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 4 Picks
Large-Field Contests: Houston Texans
With the relatively high survival rate in large field contests of around 70% through three weeks, the value of taking bigger swings continues to increase. Most public contests are on pace for about 1.5% of entrants to survive all 18 weeks, which would translate to a prize pool that’s chopped roughly 100 ways in the DraftKings $100 survivor, for example.
Therefore, giving ourselves a shot to advance when others fail is more important than raising our odds of surviving. I’d rather have a 50% chance at a prize that gets chopped 50 ways than a 60% chance at a prize chopped 100 ways, for example.
Which is where the Texans come in. While they aren’t entirely contrarian, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of the field will be using either the Lions or Bills. While both of those teams have better odds of advancing, if either were to fail, a huge chunk of the field would drop out.
Even if they don’t, both the Bills (34.6) and the Lions (26.1) have much higher future value scores than the Texans (8.2). If everybody advances, you’ll still be in a better spot by having stronger teams available late in the season, when you can potentially be contrarian and get a safer team all in one pick.
Small-Field Contests: Denver Broncos
We recommended the Packers for the small field selection last week, which obviously didn’t work out. Hopefully readers with multiple entrants diversified and thus still have teams available. For the sake of continuity, we’ll progress as if we used the Seahawks in Week 3 as well. That gives us the Eagles, Cowboys, and Seahawks as off-the-board teams.
That’s relevant because we still have the Broncos available in small field contests. Like the Texans, they’re expected to be utilized in less than 10% of entrants this week. They have the added benefit of being a safer option, as they host the Jake Browning-led Bengals in Week 4.
Those same Bengals were just blown out by the Vikings last week, and a game in Denver certainly isn’t any easier. While Denver has a higher future value than the Texans, that’s slightly less important in smaller contests.
On top of that, this is still the highest projected odds they have all season, so it’s not a bad time to use them. Not having Denver available in Week 10 will make things a bit challenging, but there’s a chance that other injuries, trades, etc., will create another obvious candidate then.
Pictured: C.J. Stroud
Photo Credit: Imagn
