# Steelers 30, Bengals 27: The Field Went 0-for-13 on Cincinnati

*Published 2026-09-29 — MissedTakes*

Pittsburgh beat Cincinnati 30-27 in Week 3, and the pundits who called this game beforehand didn't see it coming — not one of them. We've graded 13 calls tied to this result, a mix of straight winner picks and full score predictions, and every single one had the Bengals winning. The Steelers' 30-27 home win didn't just beat the underdog pick. It beat the entire field.

## A unanimous miss

Thirteen for thirteen on Cincinnati is the headline here, and it's the rare kind of split that isn't really a split at all. The default, low-effort pick in any game is the home team — that's literally the baseline our skill score measures against — and the "naive" call for this one was Pittsburgh. Every pundit we tracked went the other way, against the built-in home-field edge, and lost. That's not a case of the field being cautious and getting burned by an upset; it's a field that talked itself into a Bengals win from several different angles and got none of it right.

Some calls were about as confident as this site sees. [Danny Parkins](/pundits/danny-parkins) put his full weight behind it: "I'm going eight chips. Eight. Big bet on the Cincinnati Bengals… I expect this to be the first statement game of the year for the Bengals." [Chad Ochocinco Johnson](/pundits/chad-ochocinco-johnson) was just as sure: "They finna get this work… Who they think they gonna beat these Bengals?" [John Middlekauff](/pundits/john-middlekauff) made essentially the same case in two separate appearances, on September 25th and again on the 26th: "the only way I see Cincinnati not winning this game is like it's going to have to be one of those banana Steelers defense do crazy shit." The Steelers' defense, or at least enough of the rest of the roster, did exactly that.

## The score calls: closest margin, still the wrong team

Seven pundits went further and put a number on it. None had Pittsburgh winning, so all seven missed the winner — but the margins separate the close calls from the wild ones. [Bryan DeArdo](/pundits/bryan-deardo) predicted Bengals 20, Steelers 17, a three-point game that turned out to be exactly right in size, just pointed the wrong way; that got him the highest accuracy of the group (50, with a skill score of -83.11) because the model gives real credit for nailing the margin even when the winner is wrong. Everyone else was further off. [Jordan Dajani](/pundits/jordan-dajani) (Bengals 23-16), [Tyler Sullivan](/pundits/tyler-sullivan) (27-20) and [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech) (27-20) each had Cincinnati by 7, good for 40.48 accuracy apiece. [Colin Cowherd's](/pundits/colin-cowherd) show and [Pete Prisco](/pundits/pete-prisco) both had the Bengals winning by 10 (33.33 accuracy), and [Jared Dubin](/pundits/jared-dubin) was the furthest out, calling Bengals 24-10 — a 14-point margin that turned into the group's worst score grade (23.81 accuracy, -132.61 skill).

![Score Predictions: Points Off the Final Margin](/posts/visuals/7b094a7c-7fa7-4fa1-935b-90f74bda01f7.png)

[Richard Sherman](/pundits/richard-sherman) and [Geoff Schwartz](/pundits/geoff-schwartz) kept it simple with straight winner picks on Cincinnati, as did Johnson, Parkins and Middlekauff's pair of calls — five outcome picks in all, each one graded a flat zero with a -189 skill score, the standard penalty for missing a pick against a home-team baseline.

## What this does to their records

Middlekauff's two calls here both count against him, since they were published as separate takes on separate days — one opinion, double the damage. It's a dent, not a crater: his game-outcome record now sits at 67.42% accuracy across 22 graded calls, still comfortably his best category next to mock drafts. Sherman's outcome-pick record is stronger still at 73.95% over 42 graded calls, so one more miss barely moves him; his game-score line separately sits at 68.99% over 23 grades. DeArdo is a different case — only nine graded calls to his name across all categories, so his 50-accuracy score prediction here and an earlier perfect outcome call don't yet add up to a real trend either way.

## The bigger picture

This result also lands on top of two very different season-long stories for these teams. Playoff-berth calls on the Steelers have gone 100% right so far across 29 graded picks — a perfect record that a 2-1 start, now with a road-tested comeback over Cincinnati, does nothing to dent. Bengals win-total calls, by contrast, have been rough: just 32.5% accuracy across eight graded calls this season, with the field's calls landing well short of reality on average. A unanimous miss like this one is exactly the kind of data point that widens that gap.

For the season-long view of both teams, see the [Pittsburgh Steelers](/nfl/teams/steelers) and [Cincinnati Bengals](/nfl/teams/bengals) pages, and check the [leaderboard](/leaderboard) to see how this week moved the overall standings.