# New England Patriots 2026: The Coverage Report — 11 Win-Total Calls, None Above 10 Wins

*Published 2026-09-06 — MissedTakes*

One post per club, working through what the outlets we track said about each team and how it graded out. Today: New England. One caveat up front, and it applies to all 32 — this measures the pundits and publishers in the MissedTakes database, not all football media. A team can be wall-to-wall on local radio and still be thin here.

New England is not thin here.

## The baseline: 4th-most graded takes in the league

Across the whole database, the Patriots are the subject of 728 takes, 300 of them graded. That's the fourth-largest graded pile of any club, behind Kansas City (389), the Rams (326) and Buffalo (309). The median team has 207 graded takes. New England sits 45 percent above that.

![Patriots coverage, measured](/posts/visuals/e9f2d8ce-729a-4e02-a692-2d7905a46323.png)

That volume isn't an accident of publishing habit. The club went 14-3 in 2025, made the playoffs and reached the Super Bowl, after 4-13 seasons in 2024 and 2023. Teams that improve by ten wins get talked about.

The other number in that tile matters as much: the field's average skill delta on Patriots takes is 48.69, third-highest of any team behind Seattle (58.6) and Carolina (55.52). Skill measures a call against a naive baseline, and the naive baseline for New England was a 4-13 team. Anyone who said "playoffs" got paid for it.

## The cutdown: 80 calls, 5 grades, and none of them from this August

The news hook of this series is the 53-man cutdown, and here the honest answer is short. There are 80 roster-spot calls on the Patriots in the database. Five are graded. All five are 2025-season availability and roster calls, not 53-man projections — [Gregg Rosenthal](/pundits/gregg-rosenthal) saying [Stefon Diggs](/nfl/players/stefon-diggs) sticks, [Tom Pelissero](/pundits/tom-pelissero) reporting Diggs on track for the opener, [Jane Later](/pundits/jane-later) on [Robert Spillane](/nfl/players/robert-spillane) playing through an ankle injury.

Four of the five scored 100. The one miss was Rosenthal on [Javon Baker](/nfl/players/javon-baker): ["Javon Baker should be back on their practice squad."](/opinions/88928365-78fb-4f7b-84a4-0dd7856ba9cc) He wasn't — zero weeks on a 53, accuracy 0, skill −200. Five takes is not a record. Don't read it as one.

The other 75 roster-spot calls — the whole 2026 cutdown wave, claimed between mid-August and August 30 — are pending. [Nathan Jahnke](/pundits/nathan-jahnke) at PFF has [Kyle Williams](/nfl/players/kyle-williams) and [Efton Chism III](/nfl/players/efton-chism-iii) both making it. Ethan Hurwitz (no pundit page yet) filed a full position-by-position 53-man projection on August 15 and a series of survivor calls after that, including [JaMycal Hasty](/nfl/players/jamycal-hasty) as "destined for the practice squad, if that" and [Mike Brown](/nfl/players/mike-brown-9699) as a possible roster casualty. Zero takes were graded site-wide in the last seven days. None of it has landed. We'll grade it when it does.

## What has graded: the playoff call was free money, the win totals were not

Strip out the pending pile and the Patriots' record is dominated by a handful of claim types.

![Patriots takes by claim type](/posts/visuals/1d7c15fa-cb5c-4bf8-8491-4deffab1299d.png)

Playoff picks are the standout: 30 graded, 93.3 average accuracy, and an average skill delta of 163.57 — by far the biggest edge over baseline of any claim type on this team. [John Middlekauff](/pundits/john-middlekauff) in June 2025 ("Speaking of the Patriots, I think they make the playoffs"), [Matt Hasselbeck](/pundits/matt-hasselbeck) in July, [Colin Cowherd](/pundits/colin-cowherd) in August, [Kyle Brandt](/pundits/kyle-brandt) on the eve of the season — each scored 100 with a skill delta of 200, because the naive baseline said no. [Nick Wright](/pundits/nick-wright) took the same position in September and again in October and scored 189 and 167 as the call got easier.

Conference-champion picks: 10 graded, 100 accuracy. [Pat Gustavson](/pundits/pat-gustavson) in January — ["But I'll probably say Seattle, New England"](/opinions/06884586-5b21-40c8-9439-e303a3e8a806) — got both.

Then the win totals. Eleven pundits put a number on New England's 2025 season. Not one of them went above 10.

![Every 2025 Patriots win-total call](/posts/visuals/d314fe56-590a-4b2f-88dd-2665175dbb49.png)

The field's collective miss was 5.0 wins, the second-worst on any team-season in the database behind Kansas City's −6.3. Across all 13 graded Patriots win-total takes the average accuracy is 10.8. The best of them were the 10-win calls from [Brady Quinn](/pundits/brady-quinn), Cowherd, [Chris Brockman](/pundits/chris-brockman) and [Rich Eisen](/pundits/rich-eisen), each worth 20 accuracy. Brockman got there earliest, in May 2025: ["The Patriots are gonna win 10 plus games this year for the first time since Tom Brady."](/opinions/84fc0218-e71d-44dc-85a9-1ac6eab3864e) The pattern is clear enough — the field correctly saw a playoff team and still underestimated how good it was by a touchdown's worth of wins.

The award picks were worse. Fourteen graded, average accuracy 0.0. Eleven of them were [Drake Maye](/nfl/players/drake-maye) for MVP, from [Tony Dungy](/pundits/tony-dungy), [Colleen Wolfe](/pundits/colleen-wolfe), Nick Wright, Eisen, Brockman and others; Matthew Stafford won. (Three of the fourteen — from [Eric Mangini](/pundits/eric-mangini), [Chris Broussard](/pundits/chris-broussard) and [Willie Colon](/pundits/willie-colon) — were Super Bowl MVP guesses graded against the season award, so treat that bucket as a rough read.)

Trade and signing calls: 8 graded, 12.5 average accuracy. Seven times a pundit sent a player to Foxborough who never arrived — Tee Higgins, Josh Sweat, Ronnie Stanley, Byron Murphy, Darius Slayton, Brian Burns, George Pickens. The one hit was [Bobby Skinner](/pundits/bobby-skinner) in March 2025: ["I'm taking another swing, Milton Williams to the Patriots."](/opinions/6bc51663-60f7-4897-b5dc-40e284f869a2) Accuracy 100, skill 200. [Milton Williams](/nfl/players/milton-williams) signed.

Mock drafts came off better: 47 graded picks at 65.7 average accuracy, including [Kyle Crabbs](/pundits/kyle-crabbs) putting [Will Campbell](/nfl/players/will-campbell) at No. 4 twice in April 2025, and [Jaime Eisner](/pundits/jaime-eisner) putting [Keldric Faulk](/nfl/players/keldric-faulk) at No. 31 in the 2026 draft. Both exact.

## Who has a real record on this team

Sixteen pundits have five or more graded Patriots takes. That's a floor for being named, not for being ranked — at 5 to 26 takes these samples are small, and the mix of claim types differs from person to person.

| Pundit | Graded | Avg accuracy | Avg skill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colin Cowherd | 26 | 71.0 | 57.10 |
| Gregg Rosenthal | 18 | 67.8 | 29.13 |
| Nick Wright | 16 | 87.9 | 58.20 |
| Rich Eisen | 16 | 78.9 | 57.69 |
| Chris Brockman | 13 | 33.8 | 49.75 |
| Pat Fitzmaurice | 12 | 62.3 | 95.96 |
| [Cynthia Frelund](/pundits/cynthia-frelund) | 12 | 89.8 | 93.33 |
| Kyle Crabbs | 11 | 44.8 | 37.71 |

Brockman's line is the interesting one: the lowest accuracy in the group at 33.8, and a skill delta of 49.75 anyway, because he was early and loud on a team the baseline had at 4-13. Frelund's 89.8 accuracy over 12 graded takes is the cleanest number on the board, mostly on game outcomes and a [TreVeyon Henderson](/nfl/players/treveyon-henderson) breakout call that finished RB19 against an RB24 bar.

The short version: our tracked outlets covered New England heavily, got the direction right earlier than the baseline did, and still low-balled the magnitude on every quantity they had to name — wins, MVP, and the free-agent additions they invented. The cutdown verdicts are next.