Steelers 20, Falcons 13: 25 of 27 Calls Had Pittsburgh, and Only Three Earned Anything

Pittsburgh beat Atlanta 20-13 in the Week 1 opener of the 2026 season. We had 27 graded pre-game calls riding on it — 24 straight winner picks and three score predictions — and the result was about as unkind to the idea of punditry as a 7-point home win can be.

Twenty-five of the 27 had Pittsburgh. Two didn't.

The field was right, and that bought it almost nothing

Every one of the 22 winner picks on the Steelers graded out at a perfect 100 for accuracy. Every one of them also scored exactly zero on our skill measure, which asks a simple question: did you beat the dumbest possible strategy, which is picking the home team every week? Pittsburgh was the home team. So a Steelers pick here was free — correct, and worth nothing above the default.

That group is deep and it is not short of names: Pat McAfee ("Pittsburgh favored by five and a half. I'll take Pittsburgh"), Gregg Rosenthal, Brady Quinn, LaVar Arrington, Jonas Knox ("I think Pittsburgh rolls at home"), Jordan Dajani, Albert Breer, Conor Orr, Matt Verderame, Mitch Goldich, Gilberto Manzano, Eva Geitheim, Mike Kadlick, John Pluym, Jason McIntyre (who said so himself: "I went chalky here"), Leonard Fournette, Simon Hunter and Chad Millman, who took the Steelers money line at −178.

Two named a margin inside their pick, and one of them nailed it. Nick Shook laid the Steelers at −3.5 and added, "I think it's probably a 7 to 10 point victory in this game." Final margin: 7. Danny Parkins went the other way — "Cooper Rush gonna have a long day at the office. Steelers win that game by two scores" — and got the winner but not the shape of it.

The three that actually beat the baseline

Score predictions are graded against a much stiffer test. The naive default for this game was essentially a coin flip with a razor-thin edge to the road team, so anyone calling a Pittsburgh win by a specific number had room to earn something.

All three did.

Pete Prisco had it Steelers 27, Falcons 17 — a 10-point margin against an actual 7 — and posted the best grade of any call this game settled: 92.86 accuracy, and a skill figure of +21.59, meaning he beat the default by a wide stretch. It fits his profile. Prisco's record with us is almost entirely score picks (15 of his 17 graded calls), and they average 65.72 accuracy with a clearly positive skill number (+25.99). Small sample, but a consistent one.

Mike Florio was next, Steelers 21, Falcons 10: 90.48 accuracy, +16.83 skill, an 11-point predicted margin. Florio's 22 graded calls with us average 85.65 accuracy overall, the strongest number of anyone anchoring this game.

John Breech matched Florio's grade from the opposite direction — Steelers 23-20, a 3-point margin, 90.48 accuracy and the same +16.83. He also had a separate winner call filed back on August 19, when he wrote that Atlanta's effort "won't be enough to help Atlanta pull off the upset." Breech has 32 graded calls with us, 68.53 accuracy, and the best MissedTakes Score of the group at 57.13 — a genuinely good early run, if still an early one.

The two who took Atlanta

Nobody should get flattened for a bold prediction that was labeled as one. Both Falcons picks were, and both scored zero accuracy and −200 on skill, our worst possible outcome: wrong, and wrong against the easiest available default.

Lance Zierlein made it his Week 1 headliner: "Falcons, despite their disarray quarterback, go in to beat the Steelers." Zierlein is a strong grader overall — 66.11 accuracy across 40 calls, and he won our Pundit of the Week on score in late August — but that strength is in the draft, where his mock picks average 54.81 accuracy with a skill number of +36.19. Game picks are not his lane: he has two graded, one right and one wrong, and this was the wrong one.

Garrett Podell went further, arguing Tua Tagovailoa "will return to Pittsburgh on Sunday, and if he's able to play after suffering an oblique injury in practice on Thursday, he'll outplay Rodgers to shock the Steelers en route to a Falcons victory." Tagovailoa did not start; Cooper Rush did. Podell has only two graded calls with us, so there is no record here to read — just one upset call that didn't land.

What Sunday touched beyond Sunday

The pre-season numbers on these two clubs were already split, and one week nudged both sets. On Pittsburgh, we've tracked 22 win-total calls: a thick cluster at eight to ten wins (John Breech and Moe Moton at 9-8, Ralph Vacchiano at about eight, Rosenthal taking the over at "nine or 10"), against Nick Wright projecting 6-11 and Chris Broussard predicting "the first losing season for the Steelers since 2003." Chris Brockman is the outlier the other way at 11-6 and a division title. On Atlanta, the 17 calls range from Patrick Claybon's 2-15 to Wright's nine-win sleeper playoff team, with Breech at 6-11 and Chad Millman taking the over on 7.5.

One game answers none of that. It does mean the bearish Steelers cases now need a 0-1 head start they didn't get, and the Falcons-as-sleeper cases start a game behind with an unsettled quarterback room.

Full records: Pittsburgh Steelers, Atlanta Falcons, and the leaderboard.