Week 4 Survivor Pick Strategy: Is Seattle The Best Pick?

September 28, 2017 - by Tom Federico

Our NFL Survivor Picks product provides rich data for evaluating your Week 4 survivor pick.

In this post, we’ll provide some advice and help for making your NFL Week 4 survivor pick.

This week, Seattle, Atlanta and Green Bay are drawing almost 70% of survivor picks, with Arizona, Dallas, and New England also slightly popular. At nearly 40% picked, the Seahawks are the most popular by a solid margin.

Let’s review how things stand in survivor pools nationwide, then get to some Week 4 survivor pick analysis.

Editor’s Note: Our customized survivor picks and analysis tools are available in our NFL Survivor Picks product.

Survivor Pick Recaps & Status

Last week came mighty close to total survivor armageddon. Here’s where things stood after the Week 3 dust settled:

The 9 most popular picks either lost, or came very close to losing
Only the 10th most popular pick of Week 3, Kansas City, had a relatively comfortable win (over the LA Chargers). However, the Chiefs were only picked by about 1.5% of survivor entries. The nine more popular picks than Kansas City, comprising about 98% of survivor entries in total, either lost, won in the closing seconds (or overtime), or in the case of the LA Rams, barely escaped a shootout.

Around 35% of still-alive entries were eliminated
In the end, Miami (13% picked, upset by the NY Jets) and Pittsburgh (12% picked, upset by Chicago) inflicted the most carnage on survivor entries nationwide. Losses by Denver, Carolina, and Baltimore also contributed to over a third of survivor entries being eliminated. Only improbable last-minute comebacks by New England and Green Bay (both around 28% picked) averted wholesale disaster.

Our Week 3 Survivor Picks
Although we don’t frequently recommend the most popular and/or safest team, especially in early weeks, last week was an example where New England’s win odds were so much higher than the rest of the field that it made sense for the Patriots to play a significant role in survivor pick portfolios, despite the future value sacrifice. At the same time, Philadelphia, at only around 3% picked, looked like a great under-the-radar play. In the end, 44% of the customized pick recommendations we made to our customers were New England (win), 30% were Philadelphia (win), 20% were Miami, Carolina, or Pittsburgh (all losses), and 5% were Green Bay or the LA Rams (both wins).

TR Survivor Picks vs. The World
80% of our recommended Week 3 picks ended up surviving, compared to only around 65% for the general public. So our customer base as a whole took a nice step closer toward survivor pool profits in Week 3. Obviously we were lucky with New England and Philadelphia pulling out last-minute wins, but outside of the very few souls that picked Kansas City, pretty much everyone who survived Week 3 got lucky. Our basic bet against the public last week involved Green Bay. The Packers looked significantly less safe against Cincinnati than many people thought, and a Green Bay loss would have been big for our customers.

Week 4 Survivor Pick Strategy

When it comes to pick strategy, the best Week 4 survivor picks for you depend not only on each team’s chance to win, but also on the characteristics of each pool you play in. For instance, if you need to make multiple picks per entry in later weeks, then you need to be more careful about burning good teams early in the season.

So we always warn people to be careful reading generic survivor pool pick advice. However, the data below should help in evaluating your Week 4 survivor strategy. It also provides a taste of our proven, data-driven approach to winning pools more often. (If you want our full recommendations, check out our NFL Survivor Picks product.)

Week 4 Survivor Pick Analysis

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

Just remember that shifts in data like betting odds and pick popularity may have happened since this post was published, and altered the Week 4 landscape. If you want the latest numbers, we update our survivor picks and tools multiple times per day.

Seattle (home vs. Indianapolis)
The Seahawks are the most popular Week 4 survivor pick by a wide margin, at around 37% picked. Vegas odds currently favor Seattle by 13, and the next safest team on the Week 4 slate is only favored by 9. That’s a significant difference, so your primary decision point with Seattle this week concerns safety. The Seahawks have around an 85% chance to win, and your odds of elimination go up a lot (by at least 8%, according to our models) if you don’t use them. At the same time, 37% pick popularity is really high. So if you think Seattle is ripe for an upset after their uninspiring play in the early season, avoiding them could result in a big payoff.

Atlanta (home vs. Bufffalo)
The Falcons are the second most popular survivor pick this week at 17% picked. According to Vegas odds, Atlanta is the third safest pick after Seattle and New England. Our models are a bit more pessimistic about the Falcons’ chances in this game, though. Another negative is that Atlanta has more future value than Seattle. Our models project the Falcons with around 70% win odds in six future games, while the Seahawks only have three or four more games around that win confidence level. On the other hand, Atlanta’s pick popularity is a lot more appealing than a 37% pick rate for the Seahawks.

Green Bay (home vs. Chicago)
The Packers are currently drawing around 14% of Week 4 survivor picks, and look pretty similar to Atlanta in terms of their pick profile. Compared to the Falcons, Green Bay is about as likely to win (slightly riskier according to Vegas, slightly safer according to our models), is slightly less popular of a pick (good), but has more future value (bad). If you’re in a really big pool or a pool that requires multiple picks in later weeks, the Packers’ higher future value becomes more of a concern. Also, this game is a divisional matchup, which spooks some survivor players.

Arizona (home vs. San Francisco)
We can’t imagine anyone being thrilled to pick the Cardinals in a survivor pool after their witnessing their first three games, but that’s often the case with future value driven pick decisions. If you believe the Vegas numbers, Arizona’s win odds aren’t much lower than Atlanta’s or Green Bay’s this week. In addition, this might be the last week in which the Cardinals are a legitimate survivor pick option, though that depends on the specific characteristics of your pool. At post time about 7% of survivor entries nationwide saw the Cardinals as an opportunity to good to pass up. It’s also a divisional game.

Dallas (home vs. LA Rams)
The Cowboys are the riskiest of the five picks mentioned in this post. Our models give Dallas about a 30% chance of losing to the Rams, meaning close to 1 in 3 odds of elimination. Dallas also has value as potential pick option in at least a couple more weeks, including Week 7 at San Francisco, so future value is a consideration too. Your reward for the increased risk is a pick popularity (7%) that, like Arizona, is much lower than Seattle, Atlanta, or Green Bay.

Together, the five teams above are drawing over 80% of survivor pool entry picks this week, while no other individual team is currently being picked by more than 6% of entries.

That’s important because using a contrarian strategy to pick against the crowd can give you a big edge in survivor pools, and there are a few solid options among the much less popular teams in Week 4. Our NFL survivor pool picks product identifies them, and also shows you which of the five teams mentioned above grades out as the best.

Week 4 Survivor Pick Portfolios

If you’re playing in multiple survivor pools, or playing multiple entries in a survivor pool, your research shouldn’t only involve finding the single best pick of the week.

To maximize your expected profits, you’ll likely want to come up with a portfolio of multiple teams that you spread across your survivor entries. In other words, if you’ve got four survivor pool entries still alive, putting all four entries on the same team might not be 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 (e.g. “with your four entries, put two entries on Team X and two entries on Team Y”) and then assigns those pick recommendations on an entry-by-entry basis.

Until Next Week…

Enjoy another week of NFL football and good luck with your Week 4 survivor pick. If you found this post valuable, please consider subscribing to one of our premium products:

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