We're down to less than a quarter of the field remaining in most survivor pools, and we were close to narrowing it down much further in Week 7, but a late comeback from the chalky Broncos limited the damage to just a handful of players getting eliminated.
This week, there's an excellent potential option if you still have them available, and a wide range of secondary choices if you don't.
Let's get into the NFL Week 8 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 industry-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. 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. Additionally, they track pick selection data to help identify contrarian options. This is particularly helpful in larger NFL pools, as we're trying to optimize for expected value rather 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 Picks — Week 8
Best Option if Available: Indianapolis Colts
No screenshot this time around, since the contest I'm using on Pool Genius has already used the Colts this season, which the tools use to adjust their recommendations.
For any surviving entries that haven't used them, though, the Colts are the clear best option. They're extremely safe, with over a 90% projected win rate as -14 favorites against the Titans.
Since the Colts were fairly popular in other weeks, their utilization rate is much lower than we'd otherwise expect. At about one-third of the field using them, they’re still the most popular option, but if they had these odds earlier in the season they'd easily top 50%.
Plus, their future value is somewhat limited. They have one other week with 70% projected win odds, and nothing else above 65%. That strong spot is Week 17 where we have a handful of other teams with similar projected lines, but more importantly it is far enough in the future that we can expect plenty to change between here and then. Saving a team for that far in the future is a bad idea generally, even if they stood out more than the Colts do.
Thus, they check (to various extents) all three of the variables we're weighing in survivor pools: Safety, Leverage and Future Value.
Best Option If Indianapolis Unavailable: Kansas City Chiefs
There are two solid options if the Colts aren't on the table: the Chiefs and Eagles. The decision between the two of them comes down to weighing future value against Week 8 safety, with Kansas City bringing more of each.
For that reason, the Chiefs are my preferred option in smaller field contests, where future value is less important since there's a solid shot the pool wraps up before Week 18. The other spots where you'd potentially want the Chiefs available are all in the final three weeks of the season, which could very well be moot in most office-pool-sized contests.
The Chiefs are taking on the Commanders, and we're lucky enough to already have news that Commanders starting QB Jayden Daniels is out for the Monday Night contest. That limits some of the risk of using a MNF team in survivor, since the key injury news has already come down the pipe.
Following that announcement, the Chiefs spread jumped into the double digits, and they could close as just as heavily favored a team as the Colts.
The Chiefs' popularity will end up being considerably higher than the current Pool Genius mark, as players adjust to the Daniels news. However, since they've also been popular in prior weeks, plenty of the competition won't have them available as an option.
Of course, everyone shifting to the Colts and the Chiefs will make the Eagles more contrarian, so they're potentially a better option in larger-field contests.
The Eagles don't have a single remaining week where they're projected with the best win odds while the Chiefs have two, so saving Kansas City for late in the season makes sense if you expect to need to last all 18 weeks.
