Packers 17, Buccaneers 14: The Road Favorite Covered, and Most of the Room Called It
Green Bay beat Tampa Bay 17-14 in Week 4, and the pre-game record on this one was lopsided before kickoff: 22 graded calls settled by the final score, and the room leaned hard toward the Packers.
The verdict
Counting one voice per pundit — the same tally the game page runs — 18 people had an opinion on the winner. Fourteen took the Packers. Four took the Buccaneers. The favorite the room backed covered, but not by much: Green Bay won by three, and the field's median predicted margin (4 points) landed almost exactly on the actual one.
That's a comfortable consensus call, not a unanimous one, and it's worth separating from a coin flip. Tampa Bay was playing at home, which means the site's naive default — just pick the home team — pointed at the Buccaneers. Anyone who called Green Bay instead was already betting against that baseline, and the five pre-game winner picks on the Packers that graded out — Bill Huber's final call, Connor Rogers, Eric Cohen, Nate Tice and Matt Harmon — all scored 183 on our skill measure, well clear of what picking the home team would have earned on its own. Harmon's reasoning was about as bare as a take gets: "I guess I have to pick the Packers on this one just because I do think I know, like, I know their quarterback can beat this secondary." It worked.
The calls worth naming
Thirteen pundits put a number on the final score, and the sharpest of them belonged to Pamela Maldonado, who called Packers 20-17 — a predicted margin of Packers by 3, which is exactly what happened. That's a missedBy of zero, the only one in the group. Dan Parr (Packers 21-17) and John Breech (Packers 20-16) were a point off the margin, and Jacob Westendorf — who predicted a near-exact squeaker, "Packers will squeak by, setting up a showdown next week with Chicago," with a score of Packers 14-13 — missed the margin by 2 despite picking a game that close.
The misses, named plainly
Four pundits in the counted split took Tampa Bay, and among the outlets we track, none of the overs delivered. Richard Sherman was flattest wrong, calling it outright for the Buccaneers — "Give me Tampa Bay. Give me the old Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Mitchell, in this one" — with no winner-margin cushion to fall back on. Jeremy Pargo (Buccaneers 17-16) came within 4 points on the final tally despite picking the wrong side, and Bobby Kownack and Seth Walder each missed by 6, with Tampa Bay final scores of 24-21 and 23-20 respectively. None of those four beat the home-field default, since Tampa Bay was already the "free" pick.
Track records: a flip that paid off, and a near-miss record
Bill Huber's involvement in this game is really three calls stacked across a month, and the shape of it is a pundit changing his mind in the right direction. Back on September 13, with 18 weeks left on Green Bay's schedule, Huber picked Tampa Bay to beat the Packers — graded a miss. After Green Bay's 35-14 home loss to Atlanta, he revised his outlook on September 26 and kept the same pick, another miss. Then, in the week of the actual game, he flipped: both an October 3 and an October 4 piece had him on the Packers, and both graded out at 100% accuracy and that same 183 skill score. His final-score call, though, was the widest miss among everyone who had the winner right — Packers 16-6 missed the actual margin by 7 points. Across his tracked record, Huber's outcome-pick accuracy sits at 62.5% on seven graded calls, well below the 100% he's posted on the 52 roster-spot calls that make up most of his sample — a reminder that his strength on this site has been roster calls, not picking winners.
Pamela Maldonado's exact-margin call is the standout of the week, but it's worth noting against her broader record: she's graded at 55.27% accuracy across a small, still-developing sample of 17 calls, including 60.54% on score predictions specifically. This one was about as good as that record gets.
Beyond this one
Zoom out and the two clubs' season-long calls tell different stories. Among graded winner picks this season, Buccaneers backers have hit only 36.2% of the time; Packers backers have done a little better at 45.6%, still shy of a coin flip. Division-winner calls on both teams have been close to futile (7.4% for Tampa Bay, 7.7% for Green Bay), while playoff-berth calls on the Packers have gone 100% so far — a case this loss does nothing to dent, and one Tampa Bay's thin playoff thinking just got harder to defend. For the full season arc on both sides, see the Packers and Buccaneers team pages, and check who's actually been right all year on the leaderboard.