Ravens 41, Colts 23: The Field Took Baltimore and Still Undersold It
Baltimore went into Indianapolis in Week 1 of the 2026 season and won 41-23. We had 21 graded calls riding on that game — 15 simple winner picks and six score predictions. The field was mostly on the right side of things. The part the field missed was the margin.
The verdict on the field
Eighteen of the 21 calls backed the Ravens. Three took the Colts. On the winner picks alone, 13 of 15 came in correct.
That lopsided lean was worth more than it usually is, because the naive default here was Indianapolis. Our skill number measures a call against the dumbest possible strategy — pick the home team every week — and in this game that strategy pointed at the Colts. So every pundit who took Baltimore on the road didn't just get it right, they beat the default, and each of those winner picks graded at a perfect 100 with the maximum skill credit. The two who took Indianapolis straight up got nothing wrong that the lazy method wouldn't also have gotten wrong: zero accuracy, and a skill score of zero rather than a penalty.
The calls worth naming
Jared Dubin had the sharpest week of anyone on this game, and he had it twice. His CBS Sports preview said flatly that "It all adds up to a big Ravens win" — one of the best-scoring calls anywhere on the site over the past week. Separately, his score pick was Ravens 30, Colts 14: a 16-point margin against an actual margin of 18. That is the best-graded score prediction on this game by a wide gap (95.24 accuracy), and nobody else in the field was within nine points of the real margin.
Jordan Dajani nailed the losing half of the scoreboard — Ravens 27, Colts 23, and Indianapolis did score 23 — but had Baltimore 14 points light. Pete Prisco (Ravens 34, Colts 27) and John Breech (Ravens 27-20) both called a seven-point Baltimore win; Mike Florio had Ravens 24, Colts 20. All three landed the right side and a near-miss margin. The common thread: not one score pick in the field put Baltimore above 34 points. The Ravens scored 41.
Breech deserves a note for lead time. Back on August 19, a CBS Sports piece of his forecasting when each team would take its first loss named this as the Colts' week, reasoning "it's hard to imagine the Colts pulling this off if they're not at 100%". Jason McIntyre got there on September 2 on radio: "I can't fire on the Colts. So for now, I'm going Ravens minus three and a half." Both were right, and both were right early.
The rest of the Baltimore side: Kirk Herbstreit, AJ Hawk, Albert Breer, Conor Orr, Matt Verderame, John Pluym, Eva Geitheim, Mitch Goldich and Mike Kadlick.
The misses
Three calls went the other way.
Kevin Wildes built a parlay out of two upsets — Houston over Buffalo and Indianapolis over Baltimore — for an 11-point payoff. Gilberto Manzano was the only name in the Sports Illustrated staff picks grid to take the Colts. Neither is penalized below the default, but neither gets anything.
Richard Sherman put a number on it: "We'll go with 23-17 Indianapolis." He had the Colts by six; they lost by 18, a 24-point swing, and the call graded out at 21.43 accuracy — the worst score on the game.
Does this change how you read them?
Dubin is the interesting one, because there isn't much record behind the big week. We've graded 13 calls of his in total, and he sits at 66.6 accuracy overall — a small enough sample that this game is a meaningful chunk of it rather than confirmation of a pattern. Worth watching, not yet worth trusting blind.
Sherman has the deepest file of the three misses: 77 graded calls, 52.5 accuracy overall, with his straight-up game picks running better than that (71.43 across 15) and his score predictions better still (71.81 across 11). This was a bad night inside a decent body of work, not the norm.
Wildes is at 28.37 accuracy across 12 graded calls, and 30 on game picks specifically — again thin, but this one fits the pattern rather than breaking it. Manzano's grid sits at 53.33 across 15 picks, all from that single slate.
What this result leans on next
The Colts were carrying a lot of preseason optimism. Pat McAfee predicted the AFC South would put all four of its teams into the playoffs; Darius Butler said Indianapolis was "probably gonna be number one seed"; Danny Parkins had them winning the division as "the forgotten team." John Breech went the other way, projecting the Colts at 7-10. One September loss doesn't settle any of that — seventeen games remain — but the field's bullish Indianapolis calls now need a longer runway than they did last week.
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