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, we've continued our partnership 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 huge 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, throughout the season, I'll be providing their top option for small (less than 100) and large (1,000+) entry pools. I'm also including an alternate/contrarian option for those of us playing multiple entries in a single pool, as a means of diversifying. 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 Picks
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| NFL Survivor Picks from PoolGenius |
| Season Discounts via Action Network |
Large Field: Jacksonville Jaguars
There are two clear options in Week 1 whose odds of winning — based on both betting lines and PoolGenius' internal odds — stand above the rest. Those are the Chargers and the Jaguars, with Jacksonville offering some clear advantages for larger pools.
Let's briefly discuss the strategy differences for larger pools and smaller ones. Two variables become more valuable the larger your pool is — those variables being future value and how contrarian your pick is.
Future value is important because smaller pools are much more likely to conclude before the end of the season, so there's a nonzero chance of not needing that team you've been saving for Week 18.
The current optimal path on PoolGenius gives about a 1.5% chance of surviving all 18 weeks. Let's assume our competition is a good bit off the optimal path and arrives at 1% odds — that still means any contest with more than roughly 100 entries likely goes all 18 weeks.
The other variable we're optimizing for in larger pools is how unique our pick is.
Since we expect to share the final prize multiple ways in bigger pools, the more of our competition we can eliminate early, the larger our expected winnings will be. This is amplified early in the season, since a contrarian choice now gives us a different set of options later in the season than most of the field.
With all that said, the most important factor is still the odds of winning, as we don't want to sacrifice a ton of win equity trying to solve for other variables.
Which is where the Jaguars come in. In Week 1, they're about 3% less likely to win (based on current moneylines) than the Chargers. However, the Jaguars have less future value (0.4 to 1.4) and are slightly less popular, making them the obvious answer in pools you expect to last all 18 weeks.
One caveat here is in contests that treat the Wednesday-Friday slate of Thanksgiving as a separate week: Jacksonville has a strong Week 12 matchup (against the Titans), so it could be worth saving for the main slate that week — but it's a bit early to look that far down the road.
Small Field: Los Angeles Chargers
As alluded to above, the best option in contests with a lower likelihood of lasting all 18 weeks is the Chargers. They're taking on the Browns in Week 1 as more than a -500 favorite, giving them the best odds to advance — which is obviously the most important factor.
While there are other weeks where the Chargers are heavily favored, they aren't among the two best options at any point until Week 16. Not only could smaller pools have wrapped up by then, but there's a strong chance that injuries or surprising performance have heavily shifted the lines between now and December, so we don't want to overvalue those late-season lines at this point.
The PoolGenius model still prefers Jacksonville for the reasons listed above, and I wouldn't fault anyone for going with the Jaguars in a small pool.
I feel better about the Chargers' odds, though, especially if the small pool in question isn't your only bite at the Survivor apple this season. That holds doubly true if your contest requires multiple picks in Week 12, where the Jaguars are a more valuable team to keep in reserve.
Contrarian Option: Las Vegas Raiders
I'll have around 10 survivor entries in total this season, most of them repeats in a single contest. With those, I want to be contrarian with at least one of my picks, since I'll still have entries alive even if my big swing misses.
My favorite option is the Raiders, for two reasons.
They have solid win odds this week of 64%, but 0 future value according to PoolGenius, with only three other weeks of greater than 50% win odds, and none of those over 57%. There's probably no other week they'll be worth using, so you set yourself up well by leaving stronger teams on the board.
The other is that the Raiders are projecting for single-digit utilization. If one of the two chalky teams goes down and the Raiders win, you've moved past 25% or more of the field, which boosts the expected value of your remaining lineups considerably.
Ideally, we're chopping the prize in large pools as little as possible, which requires avoiding some big upsets. Those are probably more likely in early weeks since we have less information on each team, making this a good time to take a shot.
