NFL Survivor Pool Picks: Upgrades & Improvements For 2014

Here’s a quick rundown on upgrades we made to our NFL Survivor Pool picks product this summer.

Before we dive in, it’s worth noting what happened to us in survivor last season. After ripping off a 29-week survivor win streak across the two previous two seasons, we hit a bit of rough patch during the first few weeks of 2013. This was especially frustrating for two reasons:

  • Our analysis was sound, but our luck was bad. The teams our survivor algorithms categorized as “Top Options” and “Worth A Look” during Week 1 and Week 2 of 2013 won even more often than we expected. Combined, those teams went 13-3 compared to an expected 11-5 based on our pre-game win odds. Unfortunately, we just happened to settle on two of the losers as our Week 1 and Week 2 picks for people playing one entry in a pool.
  • The rest of the season went fine. Toward the end of last season we began hearing from customers who, despite our rocky start, were still cashing in their survivor pools. These were people who played three, four, or more entries in their pools, which is often a good idea for survivor, especially in larger contests. They had lost entries early on, but stuck with our analysis and still ended up profiting.


When the dust settled, last year was a good reminder of how thin the margin of error can be in survivor contests. If you’re serious about winning a prize in a survivor pool, you’re taking a huge risk by only playing one entry, or even two entries in bigger contests. Given the parity of the NFL, every week even the best survivor analysis in the world has to settle on a pick that will have around a 1 in 5 chance (sometimes better, often times worse) of losing.

Second, following optimal survivor strategy is not for the faint of heart. Objective research (ours included) clearly demonstrates that your best strategy for winning a survivor pool is often to avoid picking the “crowd favorite,” even if it means picking a team that is less likely to win — especially in early weeks.

Sometimes those risks don’t play out, and as a result, you can get knocked out early. But getting knocked out early some years doesn’t mean you’re not playing intelligently. In the long run, you’ll still win survivor pools much more often than your opponents if you follow optimal strategy, even if you tend to get knocked out earlier than most when you don’t win them.

So if you’re thinking of buying our survivor advice this year, just remember that the goal of our analysis will always be to maximize your odds of winning your pool, not to maximize your odds of just surviving the first X number of weeks. Those are often very different goals. We do not shy away from taking calculated risks that are proven to increase your expected profits from survivor pools in the long run.

On that note, we’re locked and reloaded for another thrilling survivor season, with our very own Survivor guru David Hess at the helm, of course.

NFL Survivor Pools Picks: New Features In 2014

The feedback from our users, and our own team to boot, was that the first version of our NFL Survivor Pools product last year was a bit too cumbersome. We went from doing a simple weekly blog post with a pick at the end (two years ago), to releasing algorithmic picks for many different survivor pool scenarios, plus a bunch of new data pages and analysis tools.

It was quite sophisticated, but a bit overwhelming for some customers.

So unlike with our Football Pick’em Pools product, we didn’t spend a lot of time this summer adding features to our Survivor product. In fact, we spent more time ripping stuff out, reducing complexity, and focusing on a few big analytical improvements. To hit the highlights, we:

  • Simplified how we deliver our recommended picks. We’re going to show you our popular Weekly Report Card that provides key data on each team, and a simple table highlighting the top four pick options for you. That’s the overview. Then, we’ll do a comprehensive weekly writeup, just like the old days, that delivers our ultimate pick recommendation for small, midsize, and large pools.
  • Eliminated all “TR Pick Set” pages. Last year we had a bunch of pages that provided computer-generated survivor picks for various types of pools, based on the number of entries being played. In the context of our weekly writeup and other analysis tools, it just didn’t work well. So we need to rethink our approach here. In the meantime, to reduce confusion, we’ve ripped all those TR Picks pages out of the product.
  • Made big improvements to how we handle future week predictions. Our win odds predictions for future games are primarily driven by our team ratings. However, until now, we’ve didn’t have a way to make future week team ratings adjustments that would immediately percolate through all of our survivor calculations and tools. Now we do. This year, if Aaron Rodgers goes out but is expected to be back in six weeks, we can immediately apply a temporary adjustment to Green Bay’s rating for only those six weeks, that also anticipates the impact of how your opponents are likely to pick Green Bay during the six weeks Rodgers is out.

In summary, the theme of this summer’s Survivor work was to continue to improve the analytics powering the product, while going “back to basics” a bit with the interface. We will still have the analysis tools that our users enjoyed last year, including the Season Planner tool, Optimal Path tool, and customizable Expected Value Calculator.

If you want to get our 2014 NFL Survivor Pool picks and tools, here’s the signup page.