As a longtime survivor pool player — and one-time winner — I’m thrilled that we have added survivor pool coverage to our industry-best suite of NFL tools.
In the old days, before the season started, I would manually build out a table with every NFL team’s projected chance of winning every game of the season. This was an extremely difficult and time-consuming task, but a valuable one for survivor contests.
In survivor pools, the aim is simple: pick one team each week, and if they win, you survive. However, you can use each team only once. That means finding the optimal spot to use the best teams in the league is important to avoid being in a tough position later in the season.
Being able to visualize each team’s odds at various points is crucial, as it helps you avoid situations where you can’t use any of the week’s strong favorites. Our new tool does exactly that — plus includes the projected popularity of each team for the current week, as well as their aggregate “future value” at a glance:
The tool also allows you to mark which teams you’ve already used, eliminating them from the full season table:
Before we get into my favorite Week 2 options, here’s a reminder of some general survivor pool strategy.
General Strategy
Much like daily fantasy sports, survivor pools are more about overall strategy than predicting the outcome of football games.
While the obvious goal is to survive as long as possible, the actual aim is to survive longer than your opponents. Most pools pay out only to the first-place finisher, with the prize pool chopped in case multiple entrants last the entirety of the season.
That means not all winning weeks are created equal, as advancing on a week where other entries fail is more valuable. That gives us a third variable to consider in our selections. Not only are the team’s odds of winning and future value important, but their popularity is as well.
If you can fade a popular team with strong future value and advance, it’s a double-whammy of leverage. Not only were you unique this week, but you’ll also be able to use a team that most of the field doesn’t have later in the season.
It’s also vital to consider your pool’s settings and size. Some pools have different rule sets, including weeks with multiple picks, whether ties count as a win or not, and even potentially opportunities to return following a loss. For this column I’ll be assuming a standard rule set, where one loss is an elimination and there are no multi-pick weeks.
Pool size is also important. Using our tool, we can do some back-of-the-envelope math to figure out the rough odds of surviving all season using the best available option. Based on my estimates, about 1% of the field is likely to last 17 weeks, and about half of those make it all 18 weeks. That means pools of 100 entrants or less are likely to wrap up before the end of the season, so the strategy is different based on pool size.
In this space, I’ll be giving out my favorite picks for large-field public contests like those found on DraftKings, as well as options for smaller pools like you might play in with friends or coworkers, since the strategy changes tremendously based on how long you’ll need to survive to win.
Here’s another sneak peek of what the tool shows:
Week 2 Picks
Large-Field Contests: Arizona Cardinals
Most years, there’s a popular Week 1 team that ruins a ton of survivor pools in the first week of the season. We didn’t get that this year, with all of the popular options — including the Cardinals — pulling off the win. That means only about 5% of the field was eliminated in most pools, at least based on the ones I’m in.
That fact further increases the need to take some chances moving forward. First, a greater percentage of surviving entrants means the eventual payout will be split more ways, so you can significantly boost your EV by pivoting from the popular teams in a week that one (or more) of them lose. Second, by being a bit contrarian, you’ll have different teams available late in the year than most of the field, which gives you further opportunities to differentiate.
While the Cardinals aren’t an entirely off-the-wall pick, we have them projected as the third most popular team, well behind the Cowboys and Ravens. While the Ravens are the safest option this week, there’s four more weeks this season where they’re projected with 80% or higher win odds, so we’d certainly prefer to have them available later.
On the other hand, Arizona’s highest projected win odds for the remainder of the season are this week. If you didn’t use them in Week 1, it’s now or never, and you can save the better teams for later in the season. Arizona’s future value score in our tool is just 6.3, which ranks 22nd in the league.
Small-Field Contests: Dallas Cowboys
With that said, I’m far less concerned about being contrarian in smaller-field contests, where even a chalky Week 1 doesn’t make it especially likely that anyone survives all 18 weeks. That means we want to optimize for safety and future value, with less concern over how popular teams are.
Dallas has a slightly lower win% than the Cardinals, with -250 odds compared to Arizona’s -285, but much lower future value. Their 0.4 mark is bottom-five in the NFL, with no other games where they project for 60% or better odds:
While the Cardinals’ best odds also occur this week, they have some other potentially usable spots down the line, especially once pickings get slim. Not so for the Cowboys, who are projected underdogs in six of the last seven weeks of the year.
While I’ll still be rooting for an unlikely upset loss from the Ravens or Bills, I’m not especially worried about getting leverage on the field — but I do want to save those high-value teams for when my opponents won’t have them.
Pictured: Kyler Murray
Photo Credit: Imagn
