# Chiefs 33, Colts 30: Every Pundit Picked Kansas City. Only One Got the Margin Right.

*Published 2026-09-23 — MissedTakes*

The Chiefs beat the Colts 33-30, and on the only question that decides a straight-up pick — who wins — the field wasn't close to divided. We tracked 15 graded calls on this game, and all 15 picked Kansas City. That's a unanimous hit, and per the site's own logic, a unanimous hit is a shrug: picking the home favorite is the naive, no-skill-required pick, and eight of the 15 calls were exactly that — a winner-only lean with nothing else attached, each one graded at 0 skill because guessing the favorite earns no credit over guessing the favorite.

[Joshua Schulman](/pundits/joshua-schulman), [Nick Wright](/pundits/nick-wright) (three separate times, dating back to a September 2 division preview), [Greg Jennings](/pundits/greg-jennings), [Mike Florio](/pundits/mike-florio), [Colin Cowherd](/pundits/colin-cowherd), and Jarvis Landry all took Kansas City straight up and were all rewarded with 100% accuracy and zero skill for it. Nothing wrong with any of those calls — they were right — but nothing about them separated one pundit's judgment from another's, either.

## Where the real split was

The six pundits who went further and predicted an actual score are where this game actually tested anyone. The Chiefs won by 3. Here's how each call's predicted margin compared, ranked by the skill score that measures distance from that result against the field's own baseline:

![Score predictions on Chiefs 33, Colts 30, ranked by skill](/posts/visuals/3e34d3d2-55bf-4465-9f95-83b5e6a13dfc.png)

**Jared Dubin** had the sharpest number on the board. Previewing the Week 2 slate for CBS, he wrote about [why he had the Colts covering against Kansas City but the Chiefs pulling out the 21-17 win](/opinions/2d7a391a-171e-4d38-abb6-3284a7670a86) — a four-point margin against a game that finished by three. That earned 97.62% accuracy and a skill score of +11.62, the best graded score call this game produced. He said the same thing in a second column two days later with an identical score and the same grade.

**Jordan Dajani** (Chiefs 24, Colts 17) and **John Breech** (Chiefs 23-16) both called a seven-point margin, more than double the actual gap, and both landed at 90.48% accuracy with a modestly negative skill score of -2.24 — not sharp, not a disaster.

**Pete Prisco**, picking [Chiefs 27, Colts 17](/opinions/29185ff4-dec4-498f-aa45-4ca2d72dcbe3), and **Matt Hamilton** (24-14) both doubled the actual margin and scored -16.09 and -16.59, respectively.

**Richard Sherman** was the outlier. Running through the entire Week 2 slate, [he settled on Kansas City 28, Indianapolis 13](/opinions/8a2c5da4-3fba-43d7-82eb-dc25b81f245e) — a 15-point call on a game that came down to a field goal's worth of difference. That's 71.43% accuracy and a skill score of -39.19, the worst mark this game handed out.

## How that fits each pundit's record

None of these misses read the same way once you check what each pundit usually does with a score prediction.

[Jared Dubin's](/pundits/jared-dubin) score-prediction average sits at -0.53 skill across 27 graded calls — essentially a coin flip against the baseline. This one, at +11.62, was a clear plus night for him, not business as usual.

[Pete Prisco](/pundits/pete-prisco) actually grades out well on score calls generally: 18.15 average skill across 40 graded predictions, with 61.8% accuracy. This one, at -16.09, was below his own bar — a miss, but not a pattern.

[Richard Sherman's](/pundits/richard-sherman) score-prediction average is +23.3 skill across 18 graded calls, one of his stronger categories. The Colts-Chiefs call, at -39.19, isn't a streak breaking down — it's a rough outlier against a pundit who's normally solid on exactly this kind of pick. Worth noting, and worth filing separately from a real slide.

## What it touches beyond one Sunday

Both teams carried 2026 preseason win totals into this result that a three-point final doesn't settle either way. We've tracked Chiefs projections ranging from 9 wins (Nate Tice, Hayden Winks) up to 12-5 (Nick Wright), and Colts projections from 5-12 (Moe Moton) up to Gregg Rosenthal's "eight or nine" over the 7.5 line — those calls won't grade until the season plays out, but a competitive road trip to Arrowhead against a good team is exactly the kind of data point that makes the low end of the Colts range look a little less obvious and the high end of the Chiefs range look a little less automatic.

For the season-long view of who's actually calling these games well, the [team pages for the Chiefs](/nfl/teams/chiefs) and [Colts](/nfl/teams/colts) and the site [leaderboard](/leaderboard) are where that gets tracked as more Sundays get graded.