Steelers 16, Saints 10: 17 of 20 Pundits Had Pittsburgh, None Predicted the Low Score
Drafted by a language model from MissedTakes' graded data, then reviewed and approved by Ben Garves before publishing. How our posts are made
The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the New Orleans Saints 16-10 in Paris in Week 7, and the pundits mostly had the winner right: 17 of 20 voices we tracked took the Steelers before kickoff. None of them predicted how low the score would stay. Twenty-four graded calls settled this one, and the nine pundits who named an exact score all guessed a combined total well above the 26 points that actually went up on the board.
How many pundits picked the Steelers to win in Paris?
Seventeen of 20 pundits took Pittsburgh, three took New Orleans, and Pittsburgh won. That's the split game_room counts the same way the game page does, one vote per pundit even when someone weighed in more than once. Across all 24 graded calls the game settled, winner picks and score predictions together, the field averaged an accuracy score of 84 out of 100. That number is carried almost entirely by the lopsided winner split; only nine pundits named an exact score, and their calls fared worse than the simple "who wins" picks did.
Whose score call came closest to 16-10?
Bryan DeArdo and Tyler Sullivan each missed the final margin by a single point, the closest anyone got. DeArdo called it Steelers 27, Saints 20, writing: "I like the Steelers in this game as long as they take care of the ball and make enough plays in the red zone." Sullivan had Steelers 30, Saints 23, in both of his Week 7 score columns. Pittsburgh's actual six-point margin landed one point shy of what each of them predicted.
What neither got close to, and nobody else did either, was the scoreboard itself. The nine score calls ranged from a projected 37-point combined total (John Breech and Mitchell Eisenstein, both Steelers 20-17) up to 53 (Sullivan and Pete Prisco's 27-26). The actual total was 26. Every single score prediction overshot it by at least 11 points, in a game that turned into a defensive slog nobody had budgeted for.
Who picked the Saints, and what happened to them?
Three pundits sided with New Orleans, and all three scored a zero. Jourdan Rodrigue said before the game: "I think I would guess the Saints are underdogs in this game. And I think that the Saints will win this game." Sam Monson went with his gut over the record: "I'm going with the Saints because, as I've said before, just can't quit them no matter how bad the record is." TJ Jefferson made the same call back in May. A zero here isn't a call that did worse than simply defaulting to the home team, it effectively was the home-team default, and the Saints lost at home.
How does this fit each pundit's season so far?
DeArdo's hit keeps an already strong record intact. He sits atop the overall leaderboard with a 92.49 accuracy mark across 22 graded calls this season (a small sample the site flags as limited), and his score-prediction accuracy by type is 84.76 across five graded calls, a number this call actually beat. Sullivan's hit is more notable for being above his norm: across 154 graded calls this season he's an established 63.02 accuracy overall, and his score predictions specifically average 62.92 across 101 graded calls, well off the mark he hit in Paris.
The missed takes (wee what I did there?) only add confusion to who should be trusted on winner picks. Monson's miss fits a pattern: his 13 game-outcome calls this season average just 41.67 accuracy, part of an overall 53.33 mark across 14 graded calls. Rodrigue's miss looks more like the exception: her pure game-outcome picks run hot at 91.67 accuracy across seven graded calls, even with this one included, while her overall number across a wider mix of call types sits at 60.86 over 70 graded calls.
What does this result change about the rest of these two teams' season?
Pittsburgh's win in Paris keeps a season-long gap between these two clubs exactly where it's been. Steelers game-outcome picks have averaged 90.5 accuracy across 42 graded calls in 2026, and Steelers score predictions have averaged 75.9 across 38 graded calls. Saints game-outcome picks, by contrast, have averaged just 31.8 across 22 graded calls, and Saints score predictions 32.7 across 27. Pundits have simply read Pittsburgh better than New Orleans all year, and a 16-10 road win does nothing to close that gap. For the full season picture on both clubs, see the Steelers and Saints team pages, or check where this week's winners and losers land on the overall leaderboard.