Cowboys Punditry Check: 27 of 34 Missed the Giants Game, and a Win-Total Field Spread From 6 to 14 | MissedTakes Daily
Dallas's opener was the most one-sided piece of pundit agreement we tracked all week (and it was wrong.) Of the 34 graded winner calls we have on Cowboys–Giants, 27 took Dallas. The Giants won 28-20.
The seven who took New York — Danny Parkins, LaVar Arrington, Chad Millman (twice), Simon Hunter and Michael Irvin — got full marks for accuracy, but not one of them beat the dumbest possible method. New York was home, and our skill measure starts from "just pick the home team," so taking the Giants scored exactly zero value added. Taking Dallas scored the floor: −200, the worst mark on offer. Pat McAfee, Kirk Herbstreit, AJ Hawk, Nick Wright, Brady Quinn, Jonas Knox, Nick Shook (who had Dallas by 15), Eric Mangini, Jason McIntyre, Conor Orr, Albert Breer and a dozen more all landed there. The closest thing to a good call was on the scoreboard, not the sideline: Garrett Podell's 31-17 Dallas prediction still earned 36 out of 100 for the margin.
That isn't a fluke. Across the 51 graded game picks we have on Dallas, average accuracy is 14.7 and the average call has come in well below the naive baseline (−130 skill). Game outcomes are where Cowboys punditry is worst by a distance.
Where the Dallas takes actually hold up
There are plenty of takes for this club, though: we've tracked roughly 900 claims touching Dallas.
Mock-draft calls involving Dallas (85 graded, 54.8 accuracy) and trade-and-signing calls (24 graded, 66.7) have both added value over the naive default. Roster projections look accurate at 68.1, but most of that is predicting that players who were already in the league stay in the league, so the credit is smaller than the number suggests.
The single most reliable Dallas voice we track by volume is Jeff Cavanaugh: 25 graded calls, 87.2 accuracy, modestly above baseline. Almost all of it is 53-man roster work, and he earned real credit where it was hard — calling Malachi Lawrence, L.T. Overton, Drew Shelton and Jaishawn Barham onto the roster were the four calls worth full skill marks, while writing off Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Nathan Thomas cost him. He also has Dallas at 12-5 this year.
The best Dallas-related record belongs to Derek Brown, currently first on our overall board: 10 graded Cowboys calls, 68.5 accuracy, and by far the strongest skill figure of any voice with five or more. He hammered George Pickens as a breakout four separate times last summer and Pickens finished as a top-five fantasy receiver; he also called Dak Prescott a top-five quarterback value. Pickens is now the best-called player on the roster (21 graded, 72.2 accuracy). CeeDee Lamb is the opposite (8 graded, 23.0) — the safe-sounding "locked-in WR1" framing has not graded well.
The cautionary tale is Micah Parsons. Ten separate graded calls said Parsons would be a Cowboy in 2025 — extensions described as imminent or inevitable by Rich Eisen, Tom Pelissero, Gregg Rosenthal, Sara Walsh, Dan Patrick, Parkins and McIntyre among them. He ended up in Green Bay. Every one of those calls missed, and the three that put him on the Week 1 roster took the full −200. Parsons is also why Dallas award picks read 0-for-11: he drew years of Defensive Player of the Year backing and never won it.
The 2026 field: 6 wins to 14
We have 17+ more weeks before the season-long Dallas call can be settled. Irvin is at 13-4 and TJ Jefferson at 14-3; Ben Arthur had them at 6-11 back in May. The middle of the field sits at 10 or 11.
Three FS1 voices — Wright's colleagues Greg Jennings, Kevin Wildes and Chris Broussard — independently picked Prescott for MVP, and John Middlekauff took Dallas to win the NFC East plus Caleb Downs as a rookie of the year. Given the club's 0-for-11 on award picks, those are the bets to watch. Meanwhile John Breech has the Cowboys 34-24 over Washington in Week 2.
The league day in brief
We graded 522 calls in the past week: 375 game winners, 113 score predictions, 32 roster calls. The clean hits came from Shook's first power rankings of the year, Jared Dubin on a Baltimore road win over the Colts, Eric Cohen on the Bears in Carolina, and both Judah Fortgang at PFF and Bryan DeArdo at CBS Sports on the Jets over Tennessee.
The full-slate zeros were expensive: Shannon Sharpe, Mangini, Tyler Sullivan and Mitch Goldich each bottomed out at zero accuracy and −200 skill on their Week 1 packages. Parkins was in that group too, which is the honest shape of Week 1: the man who correctly called the Giants upset still lost the week on everything around it.
At the top of the board, Derek Brown leads at 35.62 with 62.71 accuracy over 114 graded calls, ahead of Peter Schrager (30.69) and Jamie Erdahl (28.21). Ross Jackson remains the highest-scoring voice with a deep body of work — 196 graded calls at 68.85 accuracy. Full standings are on the leaderboard.