Saints: Pundits Really Believe in the Upset, But Keep Losing | MissedTakes Daily

What are pundits saying about the Saints' chances to win?

Pundits have made 25 graded outright-winner calls on the New Orleans Saints this season, and those calls have scored 28 accuracy on average, well below a coin falling right half the time. The pattern is consistent: a pundit likes New Orleans as a scrappy home underdog, picks the upset, and the Saints lose anyway.

The clearest recent example came in Week 7. Jourdan Rodrigue picked the Saints to beat the Steelers on October 24, saying "I think I would guess the Saints are underdogs in this game. And I think that the Saints will win this game." Sam Monson made the same call two days earlier: "I'm going with the Saints because as I've said before, just can't quit them no matter how bad the record is." Pittsburgh won 16-10. Both calls graded 0.

That followed the same shape in Week 5, when Connor Rogers, Tyler Sullivan and Mitchell Eisenstein all backed New Orleans over the undefeated Vikings and all graded 0 as Minnesota won 23-13, and in Week 4, when Grant Gordon, Bobby Kownack, Derek Brown, Pat Fitzmaurice and Mitchell Eisenstein all picked the Saints to beat Atlanta on Monday night and all graded 0 as the Falcons won 45-24.

The one clean hit came in Week 6. Mike Kadlick, Gilberto Manzano, Matt Verderame and Conor Orr all picked New Orleans over the Giants, and the Saints won 34-27, with each call grading 100 and a MissedTakes Score of 172, meaning it beat picking the home team by a wide margin. Doug Joubert's score call for that same game, Saints 21-17, also graded well (92.86 accuracy) even though the Saints won by more than he projected.

Score predictions track to this. Pundits have made 27 graded score calls on Saints games this season, averaging 32.7 accuracy. The Week 4 Falcons blowout punished almost everyone who called it: Jared Dubin, Jordan Dajani, Jerry Jones, Eric Moody, Seth Walder and Dan Parr all predicted a close Saints win over Atlanta, and the final margin ran 21 points toward Atlanta, so each graded between 4.76 and 19.05 accuracy. The exception was Week 2 at Baltimore, where Dylan Sanders called Saints 23, Ravens 17 (actual: Saints won 24-17) and Tyler Sullivan separately picked the upset outright, with both calls grading near the top; Sullivan's call was worth a MissedTakes Score of 194.

Which calls on the Saints hold up best?

Roster and depth-chart calls on the Saints are a different story: 93.8 accuracy across 130 graded roster-spot calls and 97.5 accuracy across 10 graded depth-chart calls. Mock draft picks on New Orleans are weaker, averaging 50.2 accuracy across 182 graded calls, typical of projections made more than a year before a draft happens.

Ten pundits have at least five graded calls on the Saints this season:

Ross Jackson carries the most volume, 184 graded calls across his full preseason 53-man roster breakdown, game-by-game season projection and mock-draft work. His overall record across every team he covers sits at 66.85 accuracy on 241 graded calls, built mostly on a strong roster-spot record (93.84 accuracy, 80 graded) that offset a weaker game-outcome slate (50 accuracy, 8 graded), including the Falcons pick that cost him twice over, once from his preseason schedule projection and again from an in-season repeat.

What's the biggest graded take outside NOLA?

The largest consensus miss on win totals belongs to the Kansas City Chiefs' 2025 season, where the field's collective call missed the actual total by 6.4 wins across nine calls, the widest gap of any team-season tracked. Washington's 2025 win-total consensus missed by 5.2 wins across six calls toward too few wins, while Denver, New England and Seattle each saw their fields undershoot by 5 wins or more. For a fuller sense of who's beating the field across every prediction type, the leaderboard currently has Bryan DeArdo on top at a 92.49 accuracy across 22 graded calls, with Mike Florio second on 36 graded calls.