Lions: 18 of 19 Pundits Called the Cardinals Rout, and Still Undersold It | MissedTakes Daily

The Detroit Lions are 3-2, and the clearest finding in the calls we've graded about them is that pundits have been much better at picking winners than margins. Game outcome picks on Detroit have graded at 58.5% accuracy across 57 settled calls. Score predictions on Detroit have graded at just 52.2% accuracy across 64 settled calls, and the average score call has actually scored worse than a simple guess with no insight at all (a skill score of -23.9, where zero is that baseline). Detroit's Week 5 blowout of Arizona is the clearest example of why.

How did pundits do on Detroit's rout of the Cardinals?

Eighteen of the 19 pundits we tracked on that game picked the Lions to win, and all 18 were right: Detroit won 45-21. But among the 13 who also called a score, every single one undersold the margin. Gennaro Filice came closest, calling Lions 42-24, a 24-point gap he still missed by 6 points. Jeremy Pargo had Lions 35-27. Brooke Cersosimo had Lions 30-27. Nobody among the score-callers got within 6 points of the actual gap.

The reversal matters because the two weeks before it went the other way. Detroit lost at Buffalo in Week 2 (31-41) and at Carolina in Week 4 (26-32), and pundits who'd picked the Lions in both games were graded harshly for it (scores as low as -200, since picking the home underdog against the grain costs more when it's wrong). Mike Florio is the clearest case: on Sept. 18 he called Detroit's next three games "objectively winnable" and said the Lions could be "4-1" heading into their bye. Detroit went 2-1 against that stretch, which meant the same forecast earned a win against the Jets worth nothing extra (Detroit was already the pick), a loss to Carolina worth -194, and the Cardinals blowout worth +194, all off one sentence written in mid-September.

Mock-draft punditry on Detroit adds its own disagreement: pundits mocking the Lions' 2027 first-round pick have placed it anywhere from 15th to 23rd overall, which simply reflects how unsettled projecting a .500-ish team's draft slot is five weeks into a season.

Which pundits' Lions calls have actually earned trust?

Among pundits with at least 5 graded Lions calls, John Breech has the best accuracy at 80.6%, though that's across only 6 settled calls. The two pundits with the largest Lions-specific samples, Rich Eisen (25 graded calls) and Gregg Rosenthal (15), sit at the bottom of this list at 19.4% and 16.3% accuracy; Rosenthal's number includes a 2025 pick to stick with Detroit reaching the Super Bowl that never paid off.

By position, offensive tackle calls on Detroit have graded well (68.7% accuracy across 32 settled calls), as have linebacker calls (79.3% across a thinner 11). Edge rusher calls have been the weakest: 10.8% accuracy across 17 graded calls, a real sample, not a fluke.

What else happened across the league today?

We graded 504 takes across the league in the last week, with game outcome picks (300) and score predictions (150) making up most of the volume. The best of them included Marcus Mosher's Week 1 power rankings, which put the Chiefs first and the Patriots last and graded at 100% accuracy, and Kevin Wildes's full-slate picks, also 100%. The worst calls of the week were nearly all season-long projections gone wrong, including Michael Irvin's 13-4 Cowboys forecast and Jeff Cavanaugh's 12-5 version, both graded at the bottom of the scale.

On team strength, the field's season win-total calls missed low on Kansas City and Washington in 2025 (by 6.4 and 5.2 wins respectively) and missed high on Denver, New England and Seattle (by roughly 5 wins each). On awards, Matthew Stafford's 2025 MVP pulled 24 of 68 picks, the most of any player on the ballot, and Tetairoa McMillan's Offensive Rookie of the Year win was picked by 5 of 29.

At the top of the overall leaderboard, Bryan DeArdo leads with a 84.62 MissedTakes Score on 21 graded calls, with Damonza Byrd and Mike Florio rounding out the top three. The full leaderboard has the rest.