Bills Punditry Check: 26-for-26 on the Easy Call, 0-for-13 on the Hard One | MissedTakes Daily
Predicting the Buffalo Bills has been two completely different jobs, and pundits are good at making only one of them.
The easy job: say Buffalo makes the playoffs. We've graded 26 of those calls, going back several seasons, and every one was right — 100 accuracy across the board. It also earned the people who made them nothing. Our skill number measures whether a call beat the obvious default answer, and since the default answer was also "yes, the Bills make it," those 26 perfect calls average a skill delta of zero. Free credit, no edge.
The hard job is everything past the bracket's front door. Thirty graded calls that Buffalo would win the AFC East average 6.7 accuracy out of 100 — last season the Bills won 12 games and New England won 14. Thirteen graded Super Bowl picks on the Bills: every one scored zero. Add the conference-title calls (14 graded, 14.3 accuracy) and the picture is a team pundits are reliably right about until the moment the prediction actually costs something.
What the field is saying now
None of that has cooled anyone off. Eight Super Bowl picks on Buffalo are on our books for this season and waiting on an answer, including Danny Parkins (Bills over Seattle) and TJ Jefferson (Bills over the Rams), with CBS Sports' Ryan Wilson naming Buffalo his champion twice in a week — "Josh Allen has his WR1, the defense should be more aggressive under Jim Leonhard, and they finally get over the hump with Joe Brady now the head coach." John Middlekauff said back in May he'd probably pick them. Colin Cowherd has Buffalo winning the AFC East and the AFC; Rich Eisen has them winning the AFC and losing the Super Bowl to the Rams, with Josh Allen as MVP. Kurt Warner landed on the same Rams-over-Bills final.
On win totals the field is tight and slightly more sober: Nick Wright at 11-6, Gregg Rosenthal at 12 and comfortable with the over, Jared Dubin over 10.5, Matt Harmon 11-6, Moe Moton 12-5, John Breech 11-6, Joe Marino 12-5.
The dissent is small and worth naming. Nate Tice has the Bills at 10-7 and the Patriots at 11-6 — "a dead-on 10-7 team." The CBS Sports staff vote split 8-7 for Buffalo over New England in the division. And CBS's Jordan Dajani wrote that he loves the Bills to win the East while picking Houston to beat them in Week 1, which is roughly where the whole genre sits.
Who has actually earned belief on this team
Buffalo is one of the most heavily covered clubs we track — more than 1,100 calls, about 550 of them graded. The accuracy leaders are not the people making the loud ones.
| Pundit | Graded Bills calls | Accuracy | Skill vs. baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Randy Gurzi | 48 | 100 | +33.3 |
| Joe Marino | 159 | 87.1 | +17.7 |
| Rich Eisen | 19 | 73.7 | +22.5 |
| Nick Wright | 24 | 56.0 | +9.6 |
| Chris Brockman | 15 | 52.2 | −10.1 |
| Colin Cowherd | 26 | 48.4 | −6.3 |
Gurzi and Marino are the beat-level voices: roster spots, depth charts, who makes the 53. Those calls are small, checkable and usually right — Buffalo roster calls as a group grade out at 90 accuracy over 219 graded. Gurzi's newest is that practice-squad linebacker Shaq Thompson gets elevated and eventually starts opposite Bernard; the season hasn't answered it yet.
Game-by-game is where the talk shows lose ground. Ninety-one graded calls on Bills games average 63.4 accuracy and a negative skill delta (−7.5), meaning the field as a whole has done slightly worse than simply backing the home team every week.
Josh Allen is his own category: 34 graded calls at 41.9 accuracy but a healthy +21.3 skill, because the low scores come almost entirely from award picks. Five pundits put Allen on their 2025 MVP ballot in our tally; Matthew Stafford won with 26 of 100 picks. Eisen is already back on Allen for this year.
The one thing the field genuinely nailed: 2025 win totals. Five graded projections on Buffalo came in at 11, 12, 12, 12 and 14 against an actual 12 wins. If you want a Bills prediction worth reading, it's the number, not the ring.
The league day in brief
- We graded 1,189 calls in the past week, 1,158 of them roster-spot calls as final cuts settled. Nathan Jahnke and Scott Kennedy had perfect scores among them, as did Jared Koch, who called Brevin Jordan inactive for Houston's opener against Buffalo.
- The Patriots-at-Seattle opener was the week's wipeout. Connor "Boston Connor" Campbell, Darius Butler, Jason McIntyre and Conor Orr all took New England and all scored zero — worse than defaulting to the home team, which is exactly what the skill number punishes.
- Lance Zierlein leads the board at 39.1 on 38 graded calls, ahead of Derek Brown (35.6) and David Harrison (35.4). Daniel Jeremiah is tenth at 22.2 but has by far the deepest sample up there, 278 graded calls.
Full standings are on the leaderboard.