Patriots 45, Raiders 17: Even the New England Backers Missed by 20 Points or More
New England's 45-17 win over Las Vegas in Week 5 settled 28 graded calls: winner picks, score predictions, and nothing in the way of starter or availability calls this time. The lean was toward the Patriots, and despite the margin being wrong, the Patriots won.
Sixteen picked New England, nine still liked the Raiders
Counted the way the site's game page counts it, one voice per pundit, 25 people made a call on this one. Sixteen took the Patriots at home; nine sided with a Raiders upset. That's not a landslide; more than a third of the field was willing to back Las Vegas on the road.
The home-team backers were, in the most literal sense, right: every one of them scored 100 accuracy on the winner pick. But picking the home team is also this site's naive baseline, so none of those 16 calls earned any skill credit above zero. Getting the winner right by taking the favorite doesn't beat a coin that always calls the host. Kevin Wildes said it beforehand: "I have confidence in Drake May. I have confidence in the patchwork team that we're putting out in the field because Mike Vrabel believes in next man up. I believe we are going to win the game." He was right, and so was everyone else who said the same thing, which makes it a low bar cleared rather than a feat.
The nine who took the Raiders were simply wrong, and all nine scored zero. Chris Broussard said it flatly: "I am going with the Raiders. The Raiders over New England. I told you, I'm not fully convinced that Drake is back." Richard Sherman was shorter about it: "so give me the Raiders in this game." Both calls graded to a skill score of -178, since picking against the home team and missing costs more than picking with it and hitting gains.
Nobody's score call landed within two touchdowns
Thirteen pundits went further and named a score. This is where the week actually separated the field, because New England's 28-point margin blew through every projection on the board.
Eleven of the 13 score-callers took the Patriots, with predicted margins bunched between 2 and 8 points. John Breech, Shanna McCarriston, Jordan Dajani and several others all landed on a 3-point New England win. The two who named the Raiders, Seth Walder (Raiders 23-22) and Pamela Maldonado (Raiders 23-21), missed the winner too. Across all 28 graded calls this game settled, average accuracy came in at 48 out of 100, below the middle of the scale in a week where the favorite won comfortably.
The sharpest number on the board belonged to Eric Moody, who called Patriots 28-20. His predicted 8-point margin was still 20 points light of the actual one, but it was the closest anyone got, and it's the only score call in this set that scored positive skill (+4.24) rather than landing flat at the baseline. Picking the right side and describing the game that actually happened turned out to be two different skills this week.
A flip that landed on the wrong side
Rich Eisen is the one name that shows up on both sides of this game. In August, previewing the Raiders' October slate, he said of Las Vegas: "They're not gonna win a single one of those," correctly implying a Patriots win. By late September he'd reversed himself, arguing New England wouldn't win again until Week 8: "I don't see a win there until week eight." That second, more recent call is the one that counted for this game, and it scored zero accuracy and a skill mark of -189, the worst of any Raiders backer this week, made heavier by how early he published it, 16 weeks out from a settled result.
Against his full body of work, that one call barely moves anything. Eisen's graded outcome picks sit at 60.89 accuracy with a skill score of -0.62 across 86 calls, already close to a coin flip before this one, so the miss fits his usual range rather than standing out from it. Seth Walder's score predictions otherwise run at 56.82 accuracy with a positive skill score of 12.3 across 25 graded calls, which makes his Raiders-upset call here look more like a one-week slip than his normal form. Eric Moody, for all the caution a 27-take sample deserves, has built a 70.4 accuracy mark on score predictions specifically; this one adds to that run instead of breaking it.
What the blowout leaves hanging
This result doesn't settle anything about the rest of 2026, but it leans on a few live disagreements. Preseason win-total calls on New England ranged from Chris Broussard's 9-8 to Mark Wahlberg's 14-3; a result like this one is more evidence for the high end than the low one. On the Raiders' side, calls ranged from Nick Wright's 3-14 at the bottom to Chris Brockman's 10-win optimism; a 28-point home loss doesn't help the optimists' case. And of the division-winner calls tracked for these two clubs, every one on the board backs New England to repeat as AFC East champion; none back Las Vegas to win a division this season.
For the season-long picture on both clubs, see the Patriots and Raiders team pages, and check the leaderboard to see how this week moved the pundits who called it.