Broncos 23, Chargers 17: Right About the Winner, Overthought the Blowout

Denver's 23-17 win over Los Angeles settled 34 graded calls on this game, split across winner picks, final-score projections, and the Chargers' first-win hopes. Taken together, those calls averaged 82 accuracy points out of 100, a strong week for the group as a whole, which usually means the hard part wasn't picking the winner. It was the number.

Five Pundits Took the Upset, and All Five Lost

Thirty-one pundits named a side before kickoff, one call per voice. Twenty-six of them took Denver. Only five, Eric Mangini, Nick Wright, Mike Kadlick, Benjamin Solak and Pete Prisco with an exact score, backed the winless Chargers to finally get one. None of them did.

That's not really a split so much as a consensus, and the consensus was right about who won. Mangini called it "a surprise upset win" for Los Angeles; Wright said the Chargers "might get their first win of the year, buddy"; Solak wrote he "would not be surprised at all if they win that game." Kadlick went further, expecting the Chargers "to finally put a complete game together and perhaps even come out with a win." All four were betting against a Denver team that, by Sunday, had reasserted itself as the better side in this matchup for a second straight season.

One Pundit Hit the Margin on the Nose

Nineteen pundits attached an exact score to their call, and the gap between the sharpest and the sloppiest of them was wide. Tyler Sullivan projected Broncos 26-20, a six-point Denver win, and the final was Broncos 23, Chargers 17, also a six-point Denver win. His predicted margin matched the actual margin exactly, the only score call in the group to do so.

Three more calls missed by just a single point: Gennaro Filice (Broncos 23-16), John Breech (Broncos 27-20) and Jordan Dajani (Broncos 27-20). On the other end, several pundits had the right winner but treated it as a rout: Adam Malnati (Broncos 33-12) and Sadaraine (Broncos 34-17) each missed the margin by double digits. Picking Denver here wasn't the hard part. Guessing how competitive the Chargers would stay was.

The game-outcome calls carried extra weight because the home team was the Chargers, meaning anyone who simply defaulted to the home side would have taken Los Angeles and lost. Ralph Vacchiano, Richard Sherman, Mitchell Eisenstein and Connor Rogers all picked Denver anyway and were scored well above that baseline for it. So were the earliest calls in the batch: Cody Rourke and Sayre Bedinger each predicted this specific Denver win back on July 24, months before the season started, as part of full-season forecasts that had the Broncos going 4-2 to open the year. Calling a single Week 5 result correctly from training camp is a different kind of difficult than calling it the Tuesday before kickoff, and both were graded accordingly.

A Score That Landed on the Right Numbers and the Wrong Team

The strangest result in the group belongs to Pete Prisco, who picked "Chargers 23, Broncos 17," the exact two numbers that actually came out of Sunday's game, just assigned to the wrong side. He got partial credit for the closeness of the guess (50 accuracy) but the winner call still missed, leaving him with the week's largest margin error among the score predictions: his projected Chargers-plus-six became an actual Broncos-minus-six, a 12-point swing. It's consistent with where Prisco sits overall, a 58.49 overall accuracy and 56.85 on score calls specifically across 95 graded predictions, a middle-of-the-pack record rather than a pundit coming off a hot streak.

Sullivan's exact-margin call, by contrast, beat his own typical output: his score predictions have run 61.37 accuracy across 64 graded calls, so Sunday's perfect hit was better than his own baseline, not just the field's. Vacchiano's correct outcome call pushed his game-outcome record to 3-for-3, though that's still a small, developing sample of five graded calls overall.

What This Adds to the Division Picture

Across every Chargers game-outcome call we've graded, accuracy sits at just 19.2 (52 graded calls), with the field actually losing ground against the naive baseline on those picks. Denver's game-outcome calls have fared much better, at 71.8 accuracy across 85 graded calls. The gap isn't new: pundits collectively undershot Denver's 2025 win total by 5.1 wins across six tracked calls, and Sunday's result, the Broncos handling a still-winless Chargers team on the road, fits the same shape the field has drawn on this division all year. For the season-long calls still in play on both clubs, check the Broncos and Chargers team pages, and see who's actually earned trust so far on the leaderboard.