Giants 27, Commanders 27: Pundits Split, Like the Tie That Beat Them All
New York and Washington played to a 27-27 tie in Week 5, and the 17 graded calls we tracked on the game turned out to be a tidier test of punditry than most finals. Nobody called the deadlock outright. The closest anyone came was simply failing to pick a winner strongly enough to be wrong.
An even split, with no side to vindicate
Game room counts one voice per pundit, and on this one the field broke exactly in half: eight picked the Giants, eight picked the Commanders. With the game ending level, that split was less a disagreement than a coin that never landed. Nobody was proven right, and nobody was made to look foolish for picking a side.
Across all 17 graded calls the average accuracy came in at 61, a number held up mostly by the four pundits who only picked a winner rather than a score. Since the game ended tied, every one of those outcome-only calls, Richard Sherman and Tom Pelissero on the Giants, Conor Orr and David Harrison on the Commanders, graded as a push: 50 accuracy, zero skill. None of them beat the naive pick, because there was no winner to correctly call. Sherman, for what it's worth, said before kickoff only "I got the Giants in this game," going against the market's lean toward Washington; it didn't cost him anything, but it didn't earn him anything either.
Three calls within two points, and still no winners
Twelve pundits went further and named an exact score, and that's where the game got unkind. The projected home (Commanders) margin that would have actually won the week was a sliver above zero, the kind of near-pick-'em number the site's naive baseline uses, because the real margin was zero. Three pundits landed closest, missing by just two points apiece: Dan Parr (Giants 23-21), Jeremy Pargo (Commanders 20-18) and Pete Prisco (Giants 26-24). All three still finished with negative skill scores (-4.75 apiece) for one simple reason: the naive guess of the Commanders by less than a point came even closer to 27-27 than they did. Nobody who projected a score beat the baseline. That's the whole field.
The misses
The rest of the score calls spread out behind them. Bobby Kownack (Giants 17-14) and Gennaro Filice, Jordan Dajani and Tyler Sullivan (all Commanders 26-23 or thereabouts) missed by three. Brooke Cersosimo (Commanders 25-21) and Eric Moody (Giants 24-20) missed by four. The two furthest off were John Breech (Giants 23-16) and Pamela Maldonado (Giants 24-17), each off by seven, and Seth Walder's Commanders 24-16 missed by eight, the widest gap of the 12 and the week's weakest score call at -30.18 skill.
What this does and doesn't say about the pundits involved
Walder's miss here drags down an already thin ledger: across 28 graded calls he sits at 48.64% accuracy with a provisional record, and this game's score prediction was one of his worse ones even within a score-prediction line (56.82% accuracy over 25 graded calls). Prisco, by contrast, is a high-volume score-caller, 90 graded score predictions, 58.17% accuracy there, and his 70.24 on this one actually sits above his own average, even though the skill math marks it negative. And Sherman's neutral grade here sits inside a strong outcome-picking record (66.99% accuracy on 69 graded game-outcome calls), so a tie that gives him neither credit nor blame barely moves a record built mostly on actually picking winners.
Beyond this one game
New York's tie arrives in the middle of a season where several pundits, including Danny Parkins and Chris Brockman, repeatedly called the Giants the team to beat in the NFC East; Washington's, meanwhile, sits inside a win-total range that ran from Nick Wright's preseason 5-12 finish at the bottom of the division to David Harrison's 10-7 playoff call built partly on sweeping New York. A level game against each other doesn't resolve either thread, but it doesn't help the sweep plan. For the season-long picks on both clubs, see the Giants and Commanders team pages, and for how these pundits stack up across everything we've graded, the leaderboard.