49ers 35, Dolphins 13: Nobody Missed the Winner — the Real Test Was the Margin
San Francisco beat Miami 35-13 in Week 2, and on this one there was no fence to sit on. We tracked 14 graded calls tied to this game — nine outright winner picks and five full score predictions — and all 14 picked the 49ers. Unanimous. Nobody backed the Dolphins, not even as a lean.
That's a shrug on the winner question. San Francisco was the home team, and picking the home team when it wins earns a flat zero on our skill scale — the number that measures whether a call beat just defaulting to the home side. Nine of the 14 calls here were exactly that: correct, unremarkable, worth nothing above baseline. John Middlekauff ("Niners should murder them"), Derek Brown, Dan Beyer, Mark Morales-Smith, Colin Cowherd's co-host and Nick Winkler all called it right and all scored a 0 skill delta for the privilege.
The five score predictions are where this game actually separated the field, because getting the winner right is easy when the home team is the better team — getting the margin right is not.
The calls that nailed it
John Breech called this one twice, in separate columns nine days apart, and landed on the same number both times: 49ers 38, Dolphins 16, a 22-point margin. The final was 35-13 — also a 22-point margin. His September 15 pick and his September 18 pick both graded to 100 accuracy and a 97 skill score, tied for the best mark anyone posted on this game. Worth noting: Breech's season-long record on score predictions is a rough one — 41.6 accuracy and a *negative* -7.11 average skill across 39 graded calls — which makes this exact-margin call look more like a hot week than a form line.
Richard Sherman picked "31-10" on air, saying flatly the 49ers "are going to score at least 30" — he was one point off the real total on each side and graded to 97.62 accuracy, 92.38 skill, the second-best mark on the slate. That's also well above his own season rate in this category (23.3 average skill across 18 graded score calls), making it one of his sharper individual calls of the year.
Pete Prisco had it 29-10, a 19-point margin, and graded to 92.86 accuracy and 83.14 skill — also comfortably above his season average in the category (18.15 skill across 40 graded score picks).
Alain Poupart, writing for the Miami beat, hedged the hardest of the group — arguing "logic says" the Dolphins lose while conceding the Dolphins have upset history as heavy underdogs — before landing on 27-17, a 10-point margin. That was still a correct pick of the winner, but the shallowest margin call in the group, and it graded to the lowest score-prediction mark of the five: 71.43 accuracy, 41.57 skill.
No misses to report
Every one of these 14 calls graded into hit or close territory — nothing fell into miss range. That's unusual enough to say plainly: there's no pile-on section this week, because nobody was wrong about who would win, and even the softest margin call (Poupart's) still landed in the "close" band. A unanimous, correct field isn't a story about the pundits so much as a story about the game — Miami simply didn't give anyone a reason to look elsewhere.
What it touches beyond this game
Zoom out and the picture on Miami gets less flattering. Across all the game-outcome calls we've graded on the Dolphins this season, the field is averaging just 23.5 accuracy and a skill score of -135.65 on 17 graded picks — a season, so far, of pundits expecting more from Miami than the results have delivered, this blowout included. San Francisco sits at the other end: 78 accuracy and a 59.44 average skill across 50 graded outcome calls, a team the field has read correctly and often. Season win-total calls on both clubs haven't been graded yet — it's early — but the in-season game-by-game record already points the same direction the scoreboard did Sunday. For the season-long view on either club, see the 49ers page and the leaderboard for how these pundits stack up across everything they've called.