Commanders 33, Seahawks 31: 44 of 45 Graded Calls Picked Seattle to Win

Washington's 33-31 win over Seattle in Week 3 settled 45 graded calls on this site, and the field leaned about as hard as a field can lean. Forty-four of those 45 picked the Seahawks. One picked the Commanders. This wasn't a game the pundits split on — it was a game they got almost unanimously wrong.

The verdict

Of the 39 straight win-loss picks we graded on this game, 38 had Seattle. Of the six score predictions, all six had Seattle winning too. The lone outlier: David Harrison, who called a Washington win over Seattle back on May 18 — months before Sam Darnold's injury situation, Marcus Mariota's start, or Washington's 0-2 hole were storylines at all.

The misses worth naming

The closer to kickoff the calls came, the more confident the Seattle side got. John Middlekauff made the call twice in the final week, writing that Seattle-Washington and Kansas City-Miami "got blowout written all over them" and that Mariota "doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell." Richard Sherman said before kickoff he had "the Seahawks in control of this game for a number of reasons" and expected them to "hold Washington under 10" — and he'd said as much three weeks earlier too, that Seattle would "steamroll" Washington. Colin Cowherd's show called for a blowout of "28 plus to seven." Tom Pelissero framed Washington's whole week around the assumption they'd fall to 0-3 "unless Marcus Mariota plays at an exceptional level." All of it graded as a miss — every one of these calls scored 0 accuracy and took the maximum skill penalty for backing the away team over the home side and getting it wrong.

The six score predictions were all directionally wrong too, but they didn't all miss by the same amount. The final margin was Washington by 2. Here's how close each one got:

Connor J. Benintendi's call was the closest of the six (42.86 accuracy) simply by predicting the smallest Seattle margin — still the wrong side, but seven points closer to reality than the next-nearest guess. Nick Wright's predicted 21-point Seattle blowout was the furthest off, grading out at 4.76 accuracy and a -173.11 skill score.

The one call that landed

David Harrison's Washington pick is the only hit in the batch, and it graded to 100 accuracy — but a skill score of exactly 0. That's not a contradiction, it's the point of the skill number: Washington was the model's naive home-field pick anyway, so calling the home team here earned no credit for insight, just credit for being right. It's also worth knowing what kind of track record that call sits inside. Game-outcome picks aren't Harrison's usual beat — he's built his record mostly on mock-draft and roster-spot calls (225 of his 235 graded takes are one or the other). On the four game-outcome picks he has made, his average skill score is -166.67. This is the one that worked.

Whose record this touches

Middlekauff carries a decent overall record in game picks — 67.42% accuracy across 22 graded calls — and was actually the site's Accuracy Pundit of the Week for this same week (88.89% across six graded calls), so this Washington whiff was the exception inside an otherwise sharp week, not the pattern. Sherman is a stronger-than-average game-picker overall too (73.95% accuracy on 42 graded game-outcome calls), which makes it notable that he took two separate swings at this exact matchup — three weeks apart — and missed both times.

What else this touches

Season-long, the field has undershot Seattle's win total by an average of 5 wins across seven calls tracked for 2025, and missed Washington's by an average of 4.8 wins across eight calls the same season — both teams have been a source of field-wide misses beyond just this one Sunday. For the fuller picture on either club, see the Seahawks and Commanders team pages, and see how this week's callers stack up on the leaderboard.