NFL Survivor Pool Strategy Week 3: The Picks To Make

We had our first miss of the season last week, with one of the three teams suggested by PoolGenius (Detroit) falling. Still, if you played multiple pools, you're in pretty good shape. Two of three entries advancing is well above the rate of the field, which lost roughly 50% of entrants in Week 2 alone.

With a historically rough start to the season, the odds of needing to survive all 18 weeks in most pools has dropped considerably. The onus shifts toward safer teams, and away from saving good teams for the stretch run. That brings us to our NFL survivor pool strategy for Week 3.

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.

Besides that, PoolGenius tracks pick selection data to help figure out contrarian options. This is helpful in larger pools since we're also trying to optimize for expected value.

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 Strategy Week 3

Large Field Survivor Pick: Cincinnati Bengals

I'm basing these picks on DraftKings' $100 main event survivor pool, where more than 75% of the field is already eliminated. That still leaves more than 4,500 entrants, though, with a solid chance that multiple players survive all 18 weeks.

I mention that to help explain the Bengals as the top choice this week.  They're nearly -400 favorites on the moneyline early in the week, which is tied for the best on the slate.

It doesn't feel all that safe taking on an 0-2 team, but a matchup with the Commanders leaves them as a justifiable favorite. Based on current look-ahead lines, this is also as heavily favored as they'll be all season, while the other Week 2 standouts have some better spots down the line.

My biggest concern is that Bengals-Commanders is on Monday night. Cincinnati's three best players (receivers Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, plus Joe Burrow) have dealt with various levels of injuries already this season. We could get bad news about any of them after it's too late to pivot to any other team.

However, that's a risk worth taking in a pool of this size, since we're building for the long haul and trying to make some contrarian choices.

Small Field: San Francisco 49ers

This is the contest where we suggested the Lions last week, which means if you follow the recommendations precisely, your entry is eliminated. With that said, if you went with one of the other options, you find yourself in a field with about 25 players left, based on an initial field size of 100.

For the sake of continuing to see the recommendations, we'll move forward under the assumption the Chargers and Saints (the Week 1 selection) are off the board.

The tool again gives the Bengals as the top choice in this field size, but I personally wouldn't go that route for two reasons.

First, going with an even more contrarian choice in the 49ers is important here. Dodging one more popular team could mean winning this pool in the next few weeks, so we want to be as contrarian as possible without sacrificing win equity.

San Francisco accomplishes that, at least based on early week betting lines.

The other factor is the Monday Night timing for the Bengals game mentioned above. The 49ers face the Rams on Sunday, in another game with plenty of moving parts from an injury standpoint.

You could start with the 49ers, then adjust course if necessary based on any major news on any of the relevant teams. That would be my strategy, assuming the contests rules allow you to edit your pick up until the moment the game kicks off.

RotoGrinders 2nd Chance Survivor: Seattle Seahawks

This contest lost a bit more than 57% of it's entries in the very first week, meaning a surviving $20 entry is now worth $47 in expected value.

Based on the Optimal Path tool at Pool Genius, we'd expect about 2% of the field to run the table, meaning about nine or 10 total players in this contest. However, with two teams required from Week 16 on, those odds drop considerably.

That means we're likely to have a solo winner here — and we need to save as many strong teams as possible for the final few weeks. That's why I prefer the Seahawks over the Bengals here.

Seattle is taking on a Miami team that's suddenly in a tough spot, with starting quarterback Tua Tagovailoaout indefinitely after suffering another scary concussion. The market has Seattle as a -220 favorite, with only one other game this season anywhere near those odds.

Crucially, the Seahawks have a tough schedule in the all important final three weeks of the season, while the Bengals have a home game against Denver in Week 17. Having Cincinnati available that week could be the difference between winning your pool or not, so keeping the Bengals available is extremely valuable.

Plus, the Seahawks are expected to be very unpopular. If they win while some other heavy favorite goes down — like we've seen plenty of times this season — you could suddenly find yourself in a very thin remaining field.