Lions 31, Saints 30: Everybody Picked Detroit, Nobody Saw a One-Point Game
Detroit beat New Orleans 31-30 in Week 1. We had 21 graded calls riding on that game — 15 straight-up winner picks and six score predictions — and every single one of them took the Lions.
Nobody was wrong about the winner.
The winner picks were free money, and the scoreboard says so
Our skill number measures a pick against the dumbest defensible alternative: just take the home team. Detroit was the home team. Detroit won. So all 15 winner picks graded 100 for accuracy and zero for skill.
That list includes Pete Prisco, Kirk Herbstreit, Conor Orr, Albert Breer, Gilberto Manzano, Mitch Goldich, Matt Verderame, John Pluym, Eva Geitheim, Mike Kadlick, Dave Dameshek, Jason McIntyre, John Breech and Ross Jackson. Fourteen names, one answer.
The tone is where it gets interesting, because several of them didn't just pick Detroit — they picked Detroit comfortably. Prisco, two days before kickoff: "The Saints won't keep up. Lions big." Breech, back in August, wrote that "it's hard to see the Saints keeping up." Herbstreit's version was a statement game: "I feel like Detroit coming off a disappointing year. They wanna make a statement early... I like Detroit there."
New Orleans lost by one on the road. The result rewarded the pick and repudiated the reasoning.
The margins, which is where the real grading happened
Six pundits put a number on it. The game finished as close as an NFL game gets, and the baseline — a naive expectation that this game would be roughly a coin flip, home side by half a point — was almost perfect. That meant every score prediction on record here graded below the naive baseline. All six.
| Pundit | Score called | Margin | Accuracy | vs. baseline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matt Dery | Lions 24-20 | 4 | 92.9 | −7.0 |
| Ross Jackson | Lions 27-20 | 7 | 85.7 | −21.3 |
| Mitchell Eisenstein | Lions 34-24 | 10 | 78.6 | −35.6 |
| Mike Florio | Lions 34-24 | 10 | 78.6 | −35.6 |
| John Breech | Lions 30-20 | 10 | 78.6 | −35.6 |
| Pete Prisco | Lions 33-21 | 12 | 73.8 | −45.1 |
Dery, of Detroit radio, came closest: Lions 24-20, a four-point game that finished by one, and he said out loud he expected New Orleans to cover the 7.5. That's the sharpest read of the game anyone published — he was the only one who priced the Saints as live. Fair warning on how much to make of it: we've graded only four calls from him in total, so this is a promising data point, not a track record.
Prisco's 33-21 was the furthest off, and it's a useful correction to his own numbers. Across the 15 score predictions we've graded from him, he averages 65.7 accuracy and comes out meaningfully ahead of the naive baseline (+26.0). This one graded higher than his average on raw accuracy — 73.8 — and still cost him, because a near-perfect baseline is a brutal opponent. That's not a slump; it's one blowout call in a game that refused to be a blowout. His overall record is 17 graded calls, which is thin enough that one week moves it.
Ross Jackson had both halves of it in May
The most interesting entry belongs to Jackson, who covers the Saints and sits fifth on our leaderboard with 196 graded calls, 68.9 accuracy and a +26.9 skill score — one of the few people in this piece with a sample big enough to call a record. Back on May 15 he mapped out New Orleans' season game by game and said the Saints "drop the first two games of the season, that's on the road to the Detroit Lions", while still projecting 10-7. Four months later he put a number on it: Lions 27-20.
The outcome call landed. The margin didn't — seven points predicted, one point delivered, 85.7 accuracy and 21 points below baseline. Dameshek got to the same place from the other direction, calling the Saints "0-2 right out of the gate. They go at Detroit and at Baltimore." Half of that is now settled in his favor.
What it does to the season takes
Not much. A one-point road loss in Detroit is consistent with almost every forecast on the board: Jackson's 10-7 Saints, John Middlekauff calling them a "10-plus wins" NFC South winner, Breech's 8-9, and Colin Cowherd taking both New Orleans and Detroit as division winners. The Lions bulls — Cowherd and Gregg Rosenthal on the over-10.5, Breech at 12-5 — got a win without getting much evidence.
The one call this genuinely pressured is the 0-2 projection, with Baltimore next on the Saints' schedule.
Full histories on the Lions and Saints pages, and the standings for everyone named above are on the leaderboard.