Ravens: Champion Calls All Missed, But the Weekly Picks Keep Nailing It | MissedTakes Daily

Baltimore has quietly become one of the better teams to pick on a weekly basis this season, and the record backs that up. We've tracked 765 Ravens-related calls in all, 318 of them graded, and the split between "pick who wins Sunday" and "pick who wins everything" could not be sharper.

Weekly picks are landing

When pundits simply pick the Ravens to win a given game, they've mostly been right. Baltimore beat the Colts 41-23 in Week 1, and every pundit we tracked on that game picked the Ravens correctly. Three weeks later they survived the Cowboys 34-31 in Brazil, another near-sweep for anyone who took Baltimore. In Week 4, John Breech called a Ravens win over the Titans and got the winner right, even though his predicted margin (14 points) overshot the actual one (6). Across all 60 graded game-outcome picks on the Ravens this season, accuracy sits at 55%, and score predictions specifically (39 graded) have done even better, averaging 75.9% accuracy.

Mock drafts involving Baltimore have also held up: 46 graded Mock Draft Picks average 75% accuracy, which is a decent reflection of a team that drafts with some predictability in the back half of the first round.

The crown-level calls cratered

The further out pundits reached last year, the worse it got. Every one of the 35 graded calls on the Ravens winning the AFC North came back wrong (0% accuracy). Same with the 19 graded Conference Champion picks and all 14 graded Super Bowl picks on Baltimore: zero hits across the board. Playoff-berth calls did only slightly better, hitting at 17.6% across 34 graded picks. Season win-total calls were the worst performers by the numbers that matter most: just 28.6% accuracy on 7 graded calls, with an average skill score of -67.86, meaning those calls did markedly worse than simply guessing a typical total.

The clearest single embodiment of that collapse is Manti Te'o, whose 15 graded Ravens calls all date to last season's preseason: Baltimore winning the AFC North, reaching the Super Bowl, winning it, and Lamar Jackson taking MVP. Every one of those busted when the Ravens missed the playoffs entirely, and his Ravens record sits at 0% accuracy. Quarterback-specific calls on Jackson follow the same pattern: both Rachel Nichols ("You still think Lamar is in that upper echelon of top four quarterbacks in the league") and Danny Parkins (projecting a "top ten quarterback") had Jackson finishing among the league's best passers last season; he finished 23rd in passing yards instead, and both calls scored zero. It's part of why Ravens quarterback calls overall are the shakiest position group we track for this team, 18.4% accuracy across 25 graded calls, while calls about Baltimore's guards have been the most reliable, 95% accuracy across 12 graded calls.

Who's earned the benefit of the doubt

Two names stand out on the positive side. Daniel Jeremiah has gone 83% accurate across five graded Ravens mock-draft calls, all specific player-to-pick projections rather than team-outcome bets. Breech, mentioned above, sits at 81% accuracy across seven graded Ravens calls with a strongly positive skill average (+87.69), the best full-season track record of anyone calling Baltimore's actual games this year. On the other end, Jason La Canfora (28.6% accuracy, seven graded calls) and Ryan Wormeli (19.7%, seven graded) have been the weakest, each averaging a sharply negative skill score on their Ravens calls.

The freshest Ravens story on the board right now is Lamar Jackson's ankle: Mike Florio, Ian Rapoport, La Canfora and others have all said this week he'll sit out Sunday night against Atlanta with Tyler Huntley starting, while Baltimore also works rookie guard-turned-center Cam Jurgens into the lineup after a trade from Philadelphia. Those calls haven't been graded yet, so the season will answer them in time.

Elsewhere: a week built on blowout misses and one eerie Ravens echo

MissedTakes graded 1,156 calls across the league in the past seven days, with final-score predictions (388) and outright winner picks (272) making up more than half the total. The week's best calls included John Granato's near-perfect walk through the Texans' schedule, 7-0 before the bye and a 16-1 finish, with the lone loss he conceded coming on the road against Lamar Jackson's Ravens; that call scored a perfect 100. The week's worst calls leaned heavily on full-season game-by-game forecasts that missed badly, including Douglas Clawson's bold-predictions piece that had the Ravens winning the Super Bowl over a "Cinderella" Giants team, a call that scored zero, the same fate as nearly every other crown-level Ravens pick we've tracked this year.

The overall leaderboard still has Damonza Byrd on top, though on just 14 graded calls flagged with limited confidence; Daniel Jeremiah is the highest-ranked pundit with an established sample, 276 graded calls, sitting eighth overall. The full leaderboard has the rest.