MVP Consensus *Was* Stafford and a Jets Take Graded Both Ways | MissedTakes Daily
Ninety-nine MVP ballots for the 2025 season are now graded, and the crowd got it. Matthew Stafford drew 26 picks — the plurality — and Stafford won. That is the good news. The other reading of the same number is that 73 of 99 ballots picked someone else, spread across 25 different names, including one vote each for Hunter Henry, Kayshon Boutte and Rashid Shaheed. A plurality of 26 percent is what "the consensus was right" looks like in practice: correct, and not remotely confident.
Offensive Rookie of the Year was thinner and messier. Tetairoa McMillan won, and McMillan tied for the most-picked name at five of 29 ballots — tied with Ashton Jeanty, who did not win. Two entries in that ballot pool are still raw player IDs rather than names, which is our problem, not the pundits'.
The week in grading
2,386 takes were graded over the last seven days, and 1,441 of them — 60 percent — were mock draft picks. Game outcome picks (162), playoff picks (123), depth chart calls (109), position order calls (98) and award picks (97) fill out most of the rest. Another 1,762 new takes came in over the same stretch. When one category is that dominant, weekly movement is mostly a referendum on draft-board accuracy, so read the short-window numbers accordingly.
The best and worst call lists this week illustrate why a single "take" is not a single prediction. Dylan O'Brien's game-by-game 2025 Jets projection — 11-6, opening 0-2 before a late winning streak — shows up in both the best calls and the worst calls, because its component games graded individually at 100 and at 0. Same for Chris Brockman, whose season-preview slate (Cowboys collapse into a top-five pick, Giants as the out-of-nowhere team, 49ers to championship weekend with Brock Purdy an MVP finalist) landed a 100, while his NFC South order — Falcons, Buccaneers, Panthers, Saints, with both Atlanta and Tampa in the playoffs — graded 0.
Rich Eisen posted a clean 100 on a reaction set: Giants in the hunt, Brockman's 49ers/Purdy call endorsed, Broncos in the playoffs, and a rejection of the idea that four 2024-class quarterbacks all reach the postseason. The week's clearest zero belongs to Kurt Warner, whose ballot had Chiefs over Eagles in the Super Bowl, Bengals in and Steelers out, and Drake Maye as the second-year quarterback due for the biggest leap.
Awards
Lance Zierlein takes Pundit of the Week for MissedTakes Score in 2026-W32 at 53.19, on 13 graded takes across six articles. Tom Pelissero takes Pundit of the Week for Accuracy at 90.34, on seven graded takes across three articles. Both samples are small enough that a single bad week erases them.
Where the crowd was furthest off
The collective win-total misses for 2025 are large and, notably, not all in the same direction. Kansas City (13 calls), Washington (seven) and Las Vegas (nine) miss one way; New England (11), Seattle (seven) and Denver (six) miss the other. Kansas City is the biggest gap at 6.3 wins across the most calls of any team on the list — the closest thing here to a genuine market-wide error rather than noise.
No pundit in this packet changed a previously graded position. Nothing in the reversal column.
Standing
David Harrison still leads at 54.82 on 127 graded takes, with Zierlein second at 41.61 and Mike Renner third at 33.79. The caveat matters: nine of the top ten are flagged limited confidence. Only Daniel Jeremiah, sixth at 29.85 on 251 graded takes, is marked established. Note also how far accuracy and skill can diverge — Marcus Mosher is at 85.61 accuracy but 24.09 score, because accuracy on easy calls does not beat a naive baseline by much.
Full table on the Leaderboard; how the two numbers are built is in the scoring methodology.