About MissedTakes
We keep score on the people keeping score. MissedTakes records checkable predictions made by named sports pundits, with a link to where they said it, and grades each one against what actually happened. The NFL is the proof of concept for the 2026 season.
Who runs it
MissedTakes is published by The GoodApps Company of Austin, Texas. It was built by Ben Garves, the company’s founder, who writes the site’s essays and white papers and reviews every automated daily summary before it publishes under his name.
Why it exists
Sports punditry publishes thousands of confident predictions a year and almost nobody checks them. Being wrong costs a pundit nothing, and being vague costs even less. We think the people who make their living forecasting football should have a record, the way a weather service or a stock picker does — and that the record should be public, checkable, and computed the same way for everyone.
Two rules follow from that. We grade claims about outcomes, never claims about people: a pundit being wrong is not a character judgment, and the methodology is explicit that predicting football is genuinely hard. And we do not rank on accuracy alone. The headline number is the MissedTakes Score, which asks how much better than a naive guess a pundit did on the same claims — because someone who only ever picks the favorite can be right often and still tell you nothing.
How it is paid for
MissedTakes is built and paid for by The GoodApps Company. There is no advertising on the site and no paid placement: no pundit, publisher or league can pay to be included, excluded, or scored differently. Reading it needs no account. The optional member accounts (Picks) exist so readers can record their own calls, and are governed by their own privacy policy.
How the scoring is kept honest
Every number on the site is computed from the published methodology, which is shown in full and unedited. Every graded call shows its own arithmetic — what was claimed, what happened, what a naive guess would have scored — so a pundit who disagrees with a grade can see exactly what we compared their claim against. Amendments to the methodology are recorded in the document and trigger a regrade of the whole archive, so no two takes are ever scored under different rules.
Nothing reaches the public because a model extracted it. A person approves every pundit and every recorded piece before it is published, a pundit has no page until something on it has actually been graded, and a record needs ten graded articles before it is ranked at all. Below that bar the numbers are shown and labeled provisional.
Reaching us
If a grade is wrong, a quote is misattributed, or we misread a claim, the corrections page says how to tell us and what happens next; every graded call also carries a link to it. For anything else — press, a partnership, a question the methodology does not answer — use the contact form. Both land in the same queue, with a reference code you can hold us to, and a human reads every one.
New posts and the weekly awards are also published on the accounts below. They link back here; nothing is posted there that is not on this site first.
What we collect about you
Nothing tracks you unless you say yes. The site notice is the full statement: analytics load only if you allow them, nothing counts your visit if you decline, and there are no ad tags, pixels or social widgets anywhere.