Ravens 34, Cowboys 31: Three Pundits Called the Margin Exactly, and the Cowboys Homers Missed Again

Baltimore's 34-31 win over Dallas settled 22 graded calls on our board, and the field leaned the right way. Fourteen picks had the Ravens, eight had the Cowboys — not unanimous, but a clear majority, and the majority was right.

The margin, called exactly, three times

Seven pundits put an exact score on this game before kickoff, and every one of them had Baltimore winning. Three landed on precisely the right margin.

Nick Wright said "I think my actual pick for the game is going to be like 24, 21 Baltimore" — wrong on the exact numbers, right on the three-point gap that actually decided it (100 accuracy). Jordan Dajani wrote it as "Ravens 33, Cowboys 30," and Pete Prisco went with the same 33-30 line, adding "I think Jackson rebounds to lead the Ravens to a high-scoring victory." All three scored 100 accuracy for the correct three-point margin.

The rest of the score-pickers had Baltimore right but the gap wrong in one direction or the other: Jared Dubin (31-27, a four-point margin, 97.62 accuracy) and Richard Sherman ("Give me Baltimore. Give me Baltimore. 30-26," also a four-point margin, 97.62) both undersold it slightly; Tyler Sullivan (31-29, a two-point margin, 97.62) undersold it more; and John Breech ("PICK: Ravens 34-27 over Cowboys," a seven-point margin) was furthest off among the winners, at 90.48 accuracy.

The calls that beat the obvious pick

Straight winner picks don't get graded against a coin flip here — they're graded against picking the favorite, and Dallas was the site's naive default in every one of these. That means road-team calls that landed were worth far more than one more voice on the home team, and several of these were made weeks or months out.

Nick Wright, on September 9, built his entire Ravens thesis around this game: "if you guys beat Dallas at home in week three, I just don't see any, it's going to be very hard for you not to start 6-0." Right, and worth the maximum skill credit available for an early, against-the-grain call. Jesse Holley got there even earlier, on September 3, flatly stating "I think they lose in Rio to Baltimore" as part of a Cowboys 10-7 forecast. John Breech called it back on August 19, months before kickoff, naming the Ravens as the team that would hand Dallas its first loss of the season. All three of those picks scored the ceiling on this board.

Closer to kickoff, Tracy Sandler ("I trust their defense"), Carmen Vitali (leaning on "Derrick Henry and the Baltimore Ravens"), Colin Cowherd and Danny Parkins all took Baltimore in the days before the game and were graded as hits.

The misses

Eight pundits took Dallas, all against the road team and all against what happened. Geoff Schwartz trusted the Cowboys "on this weird turf" in Brazil. Michael Irvin picked Dallas twice in early September, once flatly ("Week 3 vs. Baltimore Ravens: W") and once while narrating a hoped-for 3-0 start. Clarence Hill, Jeff Cavanaugh ("I'll say the Cowboys start three and o"), Rich Eisen and Chris Brockman all had Dallas as far back as May, when the schedule first came out.

One case is worth a second look: Danny Parkins picked the Cowboys to win this one back in August, predicting Dallas would start 5-1 "before upsetting the Baltimore Ravens." By late September he'd flipped to "I will take Baltimore over the cowboys" — and that second call is the one that got graded a hit. The record doesn't erase the first pick, but it does show a pundit who moved off a bad August lean before it cost him.

What this does and doesn't tell us about the two anchors

Nick Wright's early, correct read on this game sits inside a much larger sample: 152 graded game-outcome picks at 58.5% accuracy, and — this is the split worth knowing — a 12.5% hit rate on division winners specifically. This call was Wright doing what he's better at (picking single games) rather than what he struggles with (division races), and it landed clean.

Richard Sherman's hit here is a useful contrast to his worst week of the season, when he badly missed on a Seattle pick and also backed Dallas to win its division. Across his tracked record, Sherman's game-outcome accuracy sits at 73.95% over 42 graded calls — solidly above his overall number — which is the case for taking his straight winner picks more seriously than his longer-range ones.

Michael Irvin's two misses here come from a thin, still-developing sample: 12 graded calls overall, with a 60% accuracy rate on game outcomes but a negative average skill score in that category — a sign that when he's picking Dallas games, he's often just picking Dallas.

The bigger picture

This game also touches how believable the season-long Dallas and Baltimore calls still are. Across everyone we've tracked, picks on Cowboys games sit at 24.3% accuracy (68 graded calls), and Dallas playoff-berth calls specifically are running at just 14.3% accuracy with a sharply negative average skill score — a rough two weeks for anyone who bet big on this Cowboys team in the preseason. Ravens game-outcome picks, by comparison, are landing at 52.1% (71 graded).

For the full picture on both franchises, see the Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys team pages, and see how this week moved the leaderboard.