Cowboys 37, Commanders 20: The Field Picked Dallas 13-to-1 — and Still Undersold the Blowout
Dallas beat Washington 37-20 in Week 2, and the pregame record on this one wasn't close — not the game, and not the punditry around it. We tracked 14 graded calls tied to this matchup. Thirteen picked the Cowboys. One picked the Commanders. The field got its winner right, but nobody saw the margin coming.
The verdict: 13-1 for Dallas, and Dallas covered the spread of opinion too
Of the 14 calls, 13 had Dallas winning outright — Richard Sherman, Michael Irvin (twice, across separate schedule predictions), Jesse Holley, Jeff Cavanaugh, Clarence Hill, and Danny Parkins all called it straight, plus three pundits who went further and put exact scores on it. Only David Harrison had Washington.
That's about as lopsided as a pregame field gets, and this time the lopsided side was right. But "picked the favorite and won" isn't the same as "showed skill" — the site's MissedTakes Score measures a call against what picking the home team by default would have gotten you, and Dallas was hosting. Sherman, Irvin, Holley, Cavanaugh, Hill and Parkins all graded out at 100% accuracy and exactly zero skill points for their winner calls, because the naive home-team pick would have done just as well. Sherman's reasoning — "I'm going to go with the Dallas Cowboys. Because they're the more talented. They're the better team" — was correct, but it's a call that costs nothing to make.
The score calls: closer to right, still short of the actual margin
Three pundits put a number on it, and all three underestimated how badly this would go for Washington. Pete Prisco had it Cowboys 31, Commanders 24, a seven-point margin against an actual 17-point rout — good for 76.19% accuracy and +34.72 skill. Colin Cowherd went with "Cowboys winning this game by four ... 26-22 Dallas," which graded to 69.05% accuracy and +20.86 skill, the softest of the three margins.
The best of the group was John Breech, who picked "Cowboys 34-24 over Commanders" — a 10-point margin, still short of the real 17, but the closest of the bunch. It graded to 83.33% accuracy and +48.57 skill, the best-scoring take this game produced. Worth noting: Breech's season-long score-prediction accuracy sits at just 41.62% across 39 graded calls, with a negative overall skill mark (-7.11). This one was a clear outlier for him, not the form.
Prisco, by contrast, is having a good stretch on these — his score-prediction accuracy overall is 61.8% across 40 graded calls, so a 76.19% outing is consistent with, not a break from, his season.
The miss: one call against the field, and part of a pattern
David Harrison's pick stands alone. Back in May, laying out a path for Washington to beat its 7.5-win total, he named this game as the eighth win he expected: "And finally, the eighth game of the year, I'm projecting a win for the Washington Commanders right now ... the Dallas Cowboys." Washington lost by 17. The call graded to 0% accuracy and the maximum penalty, -200 skill.
That's not a one-off soft spot. Harrison's game-outcome record is now 0-for-3 on the season, with a -200 skill score on all three. It's a small sample and it sits inside a broader record — 151 graded calls overall, a respectable 60.95% overall accuracy driven mostly by his mock-draft work (64.04% accuracy across 120 graded draft calls) — but on picking actual game winners specifically, nothing has landed yet this year.
What it touches beyond this one
This result drops into a season where the collective read on these two teams has looked different. Across 301 graded calls involving the Cowboys, the field's average skill score sits at -25.18 — worse than a coin flip against the baseline. Across 314 graded calls involving the Commanders, the average skill score is +6.9, modestly ahead of naive. A 37-20 Dallas win over Washington doesn't fix that ledger by itself, but it's one more data point in a season where reading the Cowboys correctly has been the harder assignment of the two.
For the season-long calls on both teams — win totals, division outlooks, the rest — see the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Commanders team pages, and check the leaderboard for who's actually calling games well this year.