Giants 36, Cardinals 24: 17 of 19 Pundits Picked Arizona, and the Room Got Blown Out
New York beat Arizona 36-24 in Week 4, and almost nobody saw it coming. We tracked 21 graded calls tied to this game — winner picks, final-score predictions, and one starter call — and when you count one voice per pundit, the room split 17-to-2 for the Cardinals. The Giants won by 12.
The verdict
Nineteen pundits put their name on a winner before kickoff. Seventeen took Arizona. Two — Tom Pelissero and Conor Orr — took New York. The room's meanAccuracy on this game came out to 34, and the median call had the Cardinals winning by five and a half points. The Giants won by twelve. That's not a split decision that broke the wrong way; it's a field that was almost unanimous and almost entirely wrong.
Worth noting: neither of the two correct picks beat the field's own baseline for doing nothing. The site's naive default on this game was simply "take the home team," and Pelissero and Orr did exactly that — Pelissero calling the matchup one of New York's "winnable" games even with a backup quarterback, and Orr, back in an August preseason projection, pegging this as the Giants' only win before their Week 8 bye. Both calls graded as hits, and both scored zero on skill, because picking the favorite and being right isn't the same as adding anything the baseline didn't already have. The reward here belongs to the result, not to any contrarian nerve.
The calls worth naming
Patricia Traina made the most specific case for the upset, picking Arizona 23-17 and citing "New York's red-zone drought and the loss of the RPO game with Jameis Winston replacing the injured" starter. Chris Simms was blunter on air: "I think that the Arizona Cardinals, yeah, battle back here and win this game... I got the Cardinals winning, twenty-three twenty." Richard Sherman kept it to a sentence — "Yeah, I think Arizona wins this" — and Chris Long went further: "Once the Giants lose to the Arizona Cardinals this week... I really like the cards in this game." All four were wrong, and none of them hedged.
Among the score predictions, Dan Parr came closest, calling Cardinals 21-19 — a six-point swing off the actual margin but still 14 points off the final, the tightest miss in the room. At the other end, Seth Walder's "bold prediction" of Cardinals 29-6 missed by 35 points, by far the widest gap anyone posted on this game.
One call did land clean: John Breech wrote before the game that "Winston will almost certainly be the starter for New York's Week 4 game against Arizona" while Jaxson Dart recovered — a confirmed, correctly called starter pick that scored a perfect 100 and added real skill value (+189), since it went against what the naive default would have assumed. Breech also predicted a 20-17 Cardinals win in his score picks that same week, which missed. Same pundit, same game, two different kinds of call — one a reporting call he nailed, the other a betting-style score guess he didn't.
Track records
Pete Prisco took Arizona twice in our data for this game — a 24-21 pick that ran in two separate pieces — and both landed as misses. It's a blemish on an otherwise respectable season of score-calling: Prisco is hitting 59.22% accuracy across 76 graded score predictions this year, so this was a bad week, not a bad year.
Walder's 35-point miss here is the extreme outlier against his own record too. Across 15 graded score predictions this season he's accurate 58.67% of the time; this call dragged his skill number for the week well below that norm.
Breech's split result actually fits a pattern. His season line shows a stronger hand at depth-chart calls (75% accuracy) than at score predictions (51.26%) or straight winner picks (33.85%) — so a hit on who starts and a miss on who wins is, if anything, the form holding.
Pelissero's overall record is strong — 82.36% accuracy, good enough for fifth on our overall leaderboard — but his specific history on game-outcome picks is thin and unremarkable: three graded calls, two of them zero-skill favorite picks and an average skill score of -63. This game added another favorite pick to that pile, not a breakthrough.
What it touches next
Zoom out and the pattern holds beyond this one game. Arizona's graded game-outcome picks are 0-for-5 this season — every straight-up call on the Cardinals the field has made has missed, and three of those misses came this week. New York's outcome picks, by contrast, are hitting at 75% across 16 graded calls this season, even if the skill number on those (-48.5 on average) shows most of them are safe, favorite-leaning calls rather than anything that beat the odds. Anyone still writing off this Giants team, or still trusting a Cardinals pick on the road, has a growing body of evidence working against them. For the season-long view, the Cardinals and Giants team pages carry the full picture, and the leaderboard shows who's actually been worth following this year.