49ers Punditry Check: Playoff Calls Nail It, Division-Winner Calls Keep Missing | MissedTakes Daily

San Francisco is 3-0, and the room believes it. Ahead of Sunday's trip to Denver, 18 of the 25 pundits who've taken a side picked the 49ers to move to 4-0, against seven for the Broncos — and the median predicted margin for San Francisco sits at three points. Chris Simms, Jared Dubin and John Breech all have the Niners winning by a touchdown or more; only Tyler Sullivan among the dissenters has a specific score, Broncos 23-21.

The question this site exists to answer isn't who's on the bandwagon — it's whether the bandwagon has earned the right to be believed. We've graded 816 San Francisco-specific calls to date, and the picture is lopsided in an interesting way: the room is good at seeing the 49ers as a quality team, and bad at predicting exactly how that quality translates into hardware.

Graded playoff-berth calls on San Francisco have hit at 91.3% accuracy across 23 decisions — about as close to a sure thing as this site tracks. Game-outcome picks (54 graded) and score predictions (17 graded) have also cleared 79%. But division-winner calls on the 49ers have been a disaster: 9.1% accuracy across 11 graded picks. Jason McIntyre, John Middlekauff, Chris Brockman and others all picked San Francisco to win the NFC West outright in 2025 — and each one was wrong, because the 49ers made the playoffs as a wild card, not a division champion. Pundits keep correctly clocking this team as good enough to make the postseason while missing the specific shape of how it gets there.

Mock-draft calls on 49ers picks sit in the middle (59.8% accuracy, 65 graded), and roster-spot projections undercut their own decent accuracy rate (69.7%) with a below-zero skill score (-12.12) — meaning they're barely beating the naive assumption that whoever made last year's roster makes this one too. Tom Jensen is the clearest example: his preseason 53-man projection for San Francisco whiffed on tight ends Brayden Willis and Luke Farrell, both graded zero accuracy with the maximum penalty, and his overall 49ers record now sits at 33.3% accuracy on 12 graded calls. Season win-total calls, by contrast, have graded out well (68.3% accuracy, +117.2 skill) — Brady Quinn called 12-5 outright and nailed it, while Nick Wright's 7-win call on the same team scored zero.

The most trustworthy specific voice on this club, by volume, is Brian Peacock: 54 graded 49ers calls at 83.2% accuracy, covering everything from roster-spot projections to mock-draft slots. Richard Sherman and Cynthia Frelund have smaller but sharper samples — six and five graded calls, both above 82% accuracy — while Nick Winkler's preseason 49ers schedule sweep (14 picks, five graded so far) is a perfect 100%. Treat all of these as leans rather than verdicts given the sample sizes, but Peacock's is large enough to mean something.

The league day in brief

We graded 2,442 takes across the league in the last seven days, with mock-draft resolutions still the bulk of the volume as 2026 rookie seasons settle in.

The best calls of the stretch were roster-spot sweeps that nailed entire position groups — John Shipley on the Jaguars' practice squad, Patricia Traina on the Giants' 53-man roster, Ralph Ventre and Randy Gurzi on the Bills. The worst came from the same genre in reverse — Gurzi's Seahawks free-agency guesses and a PFF depth-chart sweep from Nathan Jahnke both graded to zero.

On season win totals, the field's biggest 2025 misses ran in both directions: the Chiefs' projected win total came in 6.3 wins too high, while New England and Seattle were each underestimated by 5 wins. Washington and Las Vegas were overestimated by roughly 4.6 to 4.8 wins. On awards, the MVP field converged hardest on Matthew Stafford, who won it with 26 of 100 ballots naming him; the Offensive Rookie of the Year field was far more scattered before Tetairoa McMillan took it with five picks.

Atop the overall leaderboard, Bryan DeArdo holds the top spot on a 71.67% accuracy mark, with Lance Zierlein and Joe Marino close behind on larger samples. The full leaderboard has the rest.