Steelers 34, Colts 22: Pete Prisco Landed Within Two Points While Six Pundits Backed Indianapolis
Pittsburgh beat Indianapolis 34-22 in Week 5, and the pundits we track settled 21 graded calls on the game: winner picks and final-score predictions from 19 different voices. Most of them had this one right. A third of them didn't.
A third of the field still had the Colts
Game Room's one-voice-per-pundit count puts it at 13 for the Steelers and 6 for the Colts. Pittsburgh winning by 12 means the 13 were right about the side, but six pundits, including three who committed to specific scores, sent Indianapolis into Acrisure Stadium as the pick. None of them were close.
Pete Prisco's 33-23 came within two points
Among the score predictions, nobody beat Pete Prisco's call of Steelers 33-23, a 10-point home margin that missed the actual 12-point final by just 2 (accuracy 95.24, the best skill score of the night at 38.66). That's a clear step up from his season-long season-long rate on score predictions, where he's hitting 58.17% accuracy across 90 graded calls with a modest 15.29 skill score. This one was sharper than his typical outing.
Behind him, a cluster of pundits landed Steelers calls within five to six points of the final margin: Jordan Dajani, Pamela Maldonado, Seth Walder and Tyler Sullivan all called a 7-point Steelers win with different exact scores (missed by 5 each), and Gennaro Filice's Steelers 22-16 missed by 6. Bryan DeArdo took Pittsburgh 24-20, a 4-point margin that missed by 8 but still beat his own recent run in this category, where his three graded score calls carry a negative skill score (-22.65) overall.
Three pundits, Jack Markowski, Chris Long and Richard Sherman, called Pittsburgh to win without a score attached. Sherman's version ("I begrudgingly take the Pittsburgh Steelers in this one") and Long's ("So I got I got the Steelers here. I I I do think it's a Steelers spot") both graded 100 accuracy, but with zero added skill. Picking the home team is the system's own default expectation here, so getting it right earns credit only when the margin or the underdog gets called too.
The Colts calls that didn't come back
Four pundits predicted an Indianapolis win with a specific score, and all four lost. Brooke Cersosimo had Colts 25-24 (accuracy 23.81, skill -88.48), Bobby Kownack had Colts 26-24 (accuracy 26.19, skill -84.25), John Breech had Colts 22-19 (accuracy 28.57, skill -80.01), and Jared Dubin published the same call twice across two separate pieces, "Prediction: Colts 20, Steelers 16" (accuracy 30.95, skill -75.77 on each).
Two more pundits called Indianapolis to win outright with no score attached, and both took the worst skill hits of the night. Connor Rogers wrote, "I don't only take them to cover. I'll take the Colts to win" (accuracy 0, skill -178). Brent Sobleski had written days earlier that "the Colts could easily win their next two contests against the Pittsburgh Steelers and Tennessee Titans" (accuracy 0, skill -183), the single worst grade of anyone on this slate.
For Rogers, that's a clean break from form: his 20 other graded game-outcome calls carry 81.14% accuracy, a strong number even accounting for a sample still building toward a full season. This was the one that didn't land.
What it leaves open for both clubs
Before the season, the win-total calls on Pittsburgh ranged widely, from Chris Broussard forecasting the Steelers' "first losing season since 2003" to several pundits landing on 9-8 or thereabouts. A Week 5 win doesn't settle that argument, but it's a data point in the other direction. On the Colts side, calls like John Breech's 7-10 projection and Moe Moton's 5-12 projection remain very much alive after this loss.
For the season-long picture on either club, see the Steelers and Colts team pages, and check the leaderboard for how this week's callers stack up across everything we've graded.