It's that time of year again when hope springs anew and the football-loving public collectively says, "This year I'll go all the way." I'm, of course, referring to survivor pools, a type of contest that sounds easy — until you're doing it.
That brings us to our NFL survivor pool Week 1 picks.
The concept is simple: Pick one team that wins an NFL game every week. No spreads or totals, just winners. Once you use that team, they're done — creating an element of strategy and long-term planning that makes these contests deceptively difficult.
Fortunately, this year we're partnering with our friends at Pool Genius to make things easier. They've built slate-leading tools to help conquer a variety of pool contests, including survivor.
My favorite feature of the site is the ability to customize for your individual pool type. Factors like contest size and payout structure are a huge factor in survivor contests, as smaller fields generally don't have any entries make it all 18 weeks.
To give a glimpse of how that works, all season I'll be providing their top option for small (less than 100), and large (1,000+) entry pools. Besides that, they track pick selection data to help figure out contrarian options. This is helpful in larger pools since we're trying to optimize for expected value more than just odds of winning.
Finally, they use projected future spreads to assign a future value to each team — which includes considering the scarcity of strong options on certain weeks. This is crucial, as we don't want to burn the best teams when there are other strong options that week.
To get their full data, you'll need to sign up for the site. It's well worth it though, and it also includes tools for taking down the increasingly popular pick'em contests that feature massive prize pools.
NFL Survivor Pool Week 1 Picks
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Large Field: Seattle Seahawks
It's a unique Week 1 setup for Survivor Pools in that just one team (Bengals) is favored by more than a touchdown. While Cincinnati feels fairly safe, it will also be an extremely popular pick, which makes them worth avoiding this week.
That's for two reasons. One, the Bengals could lose, creating massive EV for the portion of the field that fades them. Two, even in the likely scenario that Cincinnati wins, avoiding the Week 1 chalk and saving Cincinnati for later in the season allows you another opportunity to get contrarian. We discussed the value of that in our NFL Pool Strategy Podcast:
On the Seahawks front, Week 1 is the heaviest they'll be favored all season. That means it's a good time to take the swing, with their 70% implied win rate only 5% from the lead on the slate. We'll have other weeks where we want to use Cincinnati, this might be the best it gets for Seattle.
Larger field contests like this place a high premium on surviving all 18 weeks, so keeping an eye on future value is important. PoolGenius subscribers can use their Season Planner tool to chart a path all the way through Week 18 at any time during the season.
Small Field: Buffalo
Seattle checks in as the best option regardless of field size, given their perfect blend of limited future value and low utilization in most contests. If you're playing just one entry this year (regardless of size), I'd go with the Seahawks.
However, if you're like me and playing multiple pools, you probably want to diversify. In that case, the Bills are an excellent option. They have nearly identical odds of winning in Week 1 as the Seahawks, just slightly trailing the Bengals for best on the slate.
Buffalo will be a bit more popular, but with Cincinnati being the clear chalk the Bills are at a reasonable 14% utilization rate. The drawback to using Buffalo over Seattle is the Bills later season value — but that's less important in smaller pools.
Even if you follow the optimal path, less than 1% of players make it through Week 16, much less the end of the season. So, in pools with less than 100 entrants, odds are you won't need to make it all 18 weeks.
That lowers the value in saving good teams for later in the season, making Buffalo a better play than in large fields where we need to run the table to cash.
