Vikings 9, Bears 3: The Field Went 13-for-14 on Chicago and Missed Anyway

Minnesota beat Chicago 9-3 in Week 2, and the pundits we track were not ready for it. Of the 15 graded calls this game settled, 14 were a winner or a final score, and one more was a depth-chart call that rode along with it. On the winner question, the field split 13-1 for the Bears. The Bears lost.

The verdict: a near-unanimous miss

Thirteen of the 14 winner and score calls picked Chicago. Only one picked Minnesota. That is about as close to unanimous as this site sees, and it went the wrong way. None of the 13 Chicago pickers who made a straight outcome call (rather than a score) earned any skill credit for it — Chris Broussard, Greg Jennings, Danny Parkins, Jonas Knox, LaVar Arrington, Colin Cowherd and Bucky Brooks all graded 0 accuracy and 0 skill delta, because picking the home team is the naive default here — there's no reward for group-thinking your way to the obvious pick, and here the obvious pick was wrong anyway.

The one call that got it right

Adam Chudwin picked against his own team. In an August preview that went game-by-game through Chicago's schedule, he wrote plainly: "And then at the Vikings? I think we end up losing that game." That's a Bears preview writer forecasting a Bears loss, on the road favorite that the market and every other pundit we tracked wanted. It graded 100 accuracy and a 200 skill delta — the maximum credit the site hands out, in part because it beat the naive home-team pick (Chicago) that the model measures every call against. Chudwin's overall record is still provisional (3 graded calls, 66.67% accuracy, missedTakesScore of 133.33), but this is the kind of call that record is built on: going against the room and the address on the jersey.

The other call worth separating out isn't a winner pick at all. Bradley Locker, writing for PFF, flagged Carson Wentz as Minnesota's Week 2 starter over the incumbent — "Kevin O'Connell's offense still has questions with Carson Wentz (62.3 PFF passing grade) seemingly in the lineup for at least Week 2" — and that graded 100 accuracy, 194 skill. Minnesota won this one with Wentz under center, which makes the call more than a footnote.

The scores: close on the number, wrong on the winner

Six pundits put an exact score on this game, and every one of them had Chicago winning. The margins tell their own story:

• John Breech: Bears 20-17 — a 3-point Chicago margin. Graded 42.86 accuracy, +16.24 skill, the best of the wrong-side scores.
• Pete Prisco, twice: Bears 30-24 in both a video take and a written slate — a 6-point Chicago margin, which happens to be the same 6-point gap Minnesota actually won by, just flipped. Both graded 50 accuracy and +30.1 skill.
• Trevor Ripley: Bears 30-19, an 11-point margin. Graded 38.1 accuracy, +7 skill.
• Richard Sherman: "I got the Bears winning this game 32-19," a 13-point margin. Graded 33.33 accuracy, -2.24 skill.
• Tony Fusco, in his satirical predictions column: "Bears 69, Vikings 30" — the widest miss of the slate by far, a 39-point margin against an actual 6-point Vikings win. Graded 0 accuracy, -66.9 skill.

Prisco's pair stands out: get the size of the gap right and the accuracy score gives you credit for it even with the winner backwards, which is why his two identical 30-24 calls scored better than the others despite being no closer to correct on the result. His score-prediction record overall sits at 61.8% accuracy across 40 graded calls, so these two land close to his norm rather than defining it.

Track records: interrupted, not broken

Brooks' miss here folds into a game-outcome record that was already thin: 25% accuracy and a -12.5 average skill across five graded outcome calls, well off the 72.73% overall accuracy that has him at No. 9 on our leaderboard — that number is carried almost entirely by his mock-draft work (99 graded calls at 77.56% accuracy), not straight game picks. This was his room's read on Ben Johnson's 5-1 head-to-head coaching record, and it didn't hold.

What it touches beyond this game

Zoom out and the two clubs' season-long credibility looks lopsided already. Every graded call we have on the Bears winning the NFC North has hit (5-for-5, average skill +165.6); every graded call on the Vikings winning it has missed (0-for-8). Playoff-berth calls split the same way — Chicago's are hitting at 84.6% (13 graded), Minnesota's at just 16.7% (6 graded) — while season win-total calls are closer, 63.1% accuracy for the Bears against 81.8% for the Vikings. A 9-3 road win doesn't rewrite any of that on its own, but it's one more data point pointing the wrong way for the room that's been backing Chicago all offseason. Full histories for both clubs are on their team pages — Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings — and the leaderboard tracks who's actually been right about them.