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 NFL survivor pools, a type of contest that sounds easy — until you're doing it.
That brings us to my NFL Week 3 survivor 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 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 huge factors 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. Besides that, they track pick selection data to help figure out contrarian options. This is helpful in larger NFL 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 Picks — Week 3
Large Field: Seattle Seahawks
In theory, it's a fairly easy week in survivor with three teams coming in with -400 or better moneyline odds. The balance in survivor pools is between safety/win odds, leverage, and future value, but we have plenty of options that satisfy the first criteria.
Thus, the decision comes down to the balance between future value and current week popularity. In large public contests, I tend to prioritize the former since you'll almost certainly need to survive all 18 weeks even if a shocking upset takes out a big chunk of the field.
That's where the Seahawks shine — they're about 15% more likely to win in Week 3 than any individual future week, making it a "now-or-never" situation.
Plus, they're expected to be (slightly) less popular than the Bills.
Buffalo is a -805 favorite and almost certainly not going to lose to Miami this week, but you still get some leverage over Bills entries. Saving them for the future when a quarter (or more) of your competition doesn't have them available could be the difference between winning and losing late in the season when the pickings get slim.
Small Field: Kansas City Chiefs
Truth be told, the Seahawks are such a strong pick this week that I'd be fine using them in any-sized contest. The only real reason to pivot is to diversify your portfolio — as you play multiple entries, you wouldn't want one big upset to end your season.
This is where the Chiefs come in. They're 0-2, so by definition, if you're still playing, they're available to you.
Future lines still have them as solid favorites in some later weeks, but Week 3 is their best remaining spot by a nose, and they're hard to trust at this point after underwhelming through two weeks.
However, that's making them fairly unpopular at sub-10% utilization. If you get through with the Chiefs and any of the chalky teams (Seattle, Buffalo, Green Bay) are upset, that gives you a huge leg up on the field.
I prefer hunting for that leverage in smaller field contests, since a chalk team losing could drastically expedite the expected finishing week of the pool, which in turn makes future value less important.
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