Cardinals 26, Chargers 14: All 21 Graded Calls Picked Los Angeles

Arizona won in Los Angeles 26-14 to open the 2026 season. Nobody saw it coming — and we mean nobody.

We graded 21 pre-game calls on this game: 16 straight-up winner picks and five score predictions. All 21 took the Chargers. Not a single pundit we track put the Cardinals on the right side of it, and not one of the score predictions had Arizona scoring more than 21 points.

A unanimous field isn't automatically embarrassing. Arizona went 3-14 last season and Los Angeles was at home. But unanimity is also the one condition under which nobody can earn anything: our skill measure asks whether a call beat the dumbest possible default, and on this game the default was the home team. So the 16 winner picks all graded out at zero accuracy and zero skill — wrong, but no worse than a coin that always says "home." Nobody took the road team, so nobody had a chance to do better than the default either.

The calls that came closest

The score predictions are where the separation happened, because a score call earns partial credit for the shape of the game even when it names the wrong winner. Our baseline treated this one as close to a coin flip — a naive margin of about half a point. The game finished by 12. The pundits who committed to a double-digit margin got credit for that much, on the wrong side.

Two calls topped the board, both at 45.2 accuracy and both worth about 50 points of skill above the baseline:

• [Shanna McCarriston](/pundits/shanna-mccarriston), in CBS Sports' Week 1 preview: *"Pick: Chargers 27, Cardinals 17."* A 10-point margin against an actual 12 — the closest read on the size of the gap anyone produced. The team was wrong.
• [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech), in his all-16-games score column: *"Chargers 31-21 over Cardinals."* Same 10-point margin, same grade.

The other three score calls priced the game as a rout. Pete Prisco had it Chargers 31, Cardinals 14 and Mike Florio had it Chargers 27, Cardinals 10 — both 17-point margins, both 38.1 accuracy. Chris Roling's 30-10 was the widest of the five and the weakest grade at 31.0.

One near-miss deserves its own line. Jason McIntyre said on air, two weeks out: *"Give me the Arizona Cardinals getting 10 and a half against the Chargers. I like the Chargers to win, but are they going to win by more than 10 and a half?"* He was the only voice in the whole set who thought Arizona would hang around. What we grade is the winner he named, and he named the Chargers, so it goes down as a miss — but he was reading the game closer than the 20 people who agreed with his conclusion.

The misses, in their own words

The confident end of the field:

• Brandon Deutsch, streaming the Chargers defense: *"I think this is a blowout. I think it's a 20-plus point win for the Chargers."* The 20-plus-point swing happened; Arizona had it.
• Prisco, in his separate betting segment: *"This has the look of a blowout."*
• Breech, in an August piece on when each team takes its first loss: *"Jim Harbaugh has NEVER lost an NFL opener in his career ... and I don't see that streak ending here."*
• Nick Wright, running the AFC: *"Listen, they're going to start out 2-0... They're home for the Cardinals, home for the Raiders."*
• Simon Hunter, using Los Angeles as a survivor leg: *"Go, go chargers. Like I got no issue doing that..."*
• John Granato had the Chargers at 28 points: *"I see the Chargers scoring twenty eight."* They scored 14.

Eight more straight-up Chargers picks came from Mitch Goldich, Gilberto Manzano, Albert Breer, Mike Kadlick, Conor Orr, Matt Verderame, Eva Geitheim and John Pluym in the same Week 1 slate columns. Orr's slate included six upsets elsewhere. This wasn't one of them.

Does this dent anyone's record?

Not much, and the reason is sample size. McCarriston has eight graded calls to her name, at 72.6 accuracy — this was her sharpest one, not a stumble. Breech is at 68.5 accuracy over 32 graded calls, with a strong 57.1 MissedTakes Score overall; his winner picks sit at 57.1 accuracy over 16, so one wrong opener is inside the normal range. Prisco grades 65.7 on score predictions across 15 of them, better than his 38.1 here.

McIntyre is the only one of the group with an established record: 113 graded calls, 60.5 accuracy overall. His game picks are a useful warning about what accuracy alone hides — 65.4 accuracy across 59 winner picks, but a MissedTakes Score of −13.6 on that type, meaning his picks land often and still trail the always-take-the-favorite default. This game fits that pattern exactly.

What else this result touches

Nothing about the season's bigger calls is settled yet, but the direction matters. The Chargers win totals we've collected run from nine (Breech and Wright) up to 11 (Nate Tice) and Colin Cowherd's 11-6 with the AFC West title — all of which now need a point back from somewhere. On the other side, Cowherd called Arizona an "absolute rebuild, potentially drafting number one next year" and Alex Clancy put the Cardinals' floor at two wins with seven as the ceiling, most likely two. Arizona has one of those two in hand after a week.

Worth keeping in mind for the rest of the year: across every graded call we have on Chargers games, the field averages 27.8 accuracy and a skill figure of −22.2 — collectively worse than just picking the home team every time. Week 1 did not help.

Full records: Los Angeles Chargers, Arizona Cardinals, and the leaderboard.