# Browns 23, Buccaneers 19: The Field Picked Tampa Bay by 17 — and Lost by Four

*Published 2026-09-23 — MissedTakes*

Cleveland beat Tampa Bay 23-19 in Week 2, and the six graded calls we tracked on this game split cleanly into two groups: everyone who picked a winner or a score got it wrong, and everyone who made a call about who'd be under center for Cleveland got it right.

## The verdict: four for four, and all four picked the loser

Four pundits made a winner or score call on this game. All four took Tampa Bay. All four were wrong.

That's a unanimous miss, and it wasn't a photo finish. [Pete Prisco](/pundits/pete-prisco) had it Buccaneers 30, Browns 10 — a 20-point margin. [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech) went Buccaneers 34-16, an 18-point spread. [Tyler Sullivan](/pundits/tyler-sullivan) called it Buccaneers 30-13, 17 points. The field's three score predictions averaged roughly an 18-point Tampa Bay win. Cleveland won by four. That's not a near-miss on the margin — it's a 22-point gap between the consensus and what actually happened, and it moved in the opposite direction from all three predictions.

[Richard Sherman](/pundits/richard-sherman) made the fourth call, a bare winner pick with no number attached ("Does this even warrant anything more than a Bucs?"). His call is graded at zero skill, not because it's a good take, but because the site's baseline already assumes the home team — Tampa Bay was hosting — so picking the favorite by default earns nothing either way. It's worth spelling out because it's exactly what the brief means by "one more voice on the favorite": nobody in our graded sample was willing to say Cleveland wins this game, let alone by how much.

![Predicted margin vs. actual result](/posts/visuals/bb57c3ae-2a0f-4945-a670-d4cffd04ffdd.png)

## The calls worth naming: the Browns' QB question, not their record

While the winner picks whiffed, two depth-chart calls on Cleveland's Week 2 starter landed clean. [Matt Severance](/pundits/matt-severance), writing for CBS Sports, wrote that "first-year coach Todd Monken … didn't name Watson as his Week 2 starter right away over Sanders but it will be Watson" — and it was. [Rafael Zamorano](/pundits/rafael-zamorano) was just as direct: "we already know Watson is set to keep the momentum going as he'll start the Browns' Week 2 contest against the Bucs, also on the road." Both calls graded 100 accuracy with a +194 skill score — a big number because the naive assumption treats an unproven backup as a threat to the incumbent, and both pundits correctly discounted that noise. Neither one predicted the final score or the winner; they called the one piece of the pregame conversation — who plays quarterback — that turned out to matter.

## The misses, by name

Prisco's 30-10 call was the widest miss of the three score predictions (11.9 accuracy, -53.04 skill). Breech's 34-16 pick scored 16.67 accuracy and -43.81 skill. Sullivan's 30-13 call scored 19.05 accuracy and -39.19 skill — the least bad of the three, but still a call that had the wrong team winning by three scores. Sherman's plain "Bucs" pick scored zero on both measures. None of the four hedged toward a close game; all four bet on a Tampa Bay blowout that didn't happen.

## What this does to their records

Sherman's overall record is strong — 60.41 accuracy and a 26.71 MissedTakes Score across 104 graded calls — and his game-outcome picks specifically are his best category, 82.04 accuracy on 30 graded calls. This game is a clean miss inside an otherwise good bucket for him, not a pattern.

Sullivan sits at No. 2 on our [leaderboard](/leaderboard) overall (42.8 score, 59.17 accuracy across 32 calls), but his score-prediction category is his weakest: 58.13 accuracy and a comparatively thin 14.51 MissedTakes Score over seven graded calls. This miss adds to that gap rather than closing it.

Breech's overall accuracy sits at 47.09 across 68 calls, and his score-prediction line is already upside-down — 41.62 accuracy and a -7.11 MissedTakes Score on 39 graded calls. This one fits the pattern rather than breaking it.

Prisco carries a provisional record (43 graded calls, most of them score predictions), with 61.8 accuracy and an 18.15 score in that category. Middle of the pack among the three score-predictors here.

Severance and Zamorano are both thin samples — three and eight graded calls respectively, both currently sitting at 100 accuracy — so call it a lean on Cleveland's quarterback situation rather than an established record. But it's a clean lean twice over.

## The bigger picture

Zoom out and neither team has been kind to forecasters this season. Among the game-outcome calls we've graded on the Buccaneers, the field is averaging just 38.8 accuracy with a negative average skill score (-30.7) — worse than picking blind — and the smaller sample of season win-total calls on Tampa Bay is averaging -64.5 on skill. The Browns' game-outcome calls we've tracked look similar: 33.3 average accuracy on nine graded picks. A four-point road win for Cleveland over a team the field expected to roll doesn't fix that — if anything, it's more evidence that picking against the Browns and for the Buccaneers has been a losing bet more often than not this year. For the full ledger on both clubs, see the [Buccaneers](/nfl/teams/buccaneers) and [Browns](/nfl/teams/browns) team pages, and see where everyone above stacks up on the overall [leaderboard](/leaderboard).