Trade Calls Grade Out Below Baseline, Five Categories Clear at Once, and Nobody Saw 14 Wins in New England | MissedTakes Daily

The week's biggest grading bucket was also the field's worst lane. Trade and Signing Calls accounted for 349 of the 1,030 takes graded in the last seven days, and across the site's entire graded history of that category the average accuracy is 51.3 with a mean skill delta of -15.07 — meaning the field, in aggregate, did worse than a naive baseline at guessing where players would land.

That "entire graded history" bit is not a hedge. Five categories have exactly as many all-time graded takes as they had graded this week: Trade and Signing Calls (349), Sleeper Calls (308), Fantasy Bust Calls (84), Roster Spot Calls (49) and Combine Measurements (41). This wasn't a normal trickle of results — it was the first settlement of those lanes, all at once. The other 189 graded takes were partial batches of Mock Draft Picks (124), Depth Chart Calls (63) and Combine Superlatives (4), where earlier results already exist.

So the honest read of the week: pundits were fine at the mechanical stuff (roster spots, combine numbers) and no better than a coin-flip-plus at projecting player movement.

Who was on the right side of the trade calls

Among pundits with at least 10 graded Trade and Signing Calls, Rich Eisen is the outlier in the good direction: 75.9 accuracy and a +25.93 MissedTakes Score on 22 graded calls, against a category average of 51.3. His overall file is 484 graded takes at 62.2 accuracy and a 15.35 score — the site's "established" confidence tier, which almost nobody reaches.

The bottom is uglier. Chris Rose graded 0.0 accuracy on 12 movement calls, a -100 skill delta — every call wrong, none of them the safe guess. Tom Strachan went 19.1 on 21 of them. Jake Ciely: 26.3 on 19.

By publisher, the same category splits hard:

The Dan Patrick Show's 46 graded movement calls came in at 15.2 accuracy and -56.52 skill; The Herd's 74 at 31.1 and -32.73. Volume and accuracy ran in opposite directions.

Strachan is worth a second look because he shows up on both ends of the packet's honor roll. His sleeper article — Xavier Worthy, Jalen Coker, Egbuka, Zay Flowers, Pickens, DeVonta Smith and Travis Hunter as values, Jerry Jeudy and the Cleveland receivers avoided — graded a clean 100. His sleeper lane overall is 65.0 accuracy on 24 graded calls with a +60 score. His movement lane is the 19.1. Same pundit, two very different skills. He's still on provisional footing at 53 graded takes across four articles, so don't build a monument to it.

One structural note on the best/worst lists: Andrew Erickson's multi-claim article appears in both. Its Fantasy Bust claims graded 100; its Sleeper claims graded 0. Grading happens per claim, not per column, which is why a single piece can top and bottom the same week. Mitchell Eisenstein's Lions-over-Bills Super Bowl article did the same thing. Cynthia Frelund's Week 1 slate and Ryan Wormeli's rookie-receiver capital both graded 0.

Nobody changed their mind

Zero logged reversals in the last seven days, against 437 new takes. That's a real finding, not an absence of one: a week that settled five categories produced no recorded second thoughts.

What the consensus data says

The 2025 win-total ledger is where the field's collective blind spot is clearest. Three teams finished 14-win seasons, and not one pundit in the database went higher than 11 on any of them:

Kansas City is the single largest collective miss on the board at 6.3 wins too high over 13 calls, with two separate 15-win projections in the file. The pattern is symmetric and familiar: the field anchored on last year's contenders and refused to let a rebuild-flavored roster near double-digit wins.

Awards ran better. The MVP plurality was correct — Matthew Stafford took 26 of 100 ballots and won, though Award Picks as a category still average 21.2 accuracy site-wide. Offensive Rookie of the Year was a coin flip the field half-won: Tetairoa McMillan tied Ashton Jeanty at 5 picks of 29 and won.

David Harrison still leads at 48.77 on 131 graded takes, with Marcus Mosher the accuracy leader in the top ten at 80.31. Every name above Daniel Jeremiah carries "limited" confidence, so read the leaderboard as a standings snapshot, not a verdict.