as close, just backing the wrong side. The two pundits who made it a straight winner pick instead of a scored guess, [Dan Beyer](/pundits/dan-beyer) ("I don't see the Raiders as still being unbeaten") and [Richard Sherman](/pundits/richard-sherman) ("Give me the Saints by three"), took the fuller hit: zero.

![Week 3: everyone picked the Saints over the Raiders](/posts/visuals/b60417e1-af64-43e9-bf7f-4c3fd41b0de7.png)

### Whose Saints coverage has actually earned trust

Across everything we've tracked on this club — 855 tracked calls in all — mock draft speculation and roster-spot judgments make up the bulk of the volume, while the calls about this year's actual results (game outcomes, win totals) are thinner and rockier. Season win-total calls on the Saints are averaging worse than a naive guess would (a skill score of -32.89 on the seven graded so far), and straight game-outcome picks are hitting only 22.2% of the time.

The most prolific voice on this club by far is Ross Jackson, who has an established track record site-wide (231 graded calls, 66.56% accuracy, a positive skill score of 33.23) and whose work skews heavily toward New Orleans — 176 of those graded calls are Saints-specific. That volume and his above-replacement skill number make him the closest thing to a reliable Saints watcher we track.

Contrast that with [Doug Joubert](/pundits/doug-joubert), who has written almost exclusively about Saints roster decisions (44 graded calls, all roster-spot). He's right about two-thirds of the time (66.67% accuracy), but his net skill score is deeply negative (-53.56) — meaning those are largely calls where assuming "nothing changes" would have already gotten the answer right, and weighed against that bar, he's currently behind it. One example: he predicted left tackle Kelvin Banks Jr. would land on injured reserve with a practice-squad tackle stepping in. It graded a flat zero.

[Kyle Crabbs](/pundits/kyle-crabbs) is a legitimately strong mock-draft voice overall (71.26% accuracy across 323 graded calls), but his specific Saints-related draft calls have been a much rockier slice — 11 graded, only 21.4% right so far. That's a small enough sample to call a lean rather than a verdict, but it's a real gap between his general reputation and his New Orleans-specific record.

### A division bet nobody can grade yet

Three pundits — Carter Bahns, Colin Cowherd and Andrew Erickson — have all backed New Orleans to win the NFC South this month, with Cowherd going as far as "they have a real roster... we picked them to win their division" and Bahns calling the schedule "favorable" enough that "the division should be theirs to lose." That's a genuinely bullish read against a team that just lost to Las Vegas at home and sits 1-2. The season hasn't answered that one yet, but it's worth watching against Ross Jackson's more measured, higher-volume record on this club.

### The league day in brief

We graded 1,842 takes across the league in the last seven days, the overwhelming majority (1,495) roster-spot calls as final 53-man decisions get settled. The week's cleanest hits included Jeff Kerr's run of exact Eagles roster projections and Steve Kubitza's call on Za'Darius Smith heading to Atlanta rather than staying in Cleveland, all scoring perfect. The week's worst included a full-season simulation from John Breech that had the Rams beating the Ravens in the Super Bowl, and Richard Sherman's opening-week sweep of score picks, both scoring the floor.

On win totals, the field's biggest 2025 misses were Kansas City (6.3 wins short of the field's collective call) and New England, Seattle and Denver (all roughly five wins over what the field expected). On awards, Matthew Stafford's MVP season split the ballot badly — he still drew the most first-place-type picks (26 of 100), well clear of Drake Maye's 14 — while Tetairoa McMillan's Offensive Rookie of the Year edged Ashton Jeanty by a single vote among ballots we tracked.

For where every pundit we track stands overall, see the [leaderboard](/leaderboard).