Site Notice

Accounts (Picks)

Reading MissedTakes still needs no account and works exactly as described below. As of August 2026 you can optionally create a member account to record your own agree/disagree picks on claims. Accounts are governed by their own Privacy Policy and Terms of Service; the short version is: an email, an optional display name, and your picks — private by default, exportable and deletable by you, with a session cookie that exists only if you sign in.

The newsletter box

The footer has a box for leaving an email address to hear when a weekly newsletter starts. It is optional, it loads no third-party script — its spam protection is our own — and an address you leave is used for that and nothing else. The Privacy Policy says exactly what is kept and how to be removed.

Cookies

We ask once, and the answer defaults to no. Until you say otherwise this site loads no third-party scripts and sets nothing on your device beyond what you ask for — a sign-in cookie if you join Picks, or a start page — both described on this page; if you decline, the single cookie we keep is the record of that decision, so we do not ask again for a year.

If you say yes, we load Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager and Google sets its own cookies. You can change your mind at any time from Cookie Choices in the footer of every page. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we treat that as a no and do not offer the choice — the signal is the answer.

Our admin also carries a cookie, on our own browsers only, so that our own testing never reaches either count and is left out of the numbers.

Your start page

The NFL and US Elections front pages each have a Start here next time button. Press it and your browser keeps that choice in its own storage, so that opening missedtakes.co fresh — typing the address, or a bookmark — takes you straight to that desk. The Home tab at the top of every page still opens the home page, and so do links from search results and most other websites. The choice is not a cookie and is not sent to us. To remove it, press Undo on the same desk page, or clear this site’s data in your browser.

How we count visits

Every visit is counted by Vercel Web Analytics, part of the hosting this site runs on. It sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device. For each page it records the path and any campaign tag on our own links (never what you typed, such as a search), the site that sent you, your country, and your browser, operating system and kind of device. To tell one visit from another it uses a code derived from your request that is discarded within a day, so it does not follow you from day to day or across other sites. A visit is counted once the page is used — scrolled, tapped, clicked or typed in — so software that loads pages without reading them is left out. Sign-in pages and our admin pages are not counted.

If you also allow analytics, Google Analytics counts your visit too, as described below, and we read the totals. (An earlier count kept on our own server, which used no cookies, was retired in August 2026; the Vercel count, added in October 2026, does the same job.)

We do separately log requests from robots — the search engine and AI crawlers that index this site — so we can see which of them visit and whether they respect the rules we publish. That is a record about software, not about readers. Its totals are public, by crawler and by kind of page, on AI crawler traffic statistics.

The same log counts calls to our connector for AI assistants: which tool was called, which assistant called it (as its software identifies itself), and when. Never the question asked and never the address it came from.

Third-party content

No embedded fonts, no ad tags, no social widgets, and no advertising pixels — we run none and have no plans to, which is why the banner asks about one thing rather than several.

There are two third-party services. The first is Google Analytics, and only if you allow it. When you do, Google receives the addresses of the pages you open and a short list of things you do on them — which takes you read, when you check how a grade was calculated, when you follow a link out to a pundit’s original article. We never send what you type in the search box as data — search is not one of the things we report, and we do not keep a record of it ourselves. But the address of a results page includes what you searched, and once you have said yes, Google sees page addresses like any other.

The second is error monitoring, through Sentry. It records technical details when something breaks, and a small random sample of ordinary visits — about one in ten — so we can tell how slow the site is. That sample carries timings and page addresses, plus the browser, the page that linked there and the country, not identities, and it runs whether or not you allow analytics: it is how we keep the site working, not a measurement of you. Neither service follows your browsing across other sites.

Where our information comes from

MissedTakes summarizes predictions that pundits published publicly, and links back to the original every time. We do not republish articles or transcripts. Results data comes from public sports records, election-night race calls and certified election results.

Something wrong?

If we have misattributed a prediction or gotten one wrong, we want to fix it. Use the corrections form and we will correct the record — you get a reference code, and a reply if you leave an email address.