Lions 31, Jets 24: John Breech's Exact Score Beat a Field That Mostly Got This Right
Detroit beat New York 31-24 in Week 3, and the pregame record on this one wasn't close. Of the eight graded calls this game settled, seven picked the Lions to win. Only one voice took the Jets outright — and it cost him.
The verdict: lopsided, and lopsided was right
This wasn't a coin-flip game as far as the pundits were concerned. Five score predictions and three outright winner picks all landed on the board, and six of those eight got the winner right. The one holdout, Kevin Wildes, took New York "straight up," reasoning that "you know who doesn't have a good defense? The Detroit Lions." The Lions scored 31 anyway. His pick graded to 0% accuracy and a skill score of -189 — a call that lost not just to the result but badly to the naive default of picking the home favorite.
That's the asterisk worth putting on the six correct favorite picks, too. Mike Florio and Henry McKenna both had Detroit winning game outcomes and both graded to 100% accuracy — but with a skill score of exactly 0. The site's scoring measures whether a call beat the naive pick of "the home team wins," and taking Detroit at home against a beatable opponent doesn't clear that bar on its own. Getting the winner right here was table stakes; the separation came from the score predictions.
The calls worth naming
Five pundits went further than "Detroit wins" and put a number on it, and the spread in how they did tells the real story of this game.
John Breech wrote "Lions 31-24 over Jets" — the exact final score. That graded to 100% accuracy and a skill score of +29.39, the best call this game produced.
Pete Prisco was next closest: "Pick: Lions 28, Jets 23," a five-point margin against an actual seven-point margin, good for 95.24% accuracy and a skill score of +20.39.
Richard Sherman had Detroit "winning this game. 24 to 21" — a three-point margin, four off the actual result, grading to 90.48% accuracy and +11.39.
Tyler Sullivan projected "Lions 33, Jets 21," a 12-point margin, five off the mark: 88.1% accuracy, +6.89.
Colin Cowherd was the outlier among the correct picks: "The Detroit Lions are going to put 37 on the board. It's going to be 37-13. The Lions win in dominant fashion." Detroit won, but not like that — the predicted 24-point margin missed the real seven-point margin by 17, and the call graded to 59.52% accuracy and a skill score of -47.11, the weakest of anyone who had Detroit winning.
The miss
Wildes's take stands alone as the game's actual whiff, and there's no fairer way to put it: he called for New York's defense to expose Detroit and it didn't happen. The Jets lost by seven.
Track records: who this extends, who this interrupts
For Kevin Wildes, this wasn't a fluke stumble. His outright game-winner picks now stand at 13 graded calls hitting 31.25% of the time with an average skill score of -31.31 — this loss fits a pattern rather than breaking one.
Colin Cowherd has made 77 graded score predictions and averages 62.41% accuracy with a modest positive skill score of 1.65. This week's -47.11 sits well below that personal baseline — a rough outing within an otherwise decent sample, not a new low for him.
John Breech, by contrast, has struggled with exact scores overall — 55 graded score predictions average just 44.72% accuracy and a skill score of -16.33, meaning his typical score call actually grades worse than doing nothing special. This week's dead-on 31-24 is the exception that makes his ledger look better, not the rule.
What else this touches
Detroit's win keeps alive a preseason consensus that was already crowded: in one CBS Sports staff poll, eight of fifteen voters picked the Lions to win the NFC North before Week 1, and Detroit's over on 10.5 wins was a favorite bet for several pundits dating back to the offseason. New York's preseason outlook was already grim by comparison — win-total calls from John Breech (6-11), Nick Wright (4-13, twice), Moe Moton (5-12), Nate Tice (5-12) and Matt Harmon (5-12) all had the Jets near the bottom of the league, and this loss does nothing to complicate any of those calls.
For the full ledger on both teams, see the Detroit Lions and New York Jets team pages, and check where this week's callers stack up on the leaderboard.