Kyle Brandt's September Sweep: Pundit of the Month on Both Measures | MissedTakes Monthly
September belonged to one guy on two different scoreboards. Kyle Brandt is MissedTakes' Pundit of the Month for 2026-09 on both metrics we track — a perfect 100 accuracy and a 200 MissedTakes Score, the ceiling on our skill-vs-naive-baseline scale.
A quick refresher on what those numbers mean: Accuracy is graded 0-100 per call. MissedTakes Score measures how much better (or worse) a pundit did than simply taking the "naive" pick — the obvious, lazy default, like picking the home team or assuming last year's division winner repeats. A score of 0 means no better than that baseline; 200 is the maximum, meaning the calls that got graded in September were both right and the kind of right that a coin flip or a lazy guess would have missed.
That ceiling score comes with an asterisk every monthly winner carries: it's built on whatever got graded in the window, not on everything a pundit has ever said. Brandt's lifetime log, which we pulled to check the context, runs to 104 graded calls across nineteen different prediction types — playoff berths, division winners, game outcomes, award picks, power rankings and more — with an overall accuracy of 55.0 and an average skill delta of +31.92. That's a credible, broad body of work, not a hot streak built on one or two calls. But the specific calls that landed in September's grading window were the ones that pushed him to a perfect month, and our tools weren't able to isolate that exact subset for this piece — treat the month's 100/200 line as the headline, not as a claim that every one of Brandt's 104 lifetime graded takes was flawless.
What we can say with confidence from his full record: Brandt's strongest ground has been in the longer-range calls — division winners and playoff berths — where getting ahead of a naive, repeat-last-year's-result guess pays the biggest skill rewards. Two of his division-winner calls each tracked a divisional winner change (the Seahawks taking the NFC West over the Rams, the Bears over the Lions in the NFC North) and graded out to a skill delta of 156 and 200, respectively — exactly the sort of call that separates "right" from "right and worth something."
How the field did this month
September's grading volume, like most months on this site, was dominated by one category: roster-spot calls, as preseason camp battles resolved into real 53-man rosters. Site-wide, Roster Spot Calls are graded at 90 percent accuracy on average and a +20.9 skill delta across more than 1,500 graded calls — by far the easiest category to call correctly, since most roster battles resolve the way beat writers who watch every practice expect them to. Mock Draft Picks (Mock Draft Picks sit at 65.3 accuracy, +35.95 skill) and Game Outcome Picks (58.0 accuracy, a slightly negative -3.56 skill delta — meaning the field as a whole does barely better than picking the home team) remain the toughest kinds of predictions to beat the baseline on.
The leaderboard, after September's grading
The month's results didn't reshuffle the top of the overall board much. Lance Zierlein still leads on MissedTakes Score (47.39) on a thin 43 graded calls, with Joe Marino a close second (45.81) on a much deeper log of 169. Derek Brown, Peter Schrager and Pat Fitzmaurice round out the top five. Brandt himself sits well down the overall list — his 104 graded calls average out to a 14.57 MissedTakes Score, since one perfect month doesn't erase a wide-ranging record of playoff and award calls that didn't all land. That's the honest way to read a Pundit of the Month title: it's a spotlight on the best stretch of a month, not a new verdict on a career.
A few other names turned up in the month's weekly citations worth flagging. John Middlekauff won both weekly awards in W37 (100 accuracy, 66.67 MissedTakes Score) on three graded calls — a small sample, so read it as a good week, not a trend. Tom Pelissero posted a perfect week in W38 (100 accuracy on three calls) and carries the best overall accuracy on the current top-10 leaderboard at 80.34 across 32 graded calls. Mike Moraitis closed the month with a perfect accuracy week in W39 (100 on 27 calls, his best showing of the month) even though his overall MissedTakes Score sits in negative territory (-5.8) once a couple of bad trade and depth-chart calls are folded in.
The takeaway
September's grading leaned hard on preseason-to-Week-1 roster calls, which is the easiest category on the board to get right — and that shows in the 90 percent field-wide accuracy there versus the high-50s/60s for game outcomes and mock-draft slots. Against that backdrop, Brandt's sweep of both monthly titles stands out: it came from calls further out on the calendar, including divisional and playoff projections made back in September and November of last year, that paid off big against what a lazy, repeat-the-prior-season guess would have said. The overall leaderboard barely moved — depth and accuracy over many calls still separate the top of the board from a single great month — but for September, Brandt's was the name to beat on both counts.