# Bills 37, Rams 34: The Crew Picked the Opposite of the Final Score

*Published 2026-10-13 — MissedTakes*

Buffalo beat Los Angeles 37-34 on Monday night, and the 41 graded calls we tracked on this game average out to an accuracy of 49 out of 100, close to a coin flip, which is about right for a game the field leaned one way on and the result went the other.

## Most of the field took the Rams. The Bills won.

Among the 33 pundits who made a winner pick on this game (one vote per person, their final call standing), 22 sided with the Rams and 11 took the Bills. The Rams were the home team and the default pick, the one you'd land on by doing nothing more than favoring the host, so the lean wasn't a reach. It just didn't hold up.

![Most of the field took the Rams. The Bills won.](/posts/visuals/20dd5a9c-1d9e-4b0b-a3ad-f89bf4d153a0.png)

The score calls point the same direction. Eighteen pundits attached a specific final score to this game, and the median one had the Rams winning by three points. The Rams lost by three. The typical score prediction wasn't just wrong about the winner, it was the exact mirror image of what happened.

## Three pundits called the final margin exactly

Three of the 18 score predictions landed on Buffalo winning by precisely three points, which is what happened.

[Derek Brown](/pundits/derek-brown) wrote: "31-28, Bills. I just think Josh Allen has one of those Josh Allen games." [Jordan Dajani](/pundits/jordan-dajani) had it as "Bills (+3) 30-27 over Rams." [Pat Fitzmaurice](/pundits/pat-fitzmaurice) called "Bill's 34, Ram's 31." All three were graded at 100 accuracy, and because each one picked the road team over the game's default home pick, each also scored well above a plain winner call, a skill value near 100.5 apiece, versus zero for anyone who simply took the favored home side and lost.

A few more pundits got the winner right without naming a score. [John Green](/pundits/john-green) wrote a piece titled "Three Reasons Bills Will Steal Primetime Win from Rams on Monday Night Football," built on Josh Allen's history against Los Angeles. [Ryan Wormeli](/pundits/ryan-wormeli) called a Bills win "by at least 10 points." [Blaine Grisak](/pundits/blaine-grisak) had the Rams dropping to 2-3 on the week. All three picked the winning side against the field's lean and scored the full upset credit for it.

And three pundits called this specific matchup back in May, months before the season started. [Michael Brockers](/pundits/michael-brockers), going game by game through the Rams' schedule, wrote: "But if I had my pick on this game, I would say this is where the Rams lose." [Rob Bushka](/pundits/rob-bushka) and [O'Shea Jackson Jr.](/pundits/o-shea-jackson-jr) did the same. All three were right five months out.

## The Rams backers, including one who missed by 24

[Steven Ruiz](/pundits/steven-ruiz) picked this as a Super Bowl matchup back in September and wrote: "Score prediction: Rams 38, Bills 17." He missed the actual margin by 24 points, and it graded to an accuracy of 7.14 with a skill value of -72.75, the single worst number tied to this game.

[John Breech](/pundits/john-breech) backed the Rams three separate times across the week: a preseason pick in August that the Rams would end Buffalo's unbeaten run, a score prediction on October 6, and "John Breech's pick: Rams 38-31 over Bills" on October 12. All three were wrong.

Most of the Rams pack fell somewhere in between. [Pat McAfee](/pundits/pat-mcafee) said simply, "I like the Rams," and [Darius Butler](/pundits/darius-butler) bet on "Matt Stafford has the bigger day than Josh Allen." Because the Rams were already the default home pick, missing with them cost these voices nothing beyond matching the field, their skill value came back at zero rather than negative. The three-point final margin made plenty of the specific Rams scores close without being right: Pete Prisco's "Rams 34-33" missed the actual margin by four points on both of his tries.

![The typical score call was the final margin, flipped](/posts/visuals/7e85ea99-d30d-4a72-88b2-83d711c72cb6.png)

## What this extends, and what it doesn't

A single game rarely rewrites a record, and these three don't. Fitzmaurice sits fourth on our overall leaderboard with an accuracy of 67.4 across 126 graded calls, most of them mock-draft work; this hit adds to a thin three-call sample in score predictions specifically. Derek Brown, tenth on the board overall (63.47 accuracy, 109 graded calls), now has three score predictions on the books and has been right on all three. Dajani's score-prediction form over 60 graded calls sits at 53.37 accuracy, closer to a coin flip than his performance here suggests, which is why the larger sample matters more than one Monday night. Ruiz's miss is one of only ten graded calls in his record, and it's the only score prediction in it, a single bad number carrying outsized weight in a small body of work.

## Season calls on both clubs just got a little harder to square

Season win-total calls on both clubs have been a mixed bag so far: among the graded calls we've tracked, Rams win-total predictions average 60 accuracy and Bills win-total predictions average 77.5, both on small samples of eight or fewer graded calls. A win like this doesn't settle those bets, but it adds weight to whichever side guessed higher on Buffalo and lower on Los Angeles. For the fuller picture on both clubs and where the rest of the field stands, see the [Rams](/nfl/teams/rams) and [Bills](/nfl/teams/bills) team pages, and the [leaderboard](/nfl/leaderboard) for how these pundits rank once more of the season is graded.