Vikings 23, Saints 13: One Pundit Called the Exact Score for the Wrong Team

Minnesota beat New Orleans 23-13 in Week 5, and the pundits we track settled 26 graded calls on it, from 25 separate voices, covering who would win and what the final score would be. The average grade across all of them came out to 70 out of 100, which is a decent week for the field as a whole. The detail is more interesting than the average.

Minnesota Was the Popular Pick, and It Held Up

Counting one call per pundit, the way the game page does, 17 took the Vikings and 8 took the Saints. The Vikings, who were unbeaten coming in, won by 10, so the majority was right and nobody can claim this one split opinions 50-50. Among the 15 pundits who projected a score, the typical call had Minnesota winning by 3. The Vikings won by 10, so even the pundits who had the right winner mostly undersold how comfortable it would be.

Pete Prisco Got the Closest, and the Early Calls on Minnesota Held Up Best

Pete Prisco had the tightest score of anyone who guessed numbers for this game, calling it Vikings 24-17, four points off the actual spread between the teams and the closest miss in either direction. Jordan Dajani was next, projecting a 20-14 Minnesota win. Nine more pundits, including Trevor Ripley, John Breech and Tyler Sullivan, all landed on a 3-point Minnesota win with different exact scores, and Brooke Cersosimo had it at 23-21.

The sharper story is in the straight winner picks. Picking the home team is the default anyone could make without watching a snap, so a correct road pick is worth more than one more vote for the team already favored by geography. Several pundits took Minnesota on the road and beat that baseline: Adam Carlson argued "Minnesota has some clear advantages over New Orleans that should make the difference in this weekend's game," Jason Harmon wrote that "the Vikings should be able to remain undefeated if the offense can actually move the ball," and Richard Sherman, asked if the Saints could knock off the unbeaten Vikings, answered flatly: "No, I do not." Ross Jackson had this result locked in since mid-May, writing in a full game-by-game Saints projection that he had New Orleans "dropping their October 11 week five game up against the Minnesota Vikings," five months before kickoff.

Four Saints Scores Missed, and One Flipped the Final Number Onto the Wrong Team

Four pundits picked New Orleans, and none of them came close with their scores. Gennaro Filice had Saints 21-20, Jeremy Pargo had Saints 17-16, Bobby Kownack had Saints 20-17, and Pamela Maldonado had Saints 23-17. The furthest off, by score, was Seth Walder, who wrote a bold prediction that "the Saints will win by double digits" and picked Saints 23, Vikings 13. Those are the exact final numbers, 23 and 13, just assigned to the wrong sideline. It is the kind of call that looks sharp and wrong at the same time.

Three more pundits took New Orleans to win outright with no score attached, and all three missed: Connor Rogers wrote "I took the Saints," Tyler Sullivan flagged New Orleans as one of his upset picks for the week, and podcast co-host Mitchell Eisenstein said "give me New Orleans in this game." Since the home team was already the chalk pick, missing on it cost them nothing beyond the loss itself, no bonus for going against type, no penalty beyond being wrong.

What This Game Did to Three Records

Walder's reversed score sits close to his season line on score calls: 56.82 accuracy across 25 graded predictions this year, with this one grading at 50. It is a thin sample by the site's own standard, 28 graded calls overall and still a provisional record, so one unusual miss does not say much on its own, but it does not look out of character either.

Prisco's 24-17 call, by contrast, graded well above where he usually sits. His score predictions have run to 58.17 accuracy across 90 graded calls this season; this one came in near 93, a clear outlier on the strong side for a pundit the field generally treats as steady rather than sharp.

Rogers' miss is the one with the most to say. His outright winner picks have hit at 81.14 accuracy across 20 graded calls this season, among the better outcome-picking runs we track, and this Saints call drops into that file as one of the rare wrong ones rather than a pattern.

Season Calls That Just Got Harder to Square

Minnesota took the field unbeaten and stayed that way, which keeps alive the preseason calls that put the Vikings near the top of the NFC North, while making the lower calls, like a 7-8 or 9-8 finish floated back in the offseason, look increasingly shaky. New Orleans, meanwhile, has preseason win totals ranging from the mid-single digits up past 10 wins, and a loss like this one leans toward the pessimists. Full team-by-team detail lives on the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints pages, and the leaderboard tracks how the pundits named here are doing across everything they've called this season.