Colts 30, Commanders 13: The Favorite Covered, the Margin Humbled the Room
Indianapolis beat Washington 30-13 in London, and the result settled 24 graded calls — winner picks, score predictions and one pre-draft projection about the Commanders' season. Rich Eisen called it in May. Most of the room caught up by October. Almost nobody caught up to the margin.
The room leaned Colts, and the room was mostly right
Counting one voice per pundit — the way the site's Colts-Commanders game page counts it — 17 pundits took the Colts and 4 took the Commanders. That's not a split so much as a landslide, and the favorite delivered.
Where the room struggled was magnitude. Fifteen pundits put a number on the final score, and the median call had Washington losing by four points. Indianapolis won by 17. The field's average accuracy on this game settled in at 63 out of 100 — a passing grade for picking the right team, a mediocre one for describing what actually happened on the field.
The sharpest calls
Three pundits didn't just take the Colts — they took them over a Commanders team the model treats as the automatic, no-information default pick, since Washington was the nominal home side. Beating that baseline is what the site's skill number measures, and all three did it perfectly.
Rich Eisen picked the Colts back on May 13, nearly five months before kickoff: "Colts and commanders in London. Commander. No. I'm with you too. Colts." Graded 100 accuracy. Chris Long got there two days before the game: "I do give the edge to the Colts, and, you know, I think there there could be points in this game." Also 100. Mitchell Eisenstein hedged on his reasoning but not his pick: "I like the Indianapolis Colts, but I totally get why you like the Commanders here." Also 100.
Among the pundits who put real numbers on it, Eric Moody came closest, projecting Colts 31-23 — a 9-point edge for Washington's margin that still missed by 9 once the final buzzer sounded. Nobody nailed the blowout; the next-closest calls, from Gennaro Filice, Jake Arthur and John Breech, all missed by 10.
The misses
Four pundits took Washington, and all four lost the call outright. Richard Sherman went with his gut two days out: "Heaven, I got to go with the commanders. They made me a believer." Graded zero — exactly what the model's naive, pick-the-home-team default would have scored, since that's also what Sherman picked.
David Harrison and Chris Brockman had the Commanders back in May, both as part of broader season calls rather than game-day analysis — Harrison folding it into an eight-win path for Washington's 2026 season, Brockman with a one-word pick during a league-wide predictions run. Both scored zero on this game, the same as Sherman. Among the score-prediction crowd, Jeremy Pargo was the only one to back Washington, projecting a 24-20 Commanders win that turned into the week's worst score grade in the group (19.05 accuracy).
Does this fit their record?
Sherman's miss here isn't a departure from form. His game-outcome calls have graded out at 66.82 accuracy across 44 graded picks — a pundit right about two times in three — so one wrong pick on the Commanders moves that number, but it doesn't reverse it.
Pete Prisco, who took the Colts twice in high-scoring calls (31-30, both times), graded 61.9 accuracy on his final one — almost identical to his 63.97 average across 61 graded score predictions. Nothing unusual there: a typical Prisco score call, right side, wrong shape.
Rich Eisen's call is the one worth remembering longest. His overall record runs 464 graded takes across every kind of NFL prediction the site tracks, including 75 graded game-outcome picks at 65.97 accuracy. A May call on a Week 4 London game, made before most of the field had even started writing about it, fits neatly into a pundit who's been more right than wrong on these for a while.
What else moves
The result leans one way on two sets of preseason calls. Washington's floor looked shaky to several pundits before the season — Nick Wright had the Commanders finishing last in the NFC East at 5-12 more than once, and John Breech put them at 7-10 — and a 17-point home loss in October doesn't make those numbers harder to believe. On the other side, Danny Parkins picked the Colts to win the AFC South outright on five separate occasions over the summer, often noting "I'm anticipating not a lot of people picking them." A 30-point output in London is the kind of evidence that argument needed.
For the season-long picture on both clubs, see the Commanders team page and the Colts team page, and for who's actually been right across the whole slate, the leaderboard.