Bears 27, Eagles 7: The Field Picked Philadelphia and Got Buried

Chicago beat Philadelphia 27-7 on Monday night, and the pregame record was about as lopsided as the final score. We tracked 21 graded calls on this game — 11 exact-score predictions and 10 straight winner picks — and 18 of them had the Eagles winning. Three picked the Bears. The Bears won by 20.

The verdict

Every single score prediction we tracked had Philadelphia winning. Every one. The winner-only picks were less unanimous but still lopsided: seven of ten took the Eagles, three took Chicago. Across both pools, 18 calls backed Philadelphia and three backed Chicago — and the three who took the home team were right.

That's not a split decision. That's a field that walked into Soldier Field convinced the Eagles' defense and Jalen Hurts would handle a Bears team playing musical chairs at quarterback, and instead watched Chicago win by three touchdowns.

The calls that landed

The three correct picks all came from people willing to take the home Bears against what Carmen Vitali — one of the eighteen who got this wrong — described before kickoff as a "three and a half road point favorite" line for Philadelphia. Betting the board said Eagles. These three didn't:

• Tracy Sandler, on Sept. 26: "I actually think the Bears are going to win this game... the Eagles almost lost the Titans last week. And they didn't look great. I'm going with the Bears." Graded 100 accuracy.
• Adam Chudwin, from his preseason game-by-game Bears forecast: "Home on Monday night against the Eagles... We start three and o." Also right.
• John Breech, in an Aug. 19 piece on each team's first loss of the season, flagged Philadelphia as the team going down here, reasoning that "[Ben Johnson] thoroughly outcoached Nick Sirianni in that game and it wouldn't be surprising if we see that happen again." Correct.

Worth being straight about what those calls are worth: our scoring compares every pick to a naive baseline that simply takes the home team, and Chicago was the home team here. All three of these picks matched that baseline exactly — each graded a skill value of zero, meaning right, but no better than the free default would have been. Given that the market had Philadelphia favored on the road, betting the house side wasn't the safe play it looks like in hindsight. It just happened to also be the boring one, statistically speaking.

Among the score predictions, all of which missed the winner, Pete Prisco came closest to the actual margin. He called it "Eagles 27, Bears 13" twice — most recently on Sept. 28, arguing "the Eagles will limit the run game and win it behind their defense, with Jalen Hurts having a good day." The margin he predicted was 14 points; the actual margin was 20. Wrong winner, but the closest number on the board.

The misses

Everyone else missed by more. Jared Dubin posted the same call three separate times — "Eagles 23, Bears 10" — with a predicted margin of 13, calling it "an ugly Philadelphia win." John Breech had Eagles 23-16 (margin 7) across two separate pieces. Jordan Dajani and Tyler Sullivan had the tightest predicted margins, 8 and 6 points, and paid for it with the lowest accuracy scores among the score calls. On the outright side, Ty Schmit, Darius Butler, Richard Sherman and Carter Bahns all took Philadelphia outright, with Bahns calling it "a prime spot for the Eagles to improve to 3-0." None of it happened.

What this did to the record book

This wasn't a one-off stumble for Breech — it was the fourth wrong call he's made on this specific game across four separate pieces since mid-August, after his one early correct call. His season-long record reflects the pattern: 93 graded takes, 41.97% accuracy, and a below-replacement MissedTakes Score of -9.1. Prisco, by contrast, sits at 56.18% accuracy and a modestly positive score (6.44) over 61 graded calls — his closest-in-the-building miss here fits a pundit who's been more often right than wrong. Dubin's overall marks (49.4% accuracy, 2.01 score across 45 takes) put him in between. On the other side, Sandler's and Chudwin's correct calls came on thin samples — five and four graded takes respectively — so their perfect-or-near-perfect early marks are a good sign, not yet a record.

Beyond this game, the two teams' bodies of work look different: calls about the Bears we've graded this season average a higher skill score (45.57 across 237 graded takes) than calls about the Eagles (14.96 across 497 graded takes), meaning the field has generally had a harder time getting an edge on Chicago than on Philadelphia. This result won't change either number by much on its own, but it's another data point for pundits still holding season win totals or division picks on these two clubs. For the full picture, see the Eagles and Bears team pages, and the leaderboard for where everyone named here stacks up overall.