# Packers 17, Buccaneers 14: The Road Favorite Covered, and Most of the Room Called It

*Published 2026-10-05 — MissedTakes*

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.

![Green Bay drew 14 of 18 picks](/posts/visuals/3f2ed010-5f1a-4e35-af99-12eaac3cde3c.png)

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](/pundits/bill-huber)'s final call, [Connor Rogers](/pundits/connor-rogers), [Eric Cohen](/pundits/eric-cohen), [Nate Tice](/pundits/nate-tice) and [Matt Harmon](/pundits/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](/pundits/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](/pundits/dan-parr) (Packers 21-17) and [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech) (Packers 20-16) were a point off the margin, and [Jacob Westendorf](/pundits/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.

![Every predicted margin against the final score](/posts/visuals/fa25f4cb-8359-4e6c-93a0-5d96f4ecea5b.png)

## 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](/pundits/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](/pundits/jeremy-pargo) (Buccaneers 17-16) came within 4 points on the final tally despite picking the wrong side, and [Bobby Kownack](/pundits/bobby-kownack) and [Seth Walder](/pundits/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](/pundits/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](/nfl/teams/packers) and [Buccaneers](/nfl/teams/buccaneers) team pages, and check who's actually been right all year on the [leaderboard](/nfl/leaderboard).