Seahawks Punditry Check: The Room Got Burned on Washington, Then Got the Chargers Almost Perfectly Right | MissedTakes Daily
Coming off a Super Bowl title, the Seahawks got almost everyone's benefit of the doubt in Week 3 — and almost everyone paid for it. Of the 44 pundits we tracked picking that game, 43 took Seattle to beat Washington. Seattle lost, 33-31. Every one of those picks graded to zero accuracy with a skill score of -189, worse than simply defaulting to the home team, which is exactly what that baseline measures. Albert Breer, Mitch Goldich, Jamey Eisenberg and Seth Wickersham all filed the identical one-line call — "Seahawks" — and all four took the identical hit.
It didn't last. In Week 4, the room piled onto Seattle again (21 of 22 picked the Seahawks over the Chargers), and this time the result backed them up: Seattle won 30-23, and the meeting graded out at 92 mean accuracy, one of the cleaner weeks of score-calling anywhere on the site this season. Eric Moody missed the margin by nothing at all (Seahawks 28-21 predicted, 30-23 actual), and most of the field landed within a few points.
Beyond the two biggest games, the shape of Seattle's punditry is uneven by position. Wide receiver calls — mostly about Jaxon Smith-Njigba's start — have graded well (67% accuracy, 32 graded calls). Running back calls are the most frequent subject (111 takes) but the least reliable (48% accuracy), which tracks with how much the backfield has churned — Jadarian Price hurt, Zach Charbonnet still working back, George Holani and Emanuel Wilson trading first-start duty, with several of those depth-chart calls from this past week still unresolved because the season hasn't settled them yet. Quarterback calls on this club have actually graded worse than a coin flip would (48.4% accuracy, and a skill score of -26.78 — below the naive baseline). The single clearest example: Chris Roling's call that a Sam Darnold hip injury would hand the job to Drew Lock graded to zero. Roster and signing calls haven't fared much better — Randy Gurzi's offseason list of free agents Seattle might add (Donovan Wilson, Kevin Zeitler, Kareem Hunt) also graded to zero.
Who's actually earned trust here
Among pundits with a real sample of graded Seahawks calls, the gap is wide. Rich Eisen has been the most reliable voice on this club (91.4% accuracy across 14 graded calls), with Nick Wright (82.3%, 23 graded) and Colin Cowherd (65%, 28 graded) carrying the heaviest volume. Worth noting: Wright's overall number includes that same Week 3 Washington call, where he predicted a 21-point Seattle win and it cost him -173 in skill — proof that a good season-long batting average can still hide a brutal single week.
One more data point worth filing away: entering 2025, the field's win-total calls for Seattle missed by 5 wins on average across seven tracked calls — on the low side, ahead of a season that ended in a championship. It's a reminder that skepticism about this roster has been a running theme in Seahawks punditry for more than a year now, with mixed results.
The rest of the league, briefly
We graded 2,623 takes across the sport in the last seven days, with mock draft picks still the heaviest category by far (1,903 of them) as evaluators look ahead to next spring. Among single-game calls, Kevin Wildes' full slate of picks — including the Seahawks as the NFC's No. 1 seed — graded to a perfect 100. On the other end, a pair of New Orleans roster projections from Ross Jackson both missed entirely, as did a Rich Eisen Show caller's Panthers prediction. In award tracking, Matthew Stafford was the pundit favorite for MVP and won it, taking 26 of 100 ballot picks we logged. Atop the overall leaderboard, Lance Zierlein holds the top spot (67.54 accuracy, though still a limited sample), followed by Bryan DeArdo and Bill Huber — the full leaderboard has the rest.