# Vikings 39, Packers 22: The Field Split Down the Middle on a 17-Point Game

*Published 2026-09-16 — MissedTakes*

Minnesota beat Green Bay 39-22 in the Week 1 opener at U.S. Bank Stadium. We had 32 graded calls riding on that game — 20 straight winner picks and 12 score predictions — and the headline is not that the field missed. It's that the field didn't agree on anything at all.

## A 16-16 coin flip

Count every call, winner picks and score predictions together, and the split was exactly even: 16 calls on Minnesota, 16 on Green Bay. The straight winner picks leaned Vikings 11-9. The score predictions leaned the other way, 7-5 for the Packers. On a division game that finished by 17, the industry was a coin flip.

![Every score prediction on Packers-Vikings, graded](/posts/visuals/632d0589-86e5-4116-b7ff-b521584dfda9.png)

The margin is where it gets ugly. The largest winning margin anyone predicted in Minnesota's favor was 10 points. The actual margin was 17. And of the 12 score predictions, exactly one had the game producing more points than it did: [Bill Huber](/pundits/bill-huber)'s [Vikings 34, Packers 31](/opinions/a6d14515-a97f-45ac-b245-235ceff7a5a7), 65 total points against 61 actual. Everyone else was low, most of them badly.

## The calls that earned their scores

[Mike Florio](/pundits/mike-florio) was the best call on the board. His ["Vikings 30, Packers 20"](/opinions/4b20f46e-ebc0-462f-9e7a-2ab82f91a2ea) graded at 83.3 accuracy with a skill mark of +50.2 — meaning he beat the naive default (just take the home team and a roughly even margin) by a wide stretch. It's the only call all week on this game that combined the right side with something like the right size.

[Carter Bahns](/pundits/carter-bahns)' CBS Sports preview went [Vikings 27, Packers 20](/opinions/40090d54-7fc7-4871-ae7b-8fdacb7d67cf) — a seven-point margin, 76.2 accuracy, +35.9 skill. [Jordan Dajani](/pundits/jordan-dajani) had [Vikings 22, Packers 16](/opinions/f6565d23-03db-4e60-a574-21a0b86dafb0), which is off by 23 on the total but right on the shape: 73.8 accuracy, +31.1 skill.

One structural note worth understanding before the misses. Minnesota was at home, so "Vikings win" is what the default guess already says. The eleven pundits who simply picked the Vikings straight up graded at 100 accuracy and zero skill — right, but no better than the coin the baseline flips for free. Only the score predictions that named a Minnesota margin actually beat the default.

The most interesting pre-game call came almost a month out. On August 19, [Simon Hunter](/pundits/simon-hunter) argued the NFC North was wide open and took the home team as a small underdog: ["That's a division dog at home week one. People are gonna be shocked."](/opinions/8971036c-879f-481f-9a34-e41ffa8c15b9) He also bet Minnesota to win the division and go over 8.5 wins — neither of which the season has answered yet.

## The misses, by name

Nine graded winner picks landed on Green Bay and got zero, each carrying a skill mark of −200, which is the site's way of saying you did worse than the free guess.

[Pat McAfee](/pundits/pat-mcafee) and [AJ Hawk](/pundits/aj-hawk) both took ["the Green Bay Packers plus one and a half in Minnesota."](/opinions/d72ee420-9220-402c-9a25-44bc6ed8c477) [Kirk Herbstreit](/pundits/kirk-herbstreit) was blunt about it: ["Green Bay. For sure. Green Bay."](/opinions/5bc3755c-9b84-484f-b8f2-b18d51a12261) [Jared Dubin](/pundits/jared-dubin) had [Green Bay winning on the road without Josh Jacobs](/opinions/3a9aea65-224c-4050-947f-0a4acab886c3), and doubled down with a [Packers 30, Vikings 27](/opinions/5017ce6e-d3fa-471a-bcf6-b9834182fded) score. Sports Illustrated's staff picks split four ways on this game, with [Conor Orr](/pundits/conor-orr), [Mike Kadlick](/pundits/mike-kadlick), [Matt Verderame](/pundits/matt-verderame) and [Albert Breer](/pundits/albert-breer) on Green Bay and [Mitch Goldich](/pundits/mitch-goldich), [Gilberto Manzano](/pundits/gilberto-manzano), [John Pluym](/pundits/john-pluym) and [Eva Geitheim](/pundits/eva-geitheim) on Minnesota.

The single worst score on the board belonged to [Pete Prisco](/pundits/pete-prisco), whose [Packers 26, Vikings 24](/opinions/d6f9bde0-aad0-4013-967c-c197b2e9be19) graded at 14.3 accuracy and −87.9 skill: wrong side, wrong margin, wrong game entirely. [John Breech](/pundits/john-breech) missed twice — a [Packers 22-19](/opinions/b823d5ce-fc63-4d24-9f48-839f494b538a) score pick, and back in August a [piece naming Week 1 as Minnesota's first loss](/opinions/50eb251e-cf6b-417d-a0d6-bccba95e06fc) on the theory that "the Vikings new quarterback is trying to learn a new offense."

## What this does to the records

Florio's 83.3 here is a touch above his own norm. Across 22 graded calls he sits at 85.7 accuracy with a MissedTakes Score of 41.9, though his score predictions specifically run 61.8 accuracy over 15 — this was one of his sharper ones, not a typical night. That's a thin body of work, so read it as a good start rather than a track record.

Dubin's miss is the interruption, not the pattern. He's at 66.6 accuracy and a +29 score over 13 graded calls, and on this same Week 1 slate his Ravens-over-Colts call graded a perfect 100 with the maximum skill mark. He had a good week with one bad game in it.

Prisco is the reverse: his score predictions grade 65.7 accuracy over 15 calls, so Packers 26-24 sits well below his own bar. And Huber, whose 34-31 was the closest thing to a correct read of the scoring environment, carries 90.5 accuracy over 53 graded calls — nearly all of them roster calls, where he runs 93.3.

## What it touches next

Huber's preseason write-up called the Packers to go 8-9 and to start 3-4 through seven games, with a loss at Minnesota in the ledger; [Jacob Westendorf](/pundits/jacob-westendorf) also has Green Bay at 8-9 but had the Packers winning this one. Hunter's Minnesota over-8.5 and NFC North bets are now one game to the good, though his division picks have graded at zero accuracy across four prior calls — so that's a lean with a rough history behind it, not a forecast to lean on.

Seventeen more weeks will sort it out. The running records are on the [Minnesota Vikings](/nfl/teams/vikings) and [Green Bay Packers](/nfl/teams/packers) pages, and the standings for everyone named above are on the [leaderboard](/leaderboard).