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 Week 2 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 PoolGenius 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. Starting this week, I'll also include a section built around the Week 2 Survivor contest offered by RotoGrinders — in case you didn't take my advice last week and played the Bengals.
Besides that, PoolGenius tracks 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 the 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 2 Picks
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Large Field Survivor Pick: Houston Texans
The Texans make a ton of sense in large field tournaments, thanks to their somewhat-limited future value. There's four teams with moneyline odds of -300 or better this week so finding a winner isn't the key factor, making sure we're set up well down the stretch is.
We accomplish that not only by avoiding the teams we'd prefer to keep for later in the season, but by using a contrarian team. While we can hope for the more popular plays to lose, simply having those teams available when the rest of the field won't gives us another edge.
There's also a "now or never" element to the Texans pick. Their matchup against the Bears is about as good as it will get for them. Opposed to the week's chalky selection (Baltimore), Houston is only projected for better than 70% odds to win in one other week. The Ravens have two more weeks north of 80%.
Small Field: Detroit
Just like last week, PoolGenius is recommending the same team in both small and large survivor pools. However, if you're like me and playing one of each, you'll probably want to diversify your selections.
That's where the Lions come in. They're slightly more likely to win their Week 2 matchup at home against the Bucs, with an even lower public pick rate. The trade off is you're giving up plenty of future value down the road, especially a Week 18 home matchup against the division rival Vikings.
A lot could change by then of course. More importantly, in pools of this size you're unlucky to still have anyone alive. With more than a third of typical contests dropping out in Week 1, most ~100 people contests are now on track to wrap up before the season ends.
RotoGrinders 2nd Chance Survivor: Los Angeles Chargers
Another helpful feature of PoolGenius' tools is the ability to input custom rules for your pool selections. With this contest starting in Week 2, it's using custom rules that include two picks each in Weeks 16 on in order to raise the likelihood of a solo winner.
That changes the strategy considerably, putting an even higher emphasis on saving strong teams for late in the season. With roughly 800 entries (and counting) odds are good that you'll need to run the table to claim the top prize.
That's what makes the Chargers my favorite selection in this pool. They have below average future value, with no other week north of a 70% projected win odds. They're at a strong 72% this week.
While we're leaning in to a bit more chalk with the Chargers relative to the other picks, I'm prioritizing saving stronger teams for later in the season rather than trying to go too far off script. Based on Week 1 performance and our preseason expectations, it doesn't get much better than a home matchup against the Panthers.
