Week 2 Survivor Pick Strategy: Is Oakland The Best Pick?

September 14, 2017 - by Tom Federico

Half your survivor pool is probably picking Oakland this week, but options exist.

Ready to make your NFL Week 2 survivor pick?

Oakland, the proverbial “obvious survivor pick” this week, is currently dominating the Week 2 pick popularity rankings. Nearly half of all survivor pool entries nationwide are picking the Raiders.

Is Oakland your best pick this week, though? Maybe not. Let’s quickly review how things stand in survivor pools nationwide, then get right to some Week 2 survivor pick analysis.

Editor’s Note: Our customized survivor picks and tools for Week 2 are now available via our NFL Survivor Picks product. You can also watch a video tutorial about the product.

Survivor Pick Recap & Current Status

Last week featured a couple big upsets along with a few scares for popular NFL survivor picks. When the dust settled, here’s how it all shaped up:

1 Out of Every 5 Survivor Entries Was Eliminated. Based on a weighted average of data from several popular survivor pool hosting sites, about 20% of NFL survivor pool entries were eliminated last week. The main culprits were New England (10% picked) and Houston (9% picked), with Cincinnati (1% picked) contributing a little. The Patriots loss to Kansas City was a shock to many people, but it’s worth noting that we had New England’s win odds right around 80%, which is far from a lock. Also, it’s funny to remember that we’re not too far removed from the days when picking against Jacksonville (who defeated Houston) in a survivor pool was quite a popular (and effective) strategy. Those days are probably over.
Survivor Week 1 Near Misses. Pittsburgh (27% picked), Buffalo (24% picked), and Atlanta (13% picked) were the three most popular survivor pool picks last week, and none of them had an easy time winning. In particular both the Bears (vs. Atlanta) and the Browns (vs. Pittsburgh) mounted serious late game threats and had a solid shot to pull off an upset. Pittsburgh losing would have meant that almost half of survivor pool entries nationwide would have been eliminated in Week 1.
Our Week 1 Survivor Picks. A total of 75% of the customized Week 1 survivor picks we recommended to TeamRankings customers were either Buffalo (37% of our recommended picks) or the LA Rams (also 37%). Both of those teams also featured prominently in our multiple-entry pick portfolios. Why Buffalo and LAR? Primarily, Pittsburgh had too much future value to burn in Week 1, and Atlanta was too popular of a pick to justify their win odds, which weren’t all that high. Some other picks we recommended last week included Houston (9% of our recommended picks), Dallas (8%), Denver (5%), and New England (3%).
TR Survivor Picks vs. The World: A total of 87% of our recommended Week 1 picks survived, compared to 80% for the public at large. That means the public lost 50% more survivor entries in Week 1 than customers following our advice (20% pick elimination rate vs. 13% for TR). In addition, 99%+ of our recommended picks were not Pittsburgh or Atlanta, so most of our customers also should be better positioned for the future. We did sweat the Bills pick a bit, as that game was close in the second half. However, the Rams result was fantastic, since we’ll probably never consider using LAR again this season, and if Cleveland had upset Pittsburgh (so close!) it would have been a monumental Week 1 for our customers.

Week 2 Survivor Pick Analysis

Our site exists (and remains almost entirely ad-free) because of the success we have had selling unique premium products like our NFL Survivor Picks. We’re the only site that customizes picks for your specific pool’s characteristics, and over the long term our customers have won survivor pools more than twice as often as expected.

The best Week 2 picks for you depend on factors like the total number of entries in your pools, and their specific rules/formats. So you always need to be careful reading “generic” survivor advice. However, we’re happy to provide some useful frameworks and data for evaluating your Week 2 survivor pick.

Here are some important angles to keep in mind this week, focused on the four teams that most people are picking.

(Note that breaking news, betting line movement, and shifts in pick popularity may have happened since this post was published, and changed the Week 2 landscape. If you want the latest numbers before you lock in your Week 2 survivor pick, we update our survivor picks and tools multiple times per day.)

Oakland, as mentioned in the post intro, is the overwhelmingly popular pick in Week 2, with close to 50% pick popularity. The Raiders seem to have everything right in the public’s eye this week. They had a strong Week 1 result, are a popular Super Bowl bet in Vegas, and most importantly, host the expected-to-be-utterly-terrible-this-year Jets. After the success of the “just pick against the Browns” strategy in 2016, it certainly feels like the public is looking for 2016’s Browns, and the Jets are 2017’s most likely candidate. It is true that according to Vegas odds, Oakland is the safest Week 2 survivor pick you can make. However, any time you see a team hit this extreme a level of pick popularity, you need to think long and hard about following such a big herd. Safety is important, but there’s a good chance that picking Oakland does little to increase your odds of winning your survivor pool.
Seattle, at home vs. San Francisco, is the second most popular survivor pick of the week, at 21% popularity according to our estimates. Vegas odds see the Seahawks as slightly more risky than Oakland, while our prediction models are a bit more optimistic about Seattle’s chances. The biggest knock against Seattle, though, and it’s an important one, is future value. Even in the short term, Seattle has three games in their next seven where we project their win odds at 70% or greater, and in two of those games (home vs. Indianapolis in Week 4, home vs. Houston in Week 8) we project their win odds at more than 80%, which is quite high for the NFL. The bottom line is that we expect Seattle to be a top-5 team this year, and burning a team like that in Week 2 has consequences, even more so if you’re in a big pool or have to make multiple picks later in the season.
Baltimore, home against Cleveland, is the third most popular pick of the week at 11%. The Ravens’ surprise Week 1 shutout of Cincinnati made a statement, but Cleveland also outperformed expectations last week, and had a legitimate shot to upset expected powerhouse Pittsburgh deep into the fourth quarter. So it’s worth noting that Baltimore’s win odds this week are a clear step down from either Oakland or Seattle; the Ravens are absolutely more of a risk. Baltimore also has slightly more future value than Oakland according to our calculations, but significantly less future value than Seattle.
Arizona, on the road at Indianapolis, rounds out the group of popular picks this week, with 7% popularity; no other team is more than 3% picked. The blemishes on Arizona are clear. They lost all-pro running back David Johnson (and others) to injury in Week 1, got upset by Detroit, and are on the road for the second week straight. Indeed, both Vegas odds and our prediction models rank the Cardinals as the riskiest team of the four highlighted in this post. On the plus side, though, Arizona’s future value is the lowest of these four teams by a considerable margin. The Cards are on the road against San Francisco in Week 9, but in the near future their schedule is pretty much devoid of juicy matchups.

As a concluding note, Oakland is the only team out of the four above that is not either on the road (Arizona) or in a divisional matchup (Seattle, Baltimore). That’s likely another factor boosting the Raiders’ popularity this week.

Week 2 Survivor Pick Portfolios

If you are playing in multiple survivor pools, playing multiple entries in a single survivor pool, or both, keep in mind that your research shouldn’t only involve finding the single “best pick” of the week.

You’re likely going to want to come up with a portfolio of multiple different teams that you spread across all your entries, with the goal of maximizing your expected profit from playing in survivor pools this year. In other words, if you’ve got 10 survivor pool entries total, putting all 10 entries on the same team probably isn’t your best strategy.

One of the unique features of our NFL Survivor Picks product is that it figures out your optimal pick portfolio each week, and recommends the specific team to use for each of your still-alive survivor pool entries.

Until Next Week…

Enjoy NFL Week 2 and good luck in your survivor pools. If you found this post valuable, please consider subscribing to one of our premium products:

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If you’d like to see our NFL Survivor Picks product in action, check out this YouTube tutorial we did last week.