Jaguars 22, Bengals 17: Beating the Home-Team Default Paid Off, Picking the Margin Didn't
Jacksonville beat Cincinnati 22-17 in Week 4, and the room that called this game ahead of time leaned the right way. Across every graded winner pick and score prediction we tracked for this one — 30 calls in all, counting one vote per pundit at 26 voices — the field went 16 for the Jaguars and 10 for the Bengals. Jacksonville won. The room's average accuracy on the game settled at 72 out of 100.
That split matters more than it sounds like at first. This was a true road game for Jacksonville, and this site's baseline for a straight winner pick is simply taking the home team — so every one of the 16 Jaguars calls had to beat that default, not just pick the eventual winner. Seven of those road calls — Shanna McCarriston, Mitchell Eisenstein, Richard Sherman, Nick Wright, Danny Parkins, Nate Tice and Christian Rauh — came in during fight week and each scored 183 for it. Two calls made even earlier scored higher still: a John Breech simulation piece from September 16 that had Jacksonville fourth in the AFC playoff field ahead of this matchup (194), and Rich Eisen's August 19 power-rankings call that the Jaguars would go "two and one at the Bengals" (200) — the extra lead time is worth more in this site's scoring, since picking an outright road winner five or six weeks out is a harder claim than picking it the day before kickoff.
Picking the winner was the easy part. Picking the margin was not. Five pundits tied for the closest score call anyone made, all taking Jacksonville by three: Bobby Kownack (Jaguars 30-27), Eric Moody (34-31), Jared Dubin (30-27), Jeremy Pargo (23-20) and Lance Zierlein (27-24) all missed the actual five-point margin by just two. Zierlein's call is notable beyond the number: he's this site's No. 1 overall pundit by MissedTakes Score, and score predictions are a thin part of his record — only two graded calls before this one, at 77 percent accuracy. This one adds a third and keeps that side of his ledger clean.
Not everyone who named a score was close. On the Bengals side, John Breech (34-31), Pamela Maldonado (30-27), Seth Walder (27-24) and Tyler Sullivan (24-21) all missed by eight, and Pete Prisco (23-17) and Gennaro Filice (31-24) missed by 11 and 12 — the widest misses in the room.
The most interesting miss belongs to Breech twice over, for opposite reasons. His September 16 simulation piece had Jacksonville winning this game outright and scored 194. By October 2, in his own game preview, he'd flipped to "the Bengals to win in a battle of 2-1 AFC teams," arguing Trevor Lawrence's struggles against Cincinnati would continue — and that call scored zero, the same as simply taking the home team, which is the floor this site measures against for winner picks. It's not an isolated stumble: Breech's game-outcome record overall sits at 33.85 percent accuracy across 34 graded calls, with an average score of -21.25, so this flip didn't break a hot streak so much as extend a cold one. Two other Bengals-side guarantees also scored zero: Greg Jennings, who put "three chips on the Bengals," and Chad Ochocinco Johnson, the former Bengal who told his audience "it ain't happening this Sunday" for Jacksonville.
Nick Wright's game held up on both ends — the outright pick and the score (Jaguars 28-27, missed by four) both graded as hits. That's a useful data point against an otherwise middling game-outcome record: 60.21 percent accuracy across 162 graded calls, the largest sample of anyone in this piece. One more correct call doesn't change that number much, but it's on the right side of it.
Zoom out and this result leans on bigger storylines for both clubs. Jacksonville came into the year carrying plenty of preseason over-bets — repeat-13-win calls from pundits including Wright and Prisco — while the Bengals had their own believers forecasting 11 or 12 wins and an AFC North title. Several pundits, including Joe Marino, have both clubs down for the playoffs regardless of this result. None of those calls are decided yet, but a road win like this one is easier to square with the Jaguars bulls than with anyone who had Cincinnati running away with the division. For the season-long picture on both franchises, see the Jaguars and Bengals team pages, and for who's actually calling games well this year, the leaderboard.