It's that time of year when hope springs anew, and the NFL-loving public collectively says, "This year, I'll go all the way." Of course, I'm referring to NFL survivor pools, a type of contest that sounds easy — until you're doing it.
Week 2 was a bloodbath in survivor pools, with popular options like the Buccaneers (34%) and the Chargers (7.7%) eliminating a huge chunk of the field.
If you're like me, that means you have far fewer entries remaining than you did last week, but the good news is those entries are much more valuable with only 36% of the field remaining after two weeks.
That brings us to our NFL Survivor Pool Week 3 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 that 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 when appropriate.
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
| Get Survivor Picks Now |
|---|
| NFL Survivor Picks from PoolGenius |
| Season Discounts via Action Network |
Large Field: Kansas City Chiefs
Kansas City feels like an extremely safe pick against the Dolphins in Week 3. The Chiefs are somewhere around -800 favorites against probably the worst team in football.
Normally, the tradeoff with using such a strong team comes in the form of popularity and future value. Given the state of most pools — roughly two-thirds of the field already eliminated — future value matters much less now.
The odds of all but the largest pools surviving all 18 weeks are somewhat lower than they were two weeks ago, and for what it's worth, the Chiefs are smaller (projected) favorites in all of their future matchups.
Popularity is also less of a concern given how much of the field is eliminated. It's still valuable to have some leverage, but giving some up to advance is worthwhile, given how much any given entry is worth this early in the season.
If you still have multiple entries alive (must be nice!) I'd certainly consider pivoting off the Chiefs in one/some of them, but if you're down to one, they're the obvious choice.
Small Field: Buffalo Bills
The Bills, by virtue of two future dates with the Dolphins, represent a trade-off between future value and current-week popularity.
The logic in smaller pools is that leverage plays now are proportionally more valuable than larger contests, since we're unlikely to need to worry about Week 18 in contests that started with a small number of entrants.
We'd also be giving up some current-week win value on the Bills, but not much, since their win odds are just under 80%. They seem fairly safe, even if not quite the "lock" that Kansas City is.
Obviously, the real value in utilizing the Bills comes if Kansas City were to lose, which is unlikely, but that's not the only way being contrarian can give you a leg up.
The Chiefs have the second-best win odds in the league in Week 9, so having them available then, when most of your competition doesn't, gives you another opportunity to be contrarian, which then leaves that week's likely chalk (Seattle) available for other spots, creating a cascading effect of being different from the field in which you only need one big upset for it to pay off.
That's enough to justify diversifying with Buffalo and/or using them straight up in a smaller contest.
