Eagles Punditry Check: A Bears Blowout Burned Every Caller, Jeff Kerr's Record Still Holds | MissedTakes Daily
Philadelphia's Week 3 Monday-nighter in Chicago is the cleanest example this season of a whole field getting the same thing wrong. We've tracked at least 18 separate graded calls backing the Eagles to beat the Bears — seven straight game-winner picks and eleven final-score projections, spread across more than a week of previews. Chicago won 27-7. Every single one of those calls came back negative.
The seven outright winner picks — Darius Butler, Ty Schmit, Carmen Vitali, Steven Ruiz, Nate Tice, Richard Sherman and Carter Bahns among them — scored the worst grade the site hands out: 0 accuracy and a −189 skill mark, meaning they did worse than simply taking the team without home-field, which is what that baseline measures. The score predictions fared only marginally better. Pete Prisco and Jared Dubin both called it twice (27-13 and 23-10) and landed around 33-36% accuracy; Tyler Sullivan and John Breech, further off on the final margin, scored as low as 16.7% and 19%. Nobody who touched this game beat the baseline.
It's worth setting that against the one other game we have full data for. In Week 2, Philadelphia won a tight one in Nashville, 24-20 — a spot where Tennessee was the "naive" favorite. Pundits who correctly backed the Eagles there, including John Middlekauff and Jeff Kerr, were rewarded with a perfect accuracy mark and a +194 skill swing, because picking against the expected side and being right is exactly what the scoring is built to reward. Seth Walder picked the right team but overshot the final margin by 17 points and still banked a solidly positive skill score (+39.34) for getting the outcome right. Two games, same team, completely different verdicts on the people calling them.
Where the Eagles record actually holds up
Zoomed out across everything we've graded on Philadelphia this season, roster-spot and depth-chart calls are the strongest category by far — 94% accuracy across 184 graded calls, with a healthy average skill bump of +13.1. Game-outcome picks overall sit at 78.5% accuracy and a strong +43.7 average skill despite the Bears wreck, meaning the rest of the sample has been good enough to carry it. Score predictions (59.8% accuracy) and conference-champion calls (26.9%) are weaker — the latter pulled down by a run of 2025 preseason picks that had Philadelphia repeating as conference champion, none of which came through.
By position, linebacker calls have been reliable (90% accuracy across 42 graded, likely reflecting steady coverage of the Baun-Campbell-Trotter group), and offensive-line calls have been sharp too (83.5% at tackle, 88.7% at guard). Quarterback calls are the soft spot — just 57% accuracy and a skill score of −9.73, meaning the field's Jalen Hurts-related predictions have, on balance, been worse than a coin flip against the baseline.
On individual voices, Jeff Kerr is the volume leader on this club by a wide margin — 358 tracked Eagles calls, 181 graded, 94.5% accuracy and a +16.6 average skill score, which is a genuinely strong record at that sample size (even though his call that Zach Ertz would need a practice-squad elevation to play against Chicago missed badly). Colin Cowherd is a useful contrast: 70.8% accuracy on 22 graded Eagles calls sounds fine until you see his average skill score is −11.38, meaning his calls tend to be the obvious ones — right more often than not, but not adding anything beyond what you'd guess anyway. On smaller samples, LaVar Arrington's six graded Eagles calls have gone well (83.3% accuracy, +88.83 skill), and Chad Ochocinco Johnson's six have gone badly (1.4% accuracy, −19.45 skill) — both too thin to call a pattern, but worth watching as more calls land.
Where pundits disagree right now
With Philadelphia at 2-1, this year's win-total calls span a real range: John Middlekauff has them at 9-10 wins on a defense he thinks will carry the team, while Nick Wright has gone as high as 13-4 and an NFC East title in calls made twice before the season. In between, Jeff Kerr (12-5), Gregg Rosenthal (11+) and John Breech (two separate calls, 9-8 and 10-7) fill out a genuinely split field — this is one to watch as the season answers it.
The league day in brief
Across the site, 2,974 takes were graded over the last seven days, dominated by mock draft picks (1,904 of them) with game outcomes, score predictions and roster-spot calls filling out the rest. The best calls graded this week included a clean roster-spot hit for River Wells on Tampa Bay's quarterback room and a string of trade-and-signing calls from Bryan DeArdo that landed exactly as described. The worst belonged to a run of PFF preseason-snap-count projections from Nathan Jahnke that missed across multiple teams' depth charts. Atop the overall leaderboard, DeArdo leads on MissedTakes Score with Lance Zierlein and Joe Marino close behind — see the full leaderboard for where everyone else stands.