Titans 26, Colts 20: Only Four Pundits Had Tennessee Winning

The Tennessee Titans beat the Indianapolis Colts 26-20 in Week 6, and the pundits we track were lopsided the other way. Of the 35 voices with a graded call on this game, only four picked Tennessee. We graded 42 calls on the matchup in all, winner picks and score predictions combined, and the average accuracy across them was 29 out of 100.

How many pundits picked the Titans?

Four. Gennaro Filice, Dan Graziano, Mike Kadlick and Gilberto Manzano were the only ones of the 35 tracked pundits whose final call on this game had Tennessee winning; the other 31 took Indianapolis. The Titans had been held under a touchdown the week before and were playing on the road against a divisional opponent, which is presumably why so much of the field leaned Colts. It didn't matter: Tennessee won by six.

A pundit who simply defaults to the home team every week would have taken the Colts here and been wrong, since every graded outcome pick in our system is checked against that exact baseline. That makes the four Titans picks worth more than a plain tally suggests, and it's a big part of why the misses outnumber the hits by so much in the overall numbers.

Who called Tennessee's upset?

Gennaro Filice's score prediction for NFL.com was the sharpest pre-game call on this game. He wrote simply, "Gennaro Filice: Titans 14, Colts 13," on October 16, built around the idea that Tennessee's defensive front would contain Jonathan Taylor. His predicted home margin of -1 was the closest of any score call to the actual -6, missing by 5 points, and the pick graded to 88.1 accuracy with a skill score of 90.1, the best mark of anyone who named a score in this game.

Dan Graziano's ESPN pick was simpler, just "Dan Graziano: Titans," filed October 16, but it graded a perfect 100 accuracy with a skill score of 172, the full reward for beating the home-team default. That call stands out against the rest of Graziano's record: across his four graded calls tracked on the site, he's hit once and missed three times, for 25 percent overall accuracy. This was the hit.

Tyler Sullivan is a more complicated case. On October 15 he wrote that "it won't shock me if Tennessee finally gets into the win column this weekend ... it's more of a play against their opponent, the Indianapolis Colts," and that outcome pick for the Titans graded 100 accuracy and a skill score of 172. But Sullivan also filed a separate score prediction that week, Colts 24-20, which missed; across his 128 career graded calls he's more reliable picking winners (71.6 percent accuracy) than picking scores (59.9 percent), and this game split the difference exactly that way.

Which score predictions missed worst?

Jake Arthur's call was the widest miss of the twelve pundits who named a score, projecting a 34-16 Colts blowout, a predicted home margin of 18 against an actual margin of -6, 24 points off. Mike Florio wasn't far behind. On October 14 he wrote that "the Colts should move to 3-3 this weekend with a home game against the 0-5 Titans," then followed with a 27-10 score call that missed by 23 points and graded a skill score of -20.5. Across his 17 career graded score predictions, Florio is a weak 42.6 percent accurate; this one didn't help.

Here is every pundit who put a score on the board for this game, measured against the actual home margin of -6 (Colts points minus Titans points):

What does this result touch beyond Week 6?

Tennessee's win doesn't erase a thin season-long record for either club among the calls we track. Graded season win-total calls on the Titans this year average 50 percent accuracy on a small sample of four, while the Colts' graded win-total calls average 45 percent on four. Playoff-berth calls look worse for Indianapolis specifically: 8 graded calls on the Colts reaching the playoffs average just 12.5 percent accuracy, and all 9 graded division-winner calls on the Colts have missed outright. Those are small, early-season samples, and one Week 6 result doesn't settle them, but a Colts loss to a team that came in winless doesn't make any of those calls easier to defend. For the fuller picture on both clubs, see the Titans and Colts team pages, and the pundit leaderboard for how this week's callers stack up overall.