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 1 options, let’s touch on 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 1 Picks
Large-Field Contests: Denver Broncos
While the Broncos are currently projected to be the most popular pick of Week 1, I’m less concerned with that now than I am deeper in the season. Since every team is available to every player, Week 1 picks tend to be more widely distributed, so the Broncos are still projecting for less than 33% utilization.
With large field contests, you need to survive all 18 weeks anyway — and will still likely “chop” the final payout — giving us plenty of chances to get contrarian later in the season.
The Broncos stand out not just for their extremely strong win odds of 80.4%, but the fact that this is their highest projected win odds for the entire season:
The only team with better win odds this week is the Eagles — and they have multiple weeks later in the season where they’re more valuable. For that reason, I’m willing to lean into the chalky Broncos this week and hope some of the other popular teams fail to thin the field a bit.
Small-Field Contests: Philadelphia Eagles
In the section on the Broncos, I mentioned the Eagles as the team with the best win odds this week. They also have among the best future value — trailing only the Bills and Ravens.
It’s fairly unlikely to optimize all three of the relevant metrics for survivor; win probability, future value, and uniqueness. In smaller field contests, the one I’m more likely to overlook is future value, since we probably won’t need to survive all 18 weeks anyway.
The Eagles are ideal in contests with 50 or so entrants, which on average should wrap up around Week 12, or potentially sooner if your pool is filled with more casual players. When you start approaching 100 or so entrants, the expected end date moves back far enough that I’d lean towards saving the Eagles, potentially pivoting to riskier options like the Cardinals or the Commanders.
The upside of using Philadelphia this week is that most players are saving them for later, so a bust from one of the more popular, but riskier, Week 1 teams would give you a huge edge on the field and further reduce the odds of your contest running long.
That’s worth burning their future value early. Especially since injuries and other shake-ups throughout the season make that value tricky to project.
One caveat: Some pools, like the popular Circa Survivor contest, are treating the Thanksgiving and Black Friday games as a separate week. That means you’ll need two picks in Week 13, one coming from the four-game Thursday-Friday slate. If your pool follows those rules, I’d consider saving the Eagles for that week, since options are fairly limited.
Pictured: Bo Nix
Photo Credit: Imagn
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