Seahawks 13, Patriots 10: 22 of 30 Calls Had Seattle, and Not One Beat the Baseline

Seattle 13, New England 10, Week 1, and the defending champions kept their opener. We had 30 graded calls riding on this game — 22 straight-up winner picks and eight score predictions. Here is what they were worth.

The field leaned Seattle, 22 to 8

Twenty-two of the 30 calls had the Seahawks winning; eight had the Patriots. That is a 73% lean toward the home team, and the home team won. So most of the room was right.

Being right, in this case, was not worth much. Our skill number measures a pick against the dumbest available strategy — always take the home team. Seattle was home. That means every correct winner pick in this game merely tied the default (skill 0), and every wrong one fell 200 points below it. Nobody in the building beat the baseline on this game. The eight who took New England paid full price for it.

That is the shrug side of the story. The sharper part is in the scores.

The score calls: everyone had a shootout, the game had 23 points

Eight pundits put a number on it. The actual margin was three, and — awkwardly — the naive baseline for this game was also the home team by three. The default was perfect.

Cowherd made two different score calls on consecutive days and the second one was the best call on the board: *"I think it looks 23-20-ish. I'll take Seattle very, very close and very low-scoring."* Exact margin, right winner, and the only score prediction in the set to grade a perfect 100. He also got the texture right, which nobody else did — every one of the eight score calls had at least 40 combined points, and the game produced 23.

The caveat is the same one that applies to everyone here: matching a three-point home win is matching the default, so Cowherd's skill on the call is 0, not positive. He does not get extra credit for being the only one to reach the number the baseline already had.

It fits his longer record rather than bending it. Across 448 graded calls, Cowherd sits at 55.91 accuracy with a MissedTakes Score of 10.66 — a hair better than naive overall. His 71 graded score predictions run 62.76 accuracy, so 100 is his ceiling showing up, not his normal week.

The winner picks worth naming

AJ Hawk was direct about it: *"I'm taking the Seahawks minus three at home... Give me them tonight."* Anthony "Tone Diggs" DiGuilio gave the cleanest reasoning in the set — Seattle returning "91% of the snaps from their front seven and a 100% of their snaps from their offensive line" — and Ty Schmit leaned the same way on the same logic. Hawk's record backs the pick up: 15 graded winner picks at 76.14 accuracy and a MissedTakes Score of 30.82, though at 16 graded calls overall that is a lean, not a résumé.

Two calls were right on the winner and badly off on the shape. John Middlekauff said *"I expect Seattle to win... to me, this is a 10-point game by Seattle"* and, separately, liked Seattle *"to win by three and a half."* One of those was nearly exact. The graded winner pick counts either way.

The earliest hit belongs to Chris Brockman, who called it back on May 22: *"Do you think they lose the opening night in Seattle? I would assume they lose."*

The misses

Eight calls took New England, and the most interesting one moved. Darius Butler started in the right place and talked himself out of it on air: *"I'm gonna go Seattle minus three at home on banner night... Change my pick to Patriots plus three."* Zero accuracy on a call he had correct minutes earlier.

Jason McIntyre went *"I'm on Patriots tonight. I might take him on the money line"*, citing a Cowherd point from overnight — while Cowherd himself had Seattle. McIntyre is one of the more established names in this group: 86 graded calls, 61.5 accuracy overall. But his winner picks specifically hit 68.86 accuracy with a MissedTakes Score of −11.57 across 34 graded calls, meaning that over time they have come in slightly *below* just taking the home team every week. This one did not help.

Henry McKenna staked the position early, on Aug. 3: *"New England is currently a 3.5-point underdog for the season-opener. I'd say that underestimates the Patriots."* The number was right and the side was wrong. Conor Orr had the Patriots among six Week 1 upsets. Connor "Boston Connor" Campbell framed it as *"a big redemption for the Patriots."* Mark Wahlberg, going game-by-game through the schedule to a 14-3 finish, expected a *"championship hangover"* in Seattle.

For Orr, McKenna and Edelman, this is the only graded call we have on file — a single result, not a pattern. Florio's miss is his first score prediction; his other seven graded calls average 82.71 accuracy, so one zero-skill night on an eight-call ledger tells you very little either way.

What it touches going forward

The bullish Patriots takes now need 14 games to make up ground on 17. We have tracked 41 season win-total calls on New England, ranging from Wahlberg's 14-3 down to Simon Hunter's 8-9 or 9-8, with a heavy cluster at 9-8 to 11-6 — including Middlekauff's *"9-10 win range"* and a miss of the playoffs. None of those is settled after one week, but the 12-, 13- and 14-win versions got harder on Wednesday night.

On the other side, the 18 Seahawks win-total calls we have tracked lean high: Nick Wright at 14-3, Breech at 12-5, Cowherd at 12. Sherman's separate call that Seattle goes *"four for four"* over its first four games is one-quarter of the way home. Worth noting the field's history with these two: in 2025, the collective win-total call missed both New England and Seattle by five wins.

Both team pages — Seahawks and Patriots — carry the rest of the open calls, and the leaderboard shows who has earned the benefit of the doubt in Week 2.