Packers 20, Jets 17: The Field Leaned Green Bay, and the Three Who Didn't Paid For It
Green Bay's 20-17 win at MetLife Stadium settled 11 graded calls on the site — eight game-outcome picks and three final-score predictions. The field leaned Packers, 8-3, and the field was right.
The verdict: a lopsided lean that paid off
This wasn't a coin-flip game as pundits saw it. Five separate game-outcome calls backed Green Bay outright — Greg Jennings, Mark Morales-Smith, Richard Sherman, Bill Huber, and one of Tyler Sullivan's three separate columns on this game — and all three published score predictions (Sullivan again, Pete Prisco, and John Breech) had Green Bay winning too. Only three calls took the Jets: Kevin Wildes, Rich Eisen, and — in a different column than the one where he picked Green Bay — Sullivan again.
That 8-3 lean matters more than it might sound like, because the site's naive baseline for any game-outcome pick defaults to the home team. Here that default was the Jets. So every pundit who called Green Bay on the road wasn't just picking the eventual winner — they were picking against the free option, and the scoring reflects it: Jennings, Morales-Smith, Sherman, and Sullivan's hit each banked a skill score in the 194 range, and Huber's preseason call scored a full 200.
The calls worth naming
Two of the three score predictions came remarkably close to exact. Sullivan called it "Green Bay pulling out the 24-21 victory" while noting the Jets would cover; Breech had it "Packers 26-23." Both predicted a three-point Green Bay margin. The final was 20-17 — a three-point Green Bay margin. Both were graded 100% accurate, each worth 113.24 skill points. Prisco picked "Packers 27, Jets 20," a seven-point margin against an actual three-point one — still a correct winner call, graded 90.48% accurate for 94.76 skill.
On the outright side, Bill Huber's call predates the season itself. Back on September 13, before Week 1 had even been played, he forecast the Packers starting 3-4 through seven games — including a specific win over the Jets. That's the kind of call that's easy to make and hard to get right in the specifics; this one landed, at 200 skill points, the maximum the site awards.
The misses
No pile-on here — the calls speak for themselves. Kevin Wildes went the furthest out on a limb: "Jets over the Packers. Wow. Straight up," built on the idea that "Green Bay's road losing streak and Jordan Love's recent interceptions" would catch up with them. They didn't. Rich Eisen, weighing which 0-1 team was more likely to be a surprise 2-0 club, picked the Jets over the Cardinals: "I'll go Jets." Also wrong. And Sullivan's own upset-alert column argued the Jets, as 3.5-point home underdogs, "could mess around... and win outright" — a call that didn't survive the same week as his own correct score prediction.
Because the naive default already pointed to the Jets, these three misses cost nothing extra in skill terms (0, not negative) — but the accuracy line still reads 0%.
What the track records say
This wasn't Wildes' first rough week calling games. His overall game-outcome accuracy sits at 21.43% across 10 graded calls, with an average skill score of -36.57 — meaningfully worse than simply defaulting to the home team every time. This pick fits a pattern, not an aberration.
Eisen is a different case. Across 470 graded takes and 72 game-outcome calls specifically, he's at 65.05% accuracy with a skill score of -0.86 — essentially break-even against naive. One bad Jets pick barely moves that needle.
Sullivan's record is the most interesting of the three, because he's on both sides of the ledger this week. His overall game-outcome accuracy (70% on 13 graded calls, the best of his four tracked prediction types) is exactly why his hit and his miss both fit — he's a strong-but-not-flawless caller who published multiple columns on the same matchup and didn't line them up.
Huber's hit adds to a small, lopsided sample: 55 graded calls overall, dominated by roster-spot calls he's gotten right 93.33% of the time, against just two game-outcome calls (both correct) and one depth-chart swing that missed completely. Small enough that this counts as an extension of a trend, not a verdict.
The bigger picture
Zoom out and the season-long numbers on these two teams are shakier than one Week 2 result suggests. Across all tracked game-outcome calls involving the Packers, the field's average accuracy is 39.9% with an average skill score of -29.18 — worse than the naive default, taken as a whole. Jets game-outcome calls fare only marginally better: 33.3% accuracy, essentially flat skill (1.36). Neither team has been an easy read for punditry this year, road win or not.
For the full picture on both clubs, see the Packers and Jets team pages, and check where this week's callers rank on the leaderboard.