# Broncos 17, Seahawks 14: The Field Picked Seattle 31-2

*Published 2026-10-17 — MissedTakes*

*Drafted by a language model from MissedTakes' graded data, then reviewed and approved by Ben Garves before publishing.*

The Denver Broncos beat the Seattle Seahawks 17-14 on Thursday night in Week 6, and the pundits we track did not see it that way. We settled 49 graded calls on this game, and the overall numbers were rough: an average accuracy across those calls of just 23 out of 100.

### 31 pundits picked Seattle. Two picked Denver.

Counting one voice per pundit, the way our game page does, 33 people made a call on the winner. Thirty-one took the Seahawks. Two took the Broncos. That is about as lopsided as a split gets, and it broke the wrong way for the crowd: Denver, the home team, won by a field goal.

![31 of 33 pundits picked the team that lost](/posts/visuals/c79ab2e3-d469-4655-97ac-9c7a65c0cf5e.png)

This wasn't a case of the Seahawks being an obviously better team on paper and the result flipping a coin. Denver was already the side the site's own baseline would pick by default (home field with no other information), so the 31 who took Seattle weren't just going against the final score, they were going against the simple home-team pick too.

### Jeremy Brener's 22-20 and the lone hit

Of the ten people who published an actual score, only one had Denver winning: [Jeremy Brener](/pundits/jeremy-brener), who wrote "Jeremy Brener: Broncos 22, Seahawks 20." The final was 17-14, a three-point Denver win, so Brener's margin of two points for the home side missed by just one point, the tightest call on the board. He also beat the plain pick of the home team, since the naive home-field margin here was close to a pick-them-both-ways push: by naming a Denver number that actually resembled the final margin, he picked up a positive skill score (+6.91) rather than the zero he'd have gotten for just taking the favorite.

The other correct winner call belonged to [Pamela Maldonado](/pundits/pamela-maldonado), described on our site as "the lone pick for the home team: Maldonado takes the Broncos over the Seahawks." Her pick was a bare winner call with no margin attached, which is exactly what the home-field default would have told her anyway, so it scored full accuracy but no skill credit above that baseline. Two pundits broke from the field. One of them also beat the baseline that catches everybody else who just takes the favorite.

### The 31 who had Seattle winning

Everyone else is a version of the same story, with different margins. [AJ Hawk](/pundits/aj-hawk) said flatly, "I think they win by seven or 10." [Chuck Pagano](/pundits/chuck-pagano) kept it simple: "I'm taking I'm taking Seattle on this one." [Connor Rogers](/pundits/connor-rogers) leaned on Seattle's defense, saying "I think Seattle wins this game by at least a field goal." None of the three put a score down, so each is graded on the winner alone, and each came back at zero.

Among the ten who did name a score, the misses stacked up by how far off the final gap of three points landed them: [Jordan Dajani](/pundits/jordan-dajani)'s Seahawks 23-20 missed by 6, [Chris Simms](/pundits/chris-simms)'s 20-16 and [Randy Gurzi](/pundits/randy-gurzi)'s 24-20 and [Russell Baxter](/pundits/russell-baxter)'s 18-14 all missed by 7, [Tyler Sullivan](/pundits/tyler-sullivan)'s 24-19 missed by 8, [Pete Prisco](/pundits/pete-prisco)'s 23-17 missed by 9, and [Jared Dubin](/pundits/jared-dubin)'s 24-16 missed by 11. The two widest misses came from [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech), whose Seahawks 27-17 call missed by 13, and [Richard Sherman](/pundits/richard-sherman), who said on air, "I got the Seahawks winning this game and scoring some points because they're still eighth in the league in scoring. 27. Let's go. 24. 24 to 13," a call that missed by 14.

![Only one scored margin landed inside a touchdown](/posts/visuals/7a6031f0-0b01-493e-8deb-fedec3243eb9.png)

### The pundit who called it, then talked himself out of it

Breech's miss is worth a second look, because he is also the only pundit on this list who flagged this exact matchup as a problem spot for Seattle months in advance. Back in August, a CBS Sports piece on which teams would lose their first game of the season named "Seahawks (First loss: at Broncos in Week 6)," and a separate piece the day before picked the same outcome, writing "If the Seahawks are going to slip up early in the season, this feels like the most likely spot." Both calls were graded correct. When Thursday actually arrived, though, his live score pick flipped to Seahawks 27-17, the second-widest miss in the field. Breech carries an established record of 143 graded calls at 51.94% accuracy, so this isn't a hot or cold streak so much as his normal range, but it's an odd pair of outcomes for the same matchup: right from a distance, wrong up close.

Brener and Maldonado sit at the other end on thinner samples. Brener's record is still provisional at 9 graded calls (82.94% accuracy overall), and his two graded score predictions now average 98.81% accuracy. Maldonado has 34 graded calls at 54.22% accuracy overall, with her game-outcome picks sitting at just 2-of-4 correct including this one, a modest record that happened to catch the result everyone else missed.

### What it means beyond Thursday

This result fits a wider pattern we've tracked in game-outcome picks this season: calls on Seahawks games have landed at just 40.5% accuracy across 163 graded picks, with an average skill score of -58.37, well below simply picking the favorite each week. Broncos game-outcome calls, by contrast, sit at 72.7% accuracy across 88 graded picks. Seattle's loss in Denver didn't come out of nowhere for the field's broader numbers on this team, even if almost no one saw it landing this particular week. For the two clubs' full records, see the [Seahawks](/nfl/teams/seahawks) and [Broncos](/nfl/teams/broncos) team pages, and for how these and other pundits stack up across every type of call, the [leaderboard](/nfl/leaderboard).