Jaguars: Pundits Picked Them Over Houston, But the Jags Found a Way to Lose | MissedTakes Daily

What happened when pundits picked the Jaguars over Houston?

Jacksonville lost, and most of the field had it backwards. Of the 28 pundits MissedTakes tracked on the Week 6 Texans-Jaguars game in London, 17 picked the Jaguars to win and 11 picked Houston. The Texans won 34-31. The field's median call had Jacksonville winning by 4 points; the Jaguars lost by 3, a seven-point miss for the consensus. Across the 33 graded calls tied to the game, average accuracy came in at 52 out of 100, a near coin-flip outcome for a game most pundits thought leaned one way.

The two pundits who called it exactly right were John Breech and Jordan Dajani, who both picked the Texans and nailed the final margin (Breech: Texans 20-17; Dajani: Texans 21-18). On the other side, Shanna McCarriston missed widest among the Jaguars backers, projecting a 30-13 Jacksonville blowout that landed 20 points off the actual margin. The Jaguars had looked like a safer side a week earlier, when they edged the Eagles in London by 2 points and pundits picking them, including Bryan DeArdo, were rewarded; Houston reversed that read a week later.

Which pundits have actually earned trust on the Jaguars?

Among pundits with at least 5 graded Jacksonville-related calls, Brady Quinn tops the group at 87.2% accuracy, though that comes from just 5 graded calls. Rich Eisen is the more seasoned name worth trusting, at 83.2% accuracy across 16 graded calls, the largest sample in the group. On the other end, JP Acosta has been accurate on only 23.8% of 7 graded Jaguars calls, the weakest record among pundits who've made enough of them to judge.

Every number here comes from a small sample. Even Eisen's 16 graded calls is modest next to the hundreds some pundits accumulate on bigger-market teams, so one or two swings could move these ranks by the next Jaguars check-in.

Where is Jaguars punditry getting it wrong by position?

Cornerback calls have been the shakiest: 42.1% accuracy across 12 graded takes, the weakest of any position with a real sample. That tracks with an active week of trade chatter, where John Shipley named five cornerbacks (Riq Woolen, Zyon McCollum, Kristian Fulton, Deonte Banks and Brandon Stephens) as realistic Jaguars targets before the deadline, and a separate piece floated Woolen again, all still unresolved calls. Receiver calls aren't much better at 45.7% accuracy across 8 graded takes, the backdrop for Shipley's read that Brian Thomas Jr. has fallen to Jacksonville's fifth receiver spot, with Nathan Jahnke separately projecting Jakobi Meyers and Parker Washington as the club's real starters at the position. Defensive tackle calls have fared best by far, at 87.9% accuracy across 12 graded takes.

One pocket of Jaguars punditry has actually graded out well: mock draft picks involving the club are 68.6% accurate across 28 graded calls, a notably stronger hit rate than the live-roster chatter around this team.

What else got graded across the league today?

Pundits had 425 takes graded across the league in the past week, most of them game outcome picks (258) and score predictions (123), with smaller pools of roster-spot, trade and mock-draft calls. The sharpest calls included John Middlekauff's bust read on Anthony Richardson and Marcus Mosher's Week 1 power rankings, both posting perfect accuracy; the weakest included Mark Wahlberg's 14-3 season call for the Patriots and Michael Irvin's 13-4 call for the Cowboys, both scoring zero. On awards, the MVP ballot consensus landed on Matthew Stafford, who won, while Offensive Rookie of the Year picks correctly converged on Tetairoa McMillan. For the pundits actually separating themselves across all of this, the full leaderboard is updated daily.