Commanders Punditry Check: Division and Playoff Calls Busted at Zero, Roster Projections Nearly Perfect | MissedTakes Daily
Washington Commanders punditry splits into two completely different report cards depending on what's being predicted. Ask pundits who makes the 53-man roster or where a prospect lands in a mock draft, and they've been excellent. Ask them how good the team actually is, and the 2025 season exposed nearly everyone.
Across the Commanders calls we've graded, Roster Spot Calls land at 98.7 accuracy and Mock Draft Picks at 56.7. Flip to anything measuring team strength, and the bottom falls out: Game Outcome Picks average 30.3 accuracy, Season Win Totals 17.8, Playoff Picks 14.3, and Division Winner calls a flat zero.
That last line isn't a typo. Ten different graded calls backed Washington to win the NFC East last season — none hit. Fourteen graded calls had Washington reaching the 2025 playoffs; two did. The field's win-total consensus called for roughly 10-to-11 wins (Nick Wright had 11, Aaron Schatz 10.6, Brady Quinn 10), and Washington finished with 5, a miss of 4.8 wins averaged across eight qualifying calls. Nationally, that miss ranked among the six largest team misses we tracked for the 2025 season, in the company of Kansas City, New England, Seattle, Denver and Las Vegas.
The weak spot carried into this season's opener. Three pundits we've tracked — Eric Mangini, Henry Brown and David Harrison — each picked Washington to beat Philadelphia in Week 1, and each graded zero (skill −200) when the Eagles won 24-22. It's the same pattern as 2025: a readiness to bet on Washington's upside that the scoreboard hasn't been honoring.
Not every recent call has gone that way. Jeremy Pargo 's Week 4 score projection — Commanders 24-20 — at least got the winner right; Washington actually won 30-13, so the call graded a modest 19.05 accuracy for undershooting the margin badly rather than missing the game entirely.
On trust: among pundits with real sample size here, Philip Hughes is 49-for-49 on graded Commanders calls (100 accuracy), almost entirely roster and depth-chart projections — the easiest terrain to get right. Bucky Brooks, who named Stefon Diggs to Washington before it happened, sits at 90.4 accuracy on six graded Commanders calls. Harrison has logged far more Commanders material than anyone else on the site — 174 graded calls — and lands at a more human 73 accuracy: strong on mock drafts and roster projections, shaky on game picks. At the other end, Nick Wright (12 graded calls, 27.7 accuracy) and Colin Cowherd (10 graded calls, 30.2 accuracy) built their Commanders records on exactly the preseason contender calls — division winner, playoff berth, conference-title talk — that blew up.
The one Commanders storyline with no real disagreement right now is health. Over the past week, reporters including Tom Pelissero, Mike Florio and Rich Hribar all converged on the same call: Jayden Daniels, who dislocated his elbow against Dallas in Week 2, would be back for Sunday's game against the Giants. The newest wrinkle is that both Terry McLaurin and Stefon Diggs sat out practice a second straight day with hamstring issues heading into that game.
The league's day in brief
The site graded 567 takes across the league in the past week, most of them Score Predictions (282) and Game Outcome Picks (185). Clarence Hill's full-slate Cowboys outcome card graded perfectly, as did Nick Faria's Jets roster breakdown and Adam Carlson's call on three Vikings trade candidates. On the other end, Carter Bahns' cut-candidates list and two separate Ross Jackson roster projections for the Saints all graded zero.
Atop the overall leaderboard, Lance Zierlein holds the top spot (score 51.12, 67.54 accuracy on 44 graded calls), with Bryan DeArdo and Bill Huber close behind. See the full leaderboard for where everyone else stands.