Bengals Punditry Check: The Field Is Buying Cincinnati Again, and Its Last Bet Went 1-for-15 | MissedTakes Daily
The loudest thing about Cincinnati Bengals punditry is not any single take. It's the repetition. We've tracked 569 predictions about this club, and the season-long, big-picture ones — playoffs, division, MVP — are the worst-performing category of Bengals opinion we have. Fifteen graded playoff calls on Cincinnati have produced exactly one hit, and that one came in 2022, on a team everybody had in already, so it earned no credit over simply defaulting to last year's playoff field.
Every one of the thirteen graded playoff calls tied to 2025 scored zero. Cincinnati went 6-11.
Some of those were said with real conviction. In August 2025, Colin Cowherd called Cincinnati "the easiest pick in the NFL this year for a team that didn't make the playoffs last year and will this year." Rich Eisen had pushed back in March on the idea the Bengals would miss again, calling it "an overreaction." Kurt Warner put the Bengals in and left Pittsburgh out. Each of those graded zero, and because a playoff call against the grain is scored against the default of repeating last year's field, each cost its author about as much as a call can cost.
The win-total field went the same direction. Seven graded numbers on the 2025 Bengals averaged 9.9 wins against an actual six, with Brady Quinn highest at 13 and Nick Wright lowest at nine three separate times.
And here we go again
The 2026 slate of Cincinnati takes looks like a rerun. Steve Hartman named the Bengals his surprise team, picked them to win the AFC North, put them in the AFC Championship Game and named Joe Burrow MVP. John Middlekauff has them winning the division ("I'm a believer"). Eric Mangini and Danny Parkins both had them as AFC North champs. Cowherd, twice in four days: "the Ravens and the Bengals are both going to make the playoffs."
Week 1 against Tampa Bay was close to unanimous — AJ Hawk, LaVar Arrington, Quinn and Jonas Knox all laid the 3.5 points, Jordan Dajani had 21-20 and Jared Dubin 27-21, while Chad Ochocinco Johnson predicted Cincinnati would "put up about 42 points." The season will settle those.
It is worth knowing that game picks involving the Bengals have been a coin flip that loses money: 21 graded, 47.6 percent right, and on average slightly worse than just taking the favorite. Ochocinco's eight graded Bengals calls are all game picks — four right, four wrong, and a long way below the naive pick on average.
Who has actually earned trust here
One name stands apart, and it isn't a national voice. Jay Morrison's Bengals roster projection has 22 graded calls and all 22 were right. Most usefully, the credit isn't all free: naming Dohnte Meyers, Colbie Young and Cashius Howell to the 53 meant backing players who weren't on anybody's roster a year ago, which is where a projection earns something over guessing that last year's names return.
That is the pattern across the club. Roster calls on Cincinnati grade at 96.7 percent over 30 results. The speculative stuff grades near zero. Break it down by player and the same split appears: 18 graded calls about Joe Burrow average 16.2 percent accuracy, the least reliable subject on the roster, while ten graded calls about Chase Brown average 89.2 and comfortably beat the baseline.
If you take one thing from the Bengals file: believe the beat-level reporting about who is on the team and where he lines up. Discount the September conviction about where the season ends, at least until this field's Cincinnati calls start cashing.
The league day in brief
Ninety-six calls were settled across the league in the past week — 52 game picks, 27 roster calls, 15 score predictions — against 475 newly tracked takes.
The Week 1 upset callers cleaned up. John Middlekauff took the 49ers as underdogs in Melbourne and was right; Tyler Sullivan's five-upset CBS Sports slate and Eva Geitheim's full straight-up card both graded perfect. The week's zeros were all roster projections: Charean Williams on a Cowboys practice-squad elevation, Ralph Ventre on Buffalo's punt returner, Patricia Traina on the Giants' inactive list, Randy Gurzi on Dallas's practice squad and Matt Matera on a Tampa Bay running back cut.
Lance Zierlein still leads the board at 39.1 with 72.2 percent accuracy over 38 graded calls, ahead of Derek Brown and David Harrison. Full standings on the leaderboard.