There are numerous ways to play fantasy football, but NFL Survivor pools are one of the easiest and most popular ways to get involved in fantasy football besides actual managed leagues. Some people may not be hip to the weekly tinkering of setting lineups, playing the waiver wire, and the sweat of individual matchups, so taking a team-based approach with Survivor pools is a nice pivot from managed fantasy leagues.
The concept is simple: select a winning team from one NFL game each week and advance to the next. Most leagues have a "one and done" rule where you're out if you pick a team that loses. Some leagues may allow one or more losses before you're officially out of the pool. However, the general mantra aligns with the NCAA Tournament's "survive and advance."
While Survivor pools seem easy on the surface, it's not as simple as picking winning teams. The strategy is very nuanced and knowing when to preserve good teams and when to pick them is what separates the winners from everybody else. Not to mention some good old-fashioned luck; you'll need a bit of that. Here are some strategies for how to approach Survivor pools to help you toward the ultimate goal of securing that win!
Each week, you will pick an NFL team to win its game, and if you lose, you're out. While it may be different in some leagues where you get one loss or multiple losses, the majority of Survivor pools knock you out after one loss. If you win, you can't use that team again later in the season.
You don't need to worry about every little injury like you do in fantasy football, you can just root for the team to win -- not the player -- with no strings attached.
For example, if you want to use the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 1 at home against the New England Patriots? Awesome, but your available team pool is now 31 teams minus the Bengals.
With the number of teams to choose from dwindling as you get deeper into the season, you need to be judicious in the teams you choose and when. You don't need to worry about every little injury like you do in fantasy football, you can just root for the team to win, not the player, with no strings attached. It doesn't get any better.
It's easy to get information overload throughout the season and get away from your gut instinct. On the flip side, it's hard to make informed choices about the teams without at least taking a look at the NFL schedule, penciling in teams you like, and begin mapping out a path to victory in your Survivor pool with the information at hand. Here are a couple of nuggets of advice to take with you as you enter your Survivor pools this season.
Week 1 is one of the more difficult weeks to get right, as all we have to go on in terms of information is last season's results, transactional information, and what we THINK is going to happen this season.
We have nothing in stone, no concrete evidence of how teams will operate, how players will perform, how successful a team's offensive or defensive scheme will go, nothing. That is the beauty amidst the chaos of the NFL season. Anything can happen.
The few things we know in Week 1 could be upended in a single week or throughout a season. Did anybody have NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year C.J. Stroud leading the Houston Texans to a playoff victory on their bingo card? What about the Green Bay Packers' late-season surge and playoff victory in Dallas? The Philadelphia Eagles' mid-to-late-season collapse?
The great teams and the bad teams will reveal themselves during the season, but the teams we THINK are good and bad could be completely different in September than they are in even October. Just be open to new information about teams and use that smartly to your advantage while selecting your teams this season.
Throughout the season, you'll have to break ties for a particular matchup somewhere down the line. You'll have two (or more) matchups that all look good -- if you're lucky. There will inevitably be a week or two where you'll have zero good matchups to play and have to bite the bullet on one of them hoping for the best.
I don't know everything. Nobody does. So what do we do? Well, for me, I love going to see what the betting lines have to say about a particular matchup. Luckily, I'll have these betting lines updated just before my weekly Survivor article is posted each Tuesday throughout the season.
I do use the Vegas betting lines as a reference for what the betting public thinks about a particular matchup as well as the implied point totals from FantasyLabs. So per this chart, the Bengals are the biggest favorite on the entire slate against the New England Patriots, who happen to have the lowest implied point total of the slate. Where does the implied point total come from?
Take your over/under of 42 points in the Bengals/Patriots matchup and divide that in two. You've got 21 points for each side. Take the nine-point spread and divide that spread in half, where you'll get 4.5 points. Add 4.5 to Cincinnati as the favorite and subtract 4.5 from the underdog Patriots and you'll get an implied point total of 25.5 for the Bengals and 16.5 for the Patriots.
Knowing the strength (or lack thereof) of both offenses combined with the implied point totals represents a solid tool for evaluating your Survivor pool picks every week.
But are the Bengals the optimal play? They play NE, at KC, WAS, at CAR, and JAC before their Week 6 bye. Do you wait on using the Bengals until Week 4 when they play at Carolina? These are the decisions you must make.
It sounds obvious, but I'm not in the business of taking any road teams unless I have to. Sure, this is context-dependent, as a double-digit favorite on the road likely comes out on top in most instances. Home teams won at just shy of a 70% clip last season, so a team I'm choosing being in their home stadium is a huge factor.
Taking a team everybody else is taking is a good way to split a Survivor pool payout with a bunch of your close friends. Do I want to also use the same team everybody else is selecting? Or do I want to select the next-best team and potentially gain incredible leverage on the field if that highest-owned team gets upset? The decisions you make can massively swing your Survivor pool. "Any given Sunday," of course.
It sounds obvious, but anybody who played in a Survivor pool last season knows that the team to pick on was the Carolina Panthers. If there is a team that just shows they're leagues away from the competition, pounce on whoever is playing them at home. Of course, this isn't a hard and fast rule; but sometimes, you get a nice gift-wrapped matchup to exploit when it makes sense to do so. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Are you in a Survivor pool with some of a dozen or so of your coworkers? Are you in a large-field Survivor pool with a lot of money at stake? These are factors that should also influence your decision-making when selecting teams. You don't have to be as choosy about your teams in a smaller field since it may not last the entire season.
On the flip side, with a Survivor pool of hundreds if not thousands of entrants, it's almost assuredly going to last until Week 18. Fortune favors the bold in a large-field contest, but that doesn't mean you need to thread a super-thin needle and pick ultra-contrarian picks.
This season, I'll be bringing you weekly survivor pool columns on NFL teams to target and avoid each week. Survivor league strategy is a major part of winning your pools, and this article series will help you through the 2024 NFL season.
In case you missed my targets and avoids for Week 1, here is the link to the NFL Survivor Pool Picks: Week 1 Targets And Avoids article.