NFL Survivor Pool Strategy: Balancing Short Term & Long Term

September 1, 2011 - by David Hess

This is the fourth post in a short preseason series on Survivor Pool Strategy. Today, we’ll cover the balance between short term and long term planning. If there’s another topic you’d like to see us cover, please leave a note in the comments. Also, in case you missed it, we’ve been running a preseason Pick ‘Em strategy series. Check it out!

In last week’s NFL Survivor Pool Strategy post, we showed mathematical evidence that for many small pools, you won’t have to survive all 17 weeks. The implications of that fact lead us to our next topic…

Balancing the Short Term vs the Long Term

We’ve mentioned several times that future planning is necessary if you want to become a Survivor ninja. But there must be an equilibrium. Don’t put so much weight on the future that you sabotage the present.

1. A Bird In The Hand Is Worth Two In The Bush

All else being equal, if you’ve considered all your options, and planned out the next few weeks carefully, and in the end you have what appears be a choice between:

A) A 10-point favorite this week, followed by a 7-point favorite 3 weeks from now, or
B) A 7-point favorite this week, followed by a 10-point favorite 3 weeks from now,

What should you do?

You should choose the bigger favorite this week. Why? Because you’re sure you can get the 10-point favorite now, whereas if you pick the smaller favorite now, it’s only likely that you’ll have a bigger favorite available in three weeks.

This is a concept common to the world of finance — discounted cash flow analysis devalues future assets, partly because there is some risk that their value will not materialize.

That’s what we’re doing here. Even if the team values are exactly correct, you never know what could happen. The quarterback of that future 10-point favorite could get suspended. Another team you hadn’t considered might get the chance to play an injury-decimated squad, making them huge favorites.

2. Squeeze Every Inch Of Value Out Of A Team, When You Use Them.

What do we mean by this? A couple things.

First, if two teams have similar spreads and projected win odds, but one of them is overall a worse team, chances are it’s a good decision to choose that worse team. The better team will likely have even better matchups in the future. You can confirm this by checking out our NFL Survivor Tool. Choosing the worse team saves the better team for future weeks.

The other side of that coin is that this is likely the best chance you’ll have to use that worse team. And remember, you have to use more than half the teams in the league to survive the whole year, which means dipping into some potentially funky soup. If you get a chance to use a mediocre team in a week where they have substantial value, that can be a smart choice.

3. Don’t Be Too Sure Of Anything The First Few Weeks

This is similar to above, but relating especially to the beginning of the year. You need to discount the future value of teams even more severely at the beginning of the year, because whether you’re taking your cue on team strength from Vegas, our predictive power ratings, or Jaws, all the analysis is based on very little info.

Here’s an example from last season:

In Week 2, you might have been considering picking San Diego at home against Jacksonville. But say you held off because you wanted to save the Chargers for Week 13, when they hosted Oakland. After all, San Diego is always good, Oakland is always bad, and it looked like you might need the Bolts later on.

Little did you realize that San Diego would have a down year, Oakland would trend upwards, and the Raiders would upset the Chargers on the road in Week 13. You should have just burned them against Jacksonville.

A lot can change in three months. So, while it’s smart to plan ahead, it’s not smart to be overly confident in your year long projections when only one week has been played. Save a team for Week 3, sure. You won’t have a ton more info by then anyway, so the Week 2 estimate is still likely to be a good one. But don’t try to plan your choice for every week of the year until team ratings become a little more established.

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