49ers 24, Broncos 14: Picking the Winner Was the Easy Part
San Francisco beat Denver 24-14 at Levi's Stadium in Week 4, and on paper this looks like a shrug of a result: the big majority of the room took the 49ers, the 49ers won, nothing to see. Dig into the 27 graded calls we tracked on this game — from 25 different pundits — and the story is really about what separated the room once everyone agreed on the winner.
The verdict on the field
Of the 25 pundits who put their name on this game, 18 took the 49ers and 7 took the Broncos — a lopsided 72-28 lean, and the right one.
That's not much of a surprise by itself. San Francisco was unbeaten and at home; Denver was the road underdog. But the site's scoring treats "pick the home favorite" as the naive default, which means every one of those 18 straight winner picks on the 49ers graded out at zero skill — matching the baseline, not beating it. Shanna McCarriston, Jared Dubin, John Middlekauff, Richard Sherman, Danny Parkins, Nate Tice and Matt Harmon all picked San Francisco straight up and all scored a flat 0 — credit for being right, no extra credit for being obvious. The separation in this game came from the margin, not the winner.
The calls worth naming
Fourteen pundits put a final score on this one, and the final margin — 49ers by 10 — sorted them cleanly.
Tied for closest: Chris Simms, who said on air, "I'm going 40 niners twenty seven nineteen, at home, and they go to four and o," and Jared Dubin, who wrote "Prediction: 49ers 24, Broncos 16." Both had the 49ers winning by 8, two points off the actual 10-point margin, and both were rewarded for it — Simms scored 95.24 accuracy and a skill delta of +30.5, his best kind of outing after a shakier overall record on score calls (52.21 accuracy, -5.72 skill over 39 graded picks this season). Dubin matched him exactly.
Right behind them, John Breech (49ers 31-24, off by 3) and Pete Prisco (49ers 28-21, also off by 3) each scored 92.86 accuracy and +26.14 skill. For Breech specifically, that's a clear step up from his season-long score-prediction line of 51.26 accuracy across 76 graded calls — this was one of his better reads, not his normal output.
Worth a separate mention: two pundits, Cody Rourke and Sayre Bedinger, had already written this specific result into season-long outlooks back in July, with Rourke noting "you and I predicted the same exact losses at the 40 Niners" as part of a 13-4 Broncos forecast. That leg of a long-range call landed clean.
The misses, by name
Five score predictions backed Denver, and all five missed by a wide margin because the loser they picked wasn't just wrong on the number — it was wrong on the winner. Jordan Dajani called it twice, both times "Broncos (+3) 24-23," off by 11 and graded at 28.57 accuracy with a skill delta of -91.5 each time — a rough night against his season-long score-call average of 52.7 accuracy. Gennaro Filice (Broncos 24-22) and Tyler Sullivan (Broncos 23-21) each missed by 12. Jeremy Pargo (Broncos 16-13) and Pamela Maldonado, who framed her pick as "Denver upsetting the unbeaten 49ers" with a 27-24 call, both missed by 13 — a clear outlier for Maldonado, whose score predictions have otherwise run 60.54 accuracy across 15 graded calls this year.
The sharpest misses, though, came from two straight winner picks on Denver. Greg Auman picked the Broncos to hand San Francisco its first loss of the year, calling it "a potential get-right game" for Denver — wrong, and because it bucked the favored side outright, it graded at 0 accuracy and a skill delta of -183, a steep one-game dent in an otherwise 75%-accuracy season on outcome picks. Greg Jennings made the same call ("I got two chips on the Broncos... I think they get it done") and took the same -183 hit, extending a tougher year for him on game calls overall (43.75% accuracy on outcome picks, 36.05% across everything graded).
Track records in context
None of this was a first for the names involved. Breech and Prisco both do this every week and landed above their own seasonal baselines here; Dajani and Maldonado both do too, and landed below theirs. The two biggest misses — Auman and Jennings — came from pundits who don't call many single-game outcomes in a given week, so one call this wrong moves their record more than it would for a high-volume picker.
What it touches next
Plenty of preseason win-total calls on these two clubs are still live. Several pundits pegged Denver anywhere from 11 to 13 wins this year; a loss like this one doesn't settle those calls, but it's one more data point against the high end of that range. On the other side, a run of 49ers calls clustered in the 9-to-11-win band now look conservative against a team still unbeaten after four weeks. Full team-by-team context is on the 49ers and Broncos pages, and the season-long picture for every pundit named here is on the leaderboard.