Week 1 Survivor Pick Strategy: Steelers, Bills, Falcons Breakdown

September 8, 2017 - by Tom Federico

You need to consider three key factors when making your NFL Week 1 survivor pick

Ready to make your NFL Week 1 survivor pick? Here’s some insight into how the TeamRankings number crunchers are breaking down this week’s options.

Editor’s Note: Our customized NFL survivor pool picks are free for Week 1.

Week 1 Survivor Pick Advice: A Word Of Warning

As survivor pools have grown in popularity, so has the number of people and sites dispensing survivor pool pick advice. Most of it is crap, by the way.

Just make sure to remember one thing when you read articles and tips about making an NFL Week 1 survivor pick:

There is no such thing as one-size-fits-all survivor pick advice.

It’s always good to understand the general pros and cons of picking a particular team, but the best Week 1 picks for your survivor or knockout pool depend on many individual factors: the total number of entries in your pool, the specific rules your pool uses (e.g. double picks in later weeks or not?), the number of entries you have in it.

To learn more, you can start with our post on football pool strategy.

Survivor Strategy Recap

Before we get to this week’s pick analysis, let’s recap the fundamentals of winning survivor pool strategy. Let’s start by debunking a common myth shared by many players. The following is a mathematically provable fact:

Picking the most likely team to win every week almost never maximizes your odds to win a survivor pool.

Your goal in a survivor pool is not to survive for the maximum number of weeks. Your goal is simply to survive at least one week longer than your last remaining opponent. Those are two different things.

As a result, optimal survivor strategy involves evaluating not only how likely each team is to win, but also the risk/reward tradeoff of making every possible pick, based on how your opponents are likely to act.

To do that, you need to look at three factors:

Win odds: Higher is good
Pick popularity: Lower is good
Future value: Lower is good

Most survivor players only think about win odds, and try to pick the “safest” team each week. But if you don’t consider all three factors above when you make your Week 1 survivor pick, you’re not giving yourself the best chance to win.

The NFL Week 1 Survivor Pick Landscape

Note: All data mentioned in this post is as of the original post time of this article. Breaking news, betting line movement, and potential shifts in public picking trends may have happened since then and changed the Week 1 landscape substantially. Our NFL Survivor Picks product continually updates to incorporate the most recent information.

FACTOR #1: Win Odds

The higher the tier, the safer the team (good):

TIER 1: New England, Pittsburgh, Buffalo

There’s a clear triumvirate at the top of the list of least risky teams to pick this week. All three teams have Vegas money lines (a more relevant predictor to use than point spreads) of -380 or better as of post time, implying around an 80% chance to win. As the Patriots showed last night, 80% is not called 100% for a good reason.

TIER 2: Atlanta, Houston, Carolina, Dallas, LA Rams

These five teams all have Vegas implied win odds of around 65-70%. That’s around a 1-in-3 chance to lose, but in most years, you’re going to need to pick multiple teams with win odds in this range over the course of a survivor pool.

TIER 3: Minnesota, Green Bay, Denver, Cincinnati, Tennessee, Arizona

We’re dipping into the very risky zone here of 55-65% win odds, but these six teams still warrant consideration depending on the specific characteristics of your pool.

Strategy Implications of Win Odds

In a league with as much parity as the NFL, and in a sport where a single random turnover or dropped pass can be the difference between a win and a loss, there is no such thing as a “safe” survivor pick.

Looking at objective predictions, it’s relatively rare for an NFL team to have greater than 80% win odds, even when good teams play not so good opponents. So even if you make one of the “safest” picks of the week, you’ve probably got a 1-in-5 chance (or better) of getting eliminated.

That’s a very feasible chance; just ask the people who picked the Patriots in Week 1.

That said, you still need to carefully evaluate the relative survival risk of all Week 1 survivor pick options, so you can make an accurate assessment of the risk vs. reward tradeoffs of each team.

FACTOR #2: Pick Popularity

The higher the tier, the more popular the team (bad):

TIER 1: Pittsburgh, Buffalo

Each of these teams are drawing around 25% of the public’s picks in traditional survivor pools. Picking against Cleveland worked quite well last year and public sentiment about the Jets is abysmal, so no surprises here. If your pool reflects the public averages, about half of entries in it will be on either Pittsburgh or Buffalo.

TIER 2: Atlanta, New England, Houston

Around 10-15% of the public is picking each of these three teams. The public may be underestimating New England’s win odds (or not, in retrospect!), and/or figuring that New England has too much future value to burn in Week 1 against a decent opponent like KC.

TIER 3: Carolina & everyone else

Carolina has about 6% pick popularity, while every other team is 3% or less.

Strategy Implications of Pick Popularity

Analyzing pick popularity is so important because in order to win an NFL survivor pool, you need to pick a team that wins, while your opponents pick a different team that loses.

Put another way, as far as winning your survivor pool is concerned, it doesn’t do you any good to survive a week if all of your opponents survive too. It may feel good, but your odds to win the pool haven’t changed.

As a result, you need to analyze pick popularity to look for opportunities where you can pick “against the crowd” without taking on much additional risk. In that case, if your pick wins and the crowd’s loses, the rewards can be huge.

FACTOR #3: Future Value

Future value isn’t as easily explained of a metric as win odds or pick popularity, so for the purposes of this article we’ll just highlight a few high level considerations.

New England is expected to be a juggernaut this year, and has the highest future value by far across most pools. (As an aside, unless it turns into a pattern in the early weeks, losing one game isn’t going to change that calculus very much.)

Seattle, Green Bay, and Pittsburgh should also elicit much deliberation if you’re considering them as your Week 1 survivor pick. All are expected to be elite teams with many high win-odds games left this season.

The other 28 teams range in terms of their future value as survivor picks, but even the best ones are all are a decent step down from the four teams above.

Strategy Implications of Future Value

Future value is a straightforward concept to understand at a high level. Imagine that a team is expected to be a great pick in several future weeks, but you decide to use that team as your Week 1 survivor pick.

In that case, you may increase your odds to survive Week 1, but you’ve put your entry in a worse position for Week 2 and beyond. That can have significant implications for your chance to win your pool, so future value is a critical factor to evaluate when choosing between possible survivor picks.

What many people don’t understand is that a team’s future value in a survivor contest also depends on pool-specific factors. For example, if your pool requires multiple picks in later weeks, then the relative importance of saving better teams for later increases.

The 3 Most Popular Week 1 Survivor Picks

Since so much of winning survivor strategy involves understanding what your opponents are likely to do, let’s conclude our Week 1 survivor pick analysis by reviewing the 3 teams currently drawing the most picks in survivor pools nationwide.

1. Pittsburgh Steelers (27% of picks)

Safety Rank: #2
Popularity Rank: #1
Future Value: HIGH
Opponent: at Cleveland

Picking against Cleveland worked like a charm last year, and the Browns aren’t expected to be much better in 2017. With New England having lost, Pittsburgh is now the safest pick of the week according to Vegas odds, though playing on the road means this game is less of a gimme than most people probably think. In addition, using the Steelers means burning a ton of future value right off the bat in Week 1, as Pittsburgh currently has 7 future games with expected win odds of 70% or greater, and their high popularity means that the expected value of picking them this week isn’t the best.

2. Buffalo Bills (24% of picks)

Safety Rank: #3
Popularity Rank: #2
Future Value: VERY LOW
Opponent: New York Jets

Buffalo is not supposed to be good this year, but the Jets are expected to be significantly worse, and Buffalo gets them at home. The net result is perhaps your only opportunity to use the Bills, a team that we currently project to go 7-9 this year, as a survivor pick, as this is currently the only game of the entire season in which our models give Buffalo at least 60% win odds. Sadly, the downside is that a significant portion of the public, hoping that the Jets are last year’s Browns, have already decided that this risk is worth taking. So pick popularity decreases the expected payoff of picking Buffalo.

3. Atlanta Falcons (14% of picks)

Safety Rank: #4
Popularity Rank: #3
Future Value: MODERATE
Opponent: at Chicago

As noted earlier, Atlanta is a step down in safety from Pittsburgh or Buffalo, and our predictive models are actually more pessimistic about Atlanta’s odds to win than Vegas odds are. After Atlanta’s Super Bowl appearance last year, it could be that some people are overestimating their chances to win here. Combine that fact with Atlanta’s relatively high popularity, and the expected value of using the Falcons this week doesn’t look great. On the flip side, only projecting as 70%+ win odds favorites in 3 future weeks, Atlanta has far less future value than Pittsburgh.

Your Best Week 1 Survivor Pick Is…

Hopefully you passed the test we just gave you, because the headline above was a trick question. There’s no way anyone can figure out the best pick(s) for your pool without knowing more about it.

For example, a team like Dallas this week (#7 Safety Rank and virtually unpicked by the public) is probably too risky of a pick in smaller survivor pools. However, in a 10,000 entry pool where you need to take calculated risks to increase your odds to win, picking the Cowboys is a better option than going with crowd favorite Pittsburgh.

So if you want the “right” answer, you’ll need to use our NFL Survivor Picks product, which ranks the top pick options for each of your pools based on its characteristics. It then recommends exactly which Week 1 survivor picks to play on an entry-by-entry basis, if you’re playing more than one entry in a survivor pool or playing in multiple pools.

We will say this, however. The three most popular Week 1 survivor picks — Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Atlanta — are collectively drawing a full 65% of the public’s support. Yet only one of those teams ranks in our top five picks for a standard-rules pool of up to 1,000 entries.

To see which team it is, and get customized picks for your pools in seconds, please check out the product.

Our customized NFL survivor pool picks are free for NFL Week 1.