# Bears 59, Panthers 37: The Field Had Chicago 22-4, and Still Nobody Was Close

*Published 2026-09-15 — MissedTakes*

Chicago beat Carolina 59-37 in Charlotte to open the 2026 season. We had 26 graded pre-game calls riding on that game — 21 straight winner picks and five predicted final scores — and the result split them cleanly: almost everyone had the right team, and not one person was in the neighborhood of the scoreboard.

![Bears 59, Panthers 37: how the 26 graded calls broke](/posts/visuals/236e1e93-b654-4a3b-976d-b9df2699c230.png)

## The field leaned Chicago, and the field was right

Twenty-two of the 26 calls had the Bears winning. Four had Carolina.

That is close to unanimous, and it was also the harder side to take. Carolina was at home, so the lazy default — pick the host, every week, forever — pointed at the Panthers. That default is exactly what our skill number measures a pick against, and it means every Chicago call here beat it outright while the four Carolina calls landed no better than a coin flip nobody had to think about. Road-team calls that come in are worth more than one more voice on the home side; this week 22 of them cashed.

## The calls worth naming

[Eric Cohen](/pundits/eric-cohen) was the bluntest and the most right: ["Chicago wins and covers on the road fairly easily."](/opinions/37c0b874-cb1b-43c8-b78e-96a7b287ae62) A 22-point road win is "fairly easily." It graded as a perfect call and one of the best single takes we graded anywhere in the league last week.

[Danny Parkins](/pundits/danny-parkins) and Jonas Knox both took Chicago giving three points; [Kirk Herbstreit](/pundits/kirk-herbstreit) went further into the mechanism — ["I'm gonna go with Ben Johnson, and I think they're gonna get to cover on the road to open it up, cover the three."](/opinions/5bc3755c-9b84-484f-b8f2-b18d51a12261) All perfect.

The earliest correct call we have on this game is [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech)'s, filed on August 19 in a CBS Sports piece projecting when each team would take its first loss: ["The Panthers will be missing both of their starting tackles ... it's hard to win games in the NFL when you're missing both of your starting tackles."](/opinions/50eb251e-cf6b-417d-a0d6-bccba95e06fc) Right team, right week, three weeks early.

One call deserves credit for being right about the winner and wrong about everything else. [Zach Roberts](/pundits/zach-roberts) had Chicago, but explicitly ["a narrow road win rather than a blowout."](/opinions/2489be28-f1ea-4a69-b6b4-36b44a4877bc) Only the winner gets graded on a straight pick, so it counts as a hit — but the second half of the sentence was off by about 19 points.

## The score picks all missed the same direction

Five pundits printed a final score. All five had Chicago. All five had a low-scoring game. The teams combined for 96 points.

![Predicted margin vs. what happened](/posts/visuals/3e2f66d1-6abe-49d1-a94b-9f560690c448.png)

| Pundit | Pick | Predicted margin | Accuracy |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [Pete Prisco](/pundits/pete-prisco) | Bears 29, Panthers 21 | 8 | 66.67 |
| [Richard Sherman](/pundits/richard-sherman) | Bears 24, Panthers 17 | 7 | 64.29 |
| [Mike Florio](/pundits/mike-florio) | Bears 24, Panthers 17 | 7 | 64.29 |
| [Gene Chamberlain](/pundits/gene-chamberlain) | Bears 34, Panthers 30 | 4 | 57.14 |
| John Breech | Bears 24, Panthers 21 | 3 | 54.76 |

The actual margin was 22. The ranking above is essentially a ranking of who was boldest: Prisco's eight-point margin was the widest anyone printed and it graded best, Breech's three-pointer graded worst. The highest total any of them forecast was Chamberlain's 64. Nobody was within 30 points of the real number. All five still cleared the baseline, because a game the home team was supposed to win by half a point went the other way by three scores — but "closest to a blowout" is a low bar to win on.

## The four who took Carolina

[AJ Hawk](/pundits/aj-hawk) was the most emphatic: ["I like Carolina here. I like Carolina to probably win this one outright."](/opinions/74f9146c-d27f-4851-b8a4-4103d043308f) [Brady Quinn](/pundits/brady-quinn) took the Panthers with the points on air, [Tyler Sullivan](/pundits/tyler-sullivan) flagged Carolina in a CBS Sports piece on Week 1 upset candidates, and [John Pluym](/pundits/john-pluym) had the Panthers on his straight-up card. Four names, four zeros, no more to say about it.

## Does the record change?

Context matters on who missed. Hawk's miss is the outlier in an otherwise good file: across 24 graded calls he sits at 65.91 accuracy overall and 70.91 on straight game picks, comfortably above the naive baseline. This was a bad night, not a pattern.

Quinn's is the opposite. He is our most-graded voice in this game by a wide margin — 142 graded calls, 45 of them straight winner picks — and he grades at 56.98 accuracy overall with a MissedTakes Score of −13.09, meaning his calls as a group have landed slightly *behind* the naive default rather than ahead of it. Carolina at home getting three was that profile in miniature.

On the right side, Breech is the one with real standing behind him: 68.53 accuracy over 32 graded calls and a MissedTakes Score of 57.13. Cohen's call was the sharpest sentence of the week, but it is only his second graded call with us, so read it as a strong start rather than a track record.

## What it touches beyond Sunday

One game does not settle a season, but it pushes on things people have already said. [John Middlekauff](/pundits/john-middlekauff) leaned Chicago to win the NFC North ("I just think Ben Johnson's too good"), Packers writer [Bill Huber](/pundits/bill-huber) picked the Bears to win the division outright, [Colin Cowherd](/pundits/colin-cowherd) has them as a wild card, and Kay Adams called a Bears–Broncos Super Bowl — none of that got harder to believe after a 59-point road afternoon. On the other side, Breech's 6-11 Carolina projection now looks steadier than [Kevin Wildes](/pundits/kevin-wildes)' NFC playoff berth for the Panthers. Seventeen weeks will sort it out.

Everything we have graded and everything still open on these two clubs lives on the [Chicago Bears](/nfl/teams/bears) and [Carolina Panthers](/nfl/teams/panthers) pages, and the season-long standings are on the [leaderboard](/leaderboard).