Buccaneers 43, Panthers 13: Ten of Ten Pundits We Tracked Had Carolina

How did the pundits split on Buccaneers-Panthers?

They didn't. All 10 pundits whose calls we graded for this game took the Panthers to beat the Buccaneers in Week 7. Tampa Bay won 43-13, outscoring Carolina by 30 points at home for the Panthers, and every one of those 10 calls came back wrong. The 11 graded takes this game settled (one pundit, The Rich Eisen Show, is on record twice with the same call) averaged an accuracy of just 1 out of 100, about as thorough a miss as a slate of picks can produce.

Which score prediction came closest?

Pete Prisco's was the tightest number on the board, and it still missed by 31 points. Prisco picked "Panthers 24, Bucs 23," a one-point Carolina margin, before the game. The next four score calls only drifted further from what actually happened:

Every one of those five picked the home team to win, which was also the default pick for this matchup. None of them beat that baseline, so each winner call scored zero on our skill measure regardless of how the score itself graded. Sherman and Simms salvaged a little credit from their margins anyway: Sherman's score call graded out to 11.9 accuracy with a skill addition of 19.88, and Simms's to 2.38 accuracy with a skill addition of 3.98. Prisco, Breech and Sullivan's score calls scored zero on both measures.

Who went furthest out on Carolina?

John Middlekauff put it most directly on October 23: "I don't like the Panthers. I love the Panthers... So I'm really high on Carolina this week." Mitchell Eisenstein leaned on the Panthers' quarterback two days earlier: "I like Bryce Young to take care of business... Give me Carolina." Connor Rogers took the same side with the least conviction of the group, calling it "a lower confidence pick for me." All three scored zero once Tampa Bay won by 30.

Andrew Hughes took the opposite angle on the Buccaneers rather than the Panthers directly, arguing on October 19 that Tampa Bay was built for a teardown and facing "an 0-3 stretch right before the trade deadline" starting with Carolina. The Buccaneers' 43-13 win was the first result to test that theory, and it failed; it's also the only graded call on Hughes's record with us so far.

Did this extend or break anyone's run?

Richard Sherman's miss stands out because it runs against his form. Across 35 graded score predictions, Sherman's accuracy sits at 75.8%, one of the stronger marks on the site for that call type; this one, at 11.9 accuracy, was a sharp step down from his usual range. Pete Prisco and John Breech, by contrast, were closer to business as usual: Prisco's score-prediction accuracy over 132 graded calls is 56.6%, and Breech's over 126 is 57.27%, so a zero-accuracy score call from either one lands inside a pattern they've shown before rather than outside it.

What does this do to the Panthers' and Buccaneers' season outlooks?

Carolina came into Week 7 as a frequent pick to win the NFC South. Mike Florio wrote on October 13 that the Panthers "could win the division by default, again," and Conor Orr said after Carolina's prior win that he felt "better about my Panthers winning the, uh, NFC South pick." A 30-point home loss to a divisional opponent doesn't settle that question, but it complicates it. Tampa Bay, meanwhile, had preseason win-total calls ranging from John Breech's 7-10 forecasts to Nick Wright's 11-6 pick atop the division; a 43-point output argues for the higher end of that range. Both clubs' full season outlooks, and every pundit's record behind them, are tracked on their Panthers and Buccaneers pages, alongside the overall leaderboard.