Raiders 26, Chargers 14: Eight Picks for the Chargers, One for Vegas, and Only One Was Right
Nine calls, graded. Eight of them backed the home team. The Raiders won by 12.
That's the whole story of Las Vegas at Los Angeles in Week 2 — a 26-14 Raiders win that the field almost universally didn't see coming. Six pundits picked the Chargers outright to win. Three more, via score predictions, effectively did the same thing by projecting an LA win. Only one voice took the Raiders straight up.
The one who got it right
Richard Sherman called it flatly two days before kickoff: "I got the Raiders winning this. The Chargers didn't show me anything that I needed to see." That's the only take among the nine that picked Las Vegas to win, and it graded out at 100 accuracy with a skill score of +194 — about as good as a single call gets on this site. The reason the number is that high isn't just that he was right; it's that the model's naive pick was the home team, the Chargers, so calling the road upset is worth far more than one more voice piling onto the favorite. Sherman didn't just win the pick, he won it against the odds the site measures him against.
His overall record backs up that this wasn't a fluke swing. Across 30 graded game-outcome picks, Sherman is hitting at 82.04% accuracy with a +39.44 skill score for that category alone — well above his all-types average of 60.41% accuracy on 104 graded calls. Outcome picks are where he's sharpest, and this one extended that pattern rather than interrupting it.
The score guessers who had the wrong winner but the right shape
Two pundits split the difference between right and wrong in an odd way. Pete Prisco predicted Chargers 24, Raiders 16 — a call he made twice, in two separate columns, with the same number both times. John Breech had it Chargers 27, Raiders 19. Both picked the wrong team to win. But both landed at 40.48 accuracy and a +39.34 skill score, because an 8-point Chargers margin wasn't wildly out of step with the 12-point margin the Raiders actually put up — enough to beat the type's naive baseline of 20.2, even with the winner backwards.
For Prisco, that +39.34 actually beats his own typical output in this category: his score-prediction average is a +18.15 skill score across 40 graded calls, so this wrong-team miss still outperformed his norm. Breech's score-prediction average, by contrast, sits at -7.11 across 39 graded calls — this take is one of his better ones by the numbers, which says more about how rough his year in that category has been than about this particular call.
The unanimous side of the miss
Four more calls backed the Chargers outright and got nothing for it. Rich Eisen grouped the Chargers with the Rams as his "both LA teams win" pick. Nick Shook said "it still feels to me like it's a game that the Chargers win." Dan Beyer took the Chargers as his survivor pick, reasoning they "won't start 0-2 at home." And Nick Wright, calling it all the way back on September 2nd, penciled the Chargers in to open 2-0 with home games against the Cardinals and Raiders. Breech also had a second miss here — an August 19th pick built on the idea that a "divisional game on the road... isn't a good combination for a Raiders team." All five graded at 0 accuracy and 0 skill delta; none of them beat the naive home-team default, because none of them left it.
Breech's two wrong calls this week sit inside a broader pattern rather than a one-off: his game-outcome record is 43% accuracy with a +2.8 skill score across 25 graded picks, and his score-prediction record is 41.62% accuracy with a -7.11 skill score across 39. Both types are below his overall 47.09% accuracy mark — this game didn't do him any favors, but it didn't come out of nowhere either.
What it touches beyond this game
Calls on Chargers games have been shaky all year — a 25.4% average accuracy across 59 graded game-outcome picks, with an average skill score of -20.29. Calls on Raiders games, by contrast, have graded out at 92.3% accuracy across 26 picks. This week ran against that trend for the Raiders side of the ledger and right into it for the Chargers side: the field bet on the more-often-wrong team and lost.
It also fits the Raiders' recent reputation as a team punditry struggles to size up — their 2025 season win-total calls graded at just 14.5% average accuracy, against 68.9% for the Chargers over the same stretch. One Week 2 result doesn't settle a season, but it's one more data point that the Raiders are the club to bet against your own instincts on. For the season-long view, see the Raiders and Chargers team pages, and check where these pundits rank overall on the leaderboard.