Lions 45, Cardinals 21: Underestimated the Blowout
Detroit beat Arizona 45-21 in Week 5, and on the question of who would win, the pundits we track were about as close to unanimous as this sport allows. On the question of by how much, every single one of them was off, and not by a little.
We tracked 24 graded calls tied to this game: winner picks, final-score predictions, and one depth-chart call on who'd be starting at quarterback for Arizona. Across the pundits who weighed in with one voice each, 18 picked the Lions and exactly one picked the Cardinals. The field's average accuracy on the game came out to 67.
The one dissenter stood alone, and lost
That lone Cardinals pick belonged to Tyler Sullivan, who flagged Arizona as a Week 5 upset candidate, arguing "the Detroit Lions simply cannot be trusted as a road favorite with their current defense" and that Arizona had "enough playmakers on offense to take advantage of the Lions' poor defense." Detroit scored 45. Sullivan's call scored zero accuracy, a notable miss set against a career mark of 59.61% accuracy on 109 graded calls overall and 70% specifically on game-outcome picks. This was the exception, not his typical Sunday.
Sullivan's case is messier than one bad call, too. Four days earlier he'd also filed a score prediction with the Lions winning 33-30, and the week before that, another Lions score call. His last word on the matchup, published closest to kickoff, was the Cardinals upset pick, and that's the one that counts for the split.
The hits beat the obvious pick, not just the scoreboard
Several pundits picked Detroit outright, which only ties the naive default of taking the home team, except Detroit was the road team here, so every one of those Lions picks was actually a call against that default, and graded accordingly. Richard Sherman said flatly, "So your Detroit Lions, I think, win this game comfortably. I think they score 35-plus points," a call that graded 100 accuracy, same as several others who read it the same way. Connor Rogers, Big Cat and Mitchell Eisenstein all landed in the same spot: picked Detroit on the road, graded 100.
Mike Florio got there earliest. Back on September 18th, well before Week 5 kickoff, he wrote that the Lions' "next three before the bye are objectively winnable: Jets, at Panthers, at Cardinals," projecting Detroit to 4-1. That call graded 100 accuracy for this game alone, and it sits inside an overall 73.54% accuracy mark across 32 graded calls this season, so it's not an outlier for him.
On the scoring side, nobody came close to the real margin, but some came closer than others. Gennaro Filice called Lions 42-24, landing just 6 points off the final margin, the nearest of the 13 pundits who named an exact score. Emmett Matasovsky, writing the day before kickoff, predicted Detroit would clear 35 points outright: "My prediction has Detroit with 37 points, so I will stick with yes, they will." Detroit scored 45, and that call graded 100 accuracy.
Everyone undersold the rout
That chart is the real finding of this one. All 13 score predictions had the Lions winning. The closest came from Filice at 18 points, the widest gap belonged to Jordan Dajani, who had Detroit by just 2 and ended up 22 points off. The final margin was 24. Not one predicted gap reached it. The field diagnosed the right winner and badly undersold how one-sided it would be.
John Breech is worth a specific mention because he shows up twice in very different lights. His Labor Day predictions column, filed over a month before kickoff, had Detroit winning this exact game as part of a full-season sweep that graded a maximum 100 accuracy. His Week 5 score prediction, filed four days out (Lions 30-23), graded a more modest 59.52%. Across his full body of work this season, 136 graded calls, Breech sits at 52.05% accuracy, so this game gave him both one of his best calls of the year and a fairly ordinary one in the same week.
One starter call also settled here: Donnie Druin wrote that Jacoby Brissett would stay Arizona's starting quarterback into this game despite a three-interception showing the week before, and that held.
What this result leans on
Arizona came in at 1-3, and the preseason win-total calls we've tracked on the Cardinals ran bleak, with predictions as low as 3-14 and 2-15 sitting alongside a few calls for the team to clear last year's three-win mark. A 24-point loss doesn't contradict any of that. Detroit, meanwhile, drew a long list of preseason and in-season picks to win the NFC North; this win doesn't settle that case, but it does nothing to hurt it. Both clubs' full records, and the pundits who've called their seasons, are tracked on the Lions and Cardinals team pages, alongside the overall leaderboard.