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.
Week 7 Picks
After the Week 5 bloodbath, most of the popular options in Week 6 took care of business, with only about 10% of the remaining field getting eliminated. The bulk of those were due to the Eagles, who suffered a blowout loss on Thursday Night Football against the Giants.
I’ll be continuing to base my picks on the one large-field entry still alive. That has used (in order) Washington, Arizona, Seattle, Houston, Indy, and Green Bay. Since the FantasyLabs Survivor Tool allows me to check off those teams, I’ll be utilizing that feature and making the best choices going forward without using those teams.
All Contest Types: Kansas City Chiefs
Like the Packers last week, the Chiefs are an easy/obvious choice in Week 7:
Their implied win% is 10% higher than any other Week 7 team (including those we’ve already used), and this is the highest win% they’re likely to have all season. The other close option is their Week 18 contest, which is also against the Raiders, but that one is in Las Vegas, while this week is a home game — plus you never know if they’ll need to be fully competitive in Week 18.
The downside is they’ll be extremely popular since they weren’t picked by more than 10% of the field in any weeks that they’ve won this season. We’re projecting roughly half of the field to use Kansas City this week, so you won’t get much leverage even if they win.
Thus, there’s a bit of logic to fading the Chiefs this week, since it would provide a double dose of contrarianism. Not only will you be on a different team this week, but you’ll still have Kansas City available later in the year when most of the field doesn’t. That could come in handy late, like in Week 17 when they’re projected to be the safest pick — though a lot can change over the next ten weeks.
Other Option: Denver Broncos
Denver has been a popular pick at various other points this season, including more than a third of the field in Week 1. That means a large chunk of the field doesn’t have them available as an option this week — leading to just a 2% projected pick rate in our tool.
While they aren’t quite as safe as the Chiefs, a home game against the Giants feels like a solid spot, especially with Denver’s defense coming on strong in recent weeks. This is their best projected game for the remainder of the season, so there’s not much sense in holding onto the Broncos for a later game.
While we would need the Chiefs (or the somewhat-chalky Patriots) to suffer an upset loss for the contrarian play on Denver to really pay off, saving the Chiefs for late in the season or the Patriots for next week (home against the Browns) could allow us to create some leverage down the stretch.
Unlike last week, where the risk of pivoting off the best option (Green Bay) didn’t feel worth it — since you were effectively swapping which weeks you’d use Green Bay and which you’d use LA, while lowering win% in both weeks — this one does feel worth it. The Broncos are my favorite play if you still have them as an option.
Pictured: Bo Nix
Photo Credit: Imagn
