Panthers 25, Eagles 14: Pundits Picked the Right Team, Not the Right Margin
Drafted by a language model from MissedTakes' graded data, then reviewed and approved by Ben Garves before publishing. How our posts are made
The Carolina Panthers beat the Philadelphia Eagles 25-14 in Week 6, and the field that called the game leaned the right way: 12 of the 20 pundits with a graded pick took Carolina, while 8 sided with the home Eagles. The 23 graded calls this game settled averaged 64 out of 100 in accuracy, but not one score prediction came within single digits of the real gap. Carolina won by 11; the closest call had it by 6.
How did the field split on this game?
Most of the field took Carolina. Game_room's split count, one vote per pundit, has 12 on the Panthers against 8 on the Eagles. That is notable because picking Carolina meant picking against the home team, the same pick the site's own naive baseline would never make. Every pundit who took Carolina to win outright scored 172 on the MissedTakes skill measure for that call, the full credit for beating a coin-flip default on a correct road pick.
The lean toward Carolina showed up well before kickoff. Connor Rogers flagged it as a real disagreement in his picks column on October 16: "Week six, we had two disagreements straight up. Yeah. I took the bears and the Panthers." Shanna McCarriston, writing the same day, built her case on more than a hunch: "A team coming off a bye has never lost to a team coming off an international game, so based on that, the Panthers have the edge. From quarterback to schedule to trajectory, these teams appear headed in opposite directions." Mitchell Eisenstein and Richard Sherman both said simply that they were "rolling with" or giving the game to Carolina.
Who came closest on the score?
Nobody came all that close, but Ed Kracz came closest. His call of Panthers 20-14, filed October 18, put the game's margin at 6 points and missed the real 11-point margin by 5, the tightest of the seven score predictions this game settled.
| Pundit | Score call | Predicted margin (home) | Missed by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ed Kracz | Panthers 20-14 | -6 | 5 |
| John Breech | Panthers 27-24 | -3 | 8 |
| Jordan Dajani | Panthers 23-21 | -2 | 9 |
| Tyler Sullivan | Panthers 23-21 | -2 | 9 |
| Chris Simms | Eagles 17-14 | +3 | 14 |
| Jared Dubin | Eagles 20-17 | +3 | 14 |
| Pete Prisco | Eagles 23-20 | +3 | 14 |
Every score caller who got the winner right still undersold Carolina, by between 5 and 9 points. John Breech had the Panthers covering a wider gap than most at 27-24, writing "PICK: Panthers (+1.5) 27-24 over Eagles," and still missed the real margin by 8. Jordan Dajani and Tyler Sullivan both landed on the identical Panthers 23-21, Dajani calling it an upset pick ("I'll take the upset in Philly") and Sullivan repeating the same 23-21 projection twice, on October 14 and again on October 15.
Who missed the Eagles' collapse?
Eight pundits took Philadelphia, and all eight were wrong about the winner. Chris Simms called it one of his upsets of the week in the other direction, "I'm gonna go seventeen fourteen, Eagles get the win," and missed the final margin by 14. Jared Dubin ("Prediction: Eagles 20, Panthers 17") and Pete Prisco ("Pick: Eagles 23, Panthers 20") landed in the same spot, each 14 points off. Four more pundits, Matt Verderame, Conor Orr, Mitch Goldich and John Pluym, picked the Eagles to win straight up without a score attached; each scored zero, the same credit the site gives for simply defaulting to the home team and getting it wrong. A caller on The Rich Eisen Show podcast had also picked the Eagles back on August 28, nearly two months before kickoff, for the same result.
Did this extend or break anyone's run?
Tyler Sullivan's three calls on this game (two score predictions and a game-outcome pick, all landing on a Panthers win) fit an established record: he carries a 71.6% accuracy mark on game-outcome picks across 35 graded calls this season, well above his 60.3% overall accuracy over 128 graded takes. This game sat right in his strength.
Pete Prisco's miss did not buck his season either. His score-prediction accuracy over 109 graded calls this year sits at 53.4%, and his 30.95 accuracy on the Eagles call is below even that modest level, not an outlier so much as a continuation. John Breech, by contrast, beat his own going rate: his season-long score-prediction accuracy is 53.3% across 107 graded calls, and his 80.95 on this one was one of his better outings.
What this does to the two teams' season calls
Pundits' game-outcome picks involving Carolina have hit at 75% across 24 graded calls this season, well above the 65.5% clip on Philadelphia's 55 graded game-outcome calls, and this result will not narrow that gap. Season win-total calls for both clubs are still too early in the year to settle. For the full ledger on either team, see the Panthers and Eagles team pages, and for how these pundits rank overall, the leaderboard.