Steelers Punditry Check: Opinions Took Pittsburgh Over Cleveland, and Cleveland Won | MissedTakes Daily
Thursday night in Cleveland was supposed to be an easy one for Pittsburgh backers. Thirteen of the seventeen pundits we tracked on the game picked the Steelers to win outright, against just four who took the Browns. Cleveland won, 27-24.
Every straight-up Steelers pick — Nick Wright ("I like the Steelers tonight. I almost had them in place of the Vikings as my survivor pick"), Pat McAfee, Chuck Pagano, AJ Hawk and the rest — scored a flat zero, worse than simply defaulting to the home team, which is exactly what our skill number measures. The six pundits who at least put a final score on it fared only a little better. The room's closest call belonged to John Breech, who had Cleveland winning 19-16 and was off by zero points on the margin; everyone else who took Pittsburgh landed on the wrong side of a final margin that came in at Browns by 3.
Zoom out past one bad Thursday and the pattern holds across the season: Pittsburgh's roster and depth-chart punditry has earned its keep, but picking who wins and by how much has not. Among prediction types with a real sample, Roster Spot Calls on the Steelers are hitting at 84.6% accuracy with a solidly positive skill score (+51.3 across 39 graded calls), and Mock Draft Picks tied to Pittsburgh are similarly healthy (60.2% accuracy, +33.9 skill, 46 graded). Game Outcome Picks and Score Predictions are the weak links — a 62.4% hit rate on who-wins calls still nets a negative skill score (-22.1 across 71 graded picks), because so many of those calls bet against what a simple, no-information default would have said. Score Predictions are worse still, at 49.2% accuracy and a -66.6 skill score across 15 graded calls.
By position, quarterback is where the room talks about this team most (137 Steelers takes tagged QB, 58 graded, 67.4% accuracy, +30.3 skill) — unsurprising for a team that has cycled through Aaron Rodgers, Mason Rudolph and Will Howard this year. Cornerback calls have graded out strong too (78% accuracy, +116.2 skill), though that's built on only eight graded calls, too thin to call a trend rather than a lean.
One voice stands out on name recognition alone: Jack Markowski has 11 graded Steelers calls at 100% accuracy and a +90.9 average skill score, almost entirely built on roster-cut forecasting — correctly flagging safety Robert Spears-Jennings, fullback Riley Nowakowski and returner Kaden Wetjen as 53-man locks before cutdown day, each call scoring the maximum. Gerry Dulac, the locally based reporter, graded 75% across eight Steelers calls with a modest positive skill score (+21.1). Nick Wright's Steelers record is the shakiest among pundits with a real sample — 38.9% accuracy and a -53.4 skill score across 15 graded calls, the Browns pick among them.
Pittsburgh sits at 2-2 after the loss. Bill Simmons's recent read — "they're fine... eight, nine, nine and eight, somewhere around there" — is the kind of hedge this site will be able to grade once the season plays out further.
The league day in brief
The site graded 2,427 takes over the past seven days, the bulk of them mock draft picks (1,904) as draft coverage ramps up, with 198 game-outcome calls and 144 score predictions mixed in. The best call of the stretch belonged to John Shipley, who nailed a full Jaguars practice squad projection for 100% accuracy; the roughest belonged to a group of roster-spot misses, including Tom Jensen's 49ers cutdown projection, which graded to zero. Full movement, including anyone chasing Bryan DeArdo and Lance Zierlein at the top, is on the leaderboard.