New York Jets Punditry Check: Playoff Calls Are 0-for-5, and the Breece Hall Bust Predictions Missed Too | MissedTakes Daily
We've tracked 539 takes about the Jets, and the cleanest verdict in the bunch has nothing to do with this season: every graded prediction that the Jets would make the playoffs has missed. Five calls across 2023, 2024 and 2025 — from Ryan Reynolds, an AI show co-host, Marcus Mosher and Gregg Rosenthal — all graded at or near the floor the site's model hands out (an average score of -198.8 out of a possible 200, as close to the worst mark as it gets). Nick Faria has a new one on the board for 2026, tying the Jets' playoff hopes to a healthy offensive line, but the season hasn't settled it yet.
The team's game-by-game record isn't much better, just noisier. Across 34 graded game-outcome calls, the average accuracy is 32.4 and the average skill score is actually negative (-4.24) — meaning, as a group, people calling Jets games have done slightly worse than a simple baseline pick. That average hides a real split: in Weeks 1 and 2, Albert Breer, Bryan DeArdo, Gregg Rosenthal and Judah Fortgang all correctly called the Jets to beat Tennessee and Green Bay, each earning the model's best possible score. But the confidence didn't last — Kevin Wildes picked the Jets to beat Detroit straight up in Week 4 and was blown out by the call (24-31, a -189 score), and Rich Eisen's own aside about the Jets being "definitely a better team" than New England hasn't been enough to keep the Patriots winless either. Ralph Vacchiano is the newest voice in the queue, flagging a "winnable stretch" — Cleveland, at New England, Miami, Las Vegas — that hasn't been graded yet.
Where the Jets' punditry actually holds up is the draft. Mock-draft calls on New York's picks average 69.5 accuracy and a solidly positive +37.68 skill score across 128 graded picks — well above the team's game-outcome and playoff numbers. The consensus around Texas Tech edge rusher David Bailey going second overall in 2026 was essentially unanimous and correct: Daniel Jeremiah, Mel Kiper, Todd McShay, Field Yates and Keith Sanchez all called it, and it graded out as a hit for every one of them. The same pattern held in 2025 with Armand Membou going seventh. Among pundits with at least five graded Jets calls, Jeremiah's 83.5 accuracy on this team and Kiper's 73.6 stand out; Dylan O'Brien's game-by-game season predictions, by contrast, graded at just 16.7 accuracy and a -104.17 skill score — he had the Jets going 11-6 in 2025; they won three games.
By position, the Jets' linebacker and edge calls have been the most reliable thing pundits have said about this roster — 90.8 accuracy and +38.23 skill across 52 graded calls, Bailey's selection doing a lot of that lifting. Running back is the opposite story: 32.8 accuracy and a brutal -79.3 average skill score across 16 graded calls, driven by two separate 2025 preseason "bust" predictions on Breece Hall that both missed — he finished right where his price said he would, RB18. The pundits calling him a lock to stay the Jets' lead back were right; the ones betting he'd fall apart were wrong. That tension matters again right now: Hall is dealing with a quad injury this week, and Derek Brown's new call has Braelon Allen as the lead back in his place — a call that hasn't been graded yet.
The league's day in brief
We graded 2,382 takes in the last week, and mock-draft calls made up the overwhelming share of them (1,904 of that total), with game-outcome and score predictions a distant second and third. The best of the week came from a mixed bag — John Middlekauff's Patriots-and-Colts playoff call and a run of Bryan DeArdo trade-and-signing predictions all scored perfectly — while the worst were uniformly preseason depth-chart guesses, including two separate Nathan Jahnke calls that whiffed on roster battles from Pittsburgh to New Orleans.
On the leaderboard, Bryan DeArdo currently sits first overall (a 48.39 skill score on 71.67 accuracy), though with only 16 graded takes that's a limited sample; Ross Jackson is the only top-ten pundit with an established track record, at 231 graded calls. The 2025 MVP ballot is a reminder of how spread out award predictions can be — Matthew Stafford won it while drawing just 26 of 100 picks, with Drake Maye (14) and Baker Mayfield (8) the next-most-popular wrong answers. Full standings are on the leaderboard.