Cowboys 34, Texans 30: The Room Picked Houston's First Win and Got Burned
Dallas beat Houston 34-30 in Week 4, and the room leaned the wrong way. Of the 27 pundits we tracked making a live call on this game — one voice each, latest pick standing — 17 took the Texans to finally get a win. Ten took the Cowboys. Dallas won.
That 17-10 lean wasn't unreasonable on its face: Houston was the home team and, per the previews we tracked, a winless club overdue for a win. It just happened to be backwards. Across all 31 graded calls this game settled — winner picks and score predictions alike — the room's average accuracy came out to 50, a coin flip's worth of signal on a game that wasn't actually that close to call.
The calls worth naming
Four pundits didn't just pick the winner, they called the exact four-point margin. Chris Simms went on the record with real specificity: "I'm gonna take the cowboys in a low scoring one, really. I'm gonna go twenty one seventeen... Twenty one seventeen cowboys." Eric Moody (Cowboys 23-19), Jeremy Pargo (Cowboys 24-20) and Tyler Sullivan (Cowboys 27-23) all landed on the same margin. None of them had the final score right, but margin is what the grading rewards here, and all four scored 100 accuracy for it.
Sullivan's game deserves a closer look because he didn't just call it once. He took the Cowboys in a score prediction on September 30, then again in a separate outcome pick on October 1 ("This is a bad vs. bad matchup between the Cowboys' defense and the Texans' offense... I think I'm going to give the ever so slight edge to Dallas, especially if Houston wideout Nico Collins (hamstring) is out or limited"), then a third time on October 2. All three landed. Picking the Cowboys as the true road underdog — Houston was the naive, home-field pick in our grading — is worth more than one more voice on the favorite, and it shows: his outcome-pick skill score on this one came in at 183, far above his season average of 31.95 across 20 graded outcome calls.
The dots above show every score call's predicted margin against the final. Above zero is a Texans win; the final margin sat at -4, a Cowboys win by four. The closest calls bunched right on the mark; the ones that missed worst weren't close at all.
The misses
Gennaro Filice took the biggest L of the group: Texans 28-17, an 11-point home margin that missed the actual result by 15 and graded out to 33.33 accuracy, his worst score call of a thin 16-take sample we have on file for him — worth treating as a lean rather than a trend either way.
The conviction misses stung more than the numbers did. Chad Ochocinco Johnson didn't hedge: "guarantee you the Texans win this game. And it's nothing against the Cowboys... the football gods aren't going to allow them to be 0-4." They were. Richard Sherman pegged it as the game for C.J. Stroud to "find his rhythm" and get Houston a win — zero on both counts. Shannon Sharpe was blunter still: "y'all going to lose this week," aimed at Dallas. Joe House wanted Houston by "three or four" without laying the points himself — he got the three or four backwards, in the wrong team's favor.
Pete Prisco also missed, picking Texans 24-18 (46.24 accuracy on the call), which extends a mixed season on this prediction type — his score-call accuracy sits at 59.22 across 76 graded picks, so this was in line with, not a departure from, his normal results.
Beyond this one game
The result lands on top of two season-long storylines we've been tracking. Houston was a popular preseason pick to win the AFC South — in one CBS Sports staff poll, the Texans drew more division-winner votes than any other team in the exercise — with win-total calls clustered in the 10-to-13-win range. A loss to a Cowboys team several pundits had pegged for a losing record makes that preseason confidence look shakier than it did in August. Dallas, meanwhile, was widely picked to win the NFC East outright, and this result does nothing to undercut that case.
For the season-long record on both clubs, see the Cowboys and Texans team pages, and for who's actually calling games well so far, the leaderboard.