Survivor Pick'em
A new way to test your NFL knowledge has started to gain steam in recent years: NFL Survivor Pick'em. Whether you want to call it sports betting, fantasy football, or anything else is up to you. The rules are simple:
- Pick one team per week to win.
- If they win, you advance to the next week. If they lose, you are eliminated.
- You can only choose a team once per season.
One of the more popular contests for the upcoming 2024 NFL season is hosted by DraftKings. It is a $100 buy in and the winner receives $1.5 million. Now there are some important caveats to note. If more than one person makes it through the whole season, or all remaining players are eliminated the same week, the grand prize is split evenly among those contestants. This will be important to revisit later.
Strategies
One strategy is to just choose the team with the highest probability to win you still have available. Ignoring the once per season rule for a moment, let’s take a look at how the most heavily favored team each week performed last season.
While this is effective in terms of shear success rate, even if you could pick a team multiple times, it’s not a shoe in. The Cowboys (4x), 49ers (3x), Dolphins (2x), Bills (2x), and Ravens (2x) were all allowed to be chosen more than once. Yet, the Bengals without Joe Burrow went down to Jacksonville in week 13 and upset the Jaguars in overtime. This underscores how truly difficult it is to have a successful survivor season. Now let’s look if we add back in the once per season rule to see how that affects the results.
A fairly significant difference, especially once you hit the middle of the year. While the first 7 weeks of the season are the same, it gets more and more difficult from there. This intuitively checks out as the best teams will be more likely to be favored and used early on. Interestingly, some of the selections in the second half of the season actually show up here as well. With many contestants most likely having the Jaguars available in week 13, that may have been a big week for eliminations in last year's survivor contests.
Another thing to think about is how obvious this strategy is. It does not take a stats wizard to look through sportsbooks' odds and find the team with the best odds to win each week. Even if you are successful all season with this strategy, chances are you are not the only one who thought of it. Choosing to avoid obvious selections like the Jaguars in week 13 may be a credible strategy to avoid ties. One upset of the most popular choice on a given week could knock out a lot of fellow survivor competitors. A tie greatly reduces the amount of money you can win. Even a two person tie in the DraftKings contest drops your winnings by $750k, and it could potentially be more than a 2 way tie. How can we slightly differentiate from the pack while also selecting the highest probability path?
Optimized Selections
Looking forward to see matchups coming up later in the season is a good way to separate from competitors without sacrificing win probability. Don’t burn the 49ers in week 1 with a 66% chance to win when they are an 83% chance to win in week 4. It’s also important to note when a team is by far the significantly best option in a week as you may want to save them for that week. Let's use a season long approach to pick our teams based on current and future matchups. Here is every team’s win probability for each week according to DraftKings.
While there is a lot to digest here, you can see certain teams in certain weeks, like the Ravens in week 9, Chiefs in week 10, and the Bills in Week 16 seem to be great options. Unsurprisingly, the greatest win probability belongs to the 49ers in week 4 against the Patriots, but with a handful of other good options in week 4 are they really the best pick? Let’s look ahead to week 11. The only real good picks are the 49ers, Eagles, and Dolphins. However, the Dolphins and Eagles are the clear top 2 best choices in week 12 and 14, respectively. By not using the 49ers in week 4, that sets us up to save them for week 11, thus allowing us to preserve using the Dolphins and Eagles in a better spot. We could go all day looking through this table manually, so let’s put this through an optimizer (see my code if you’re into that sort of stuff).
Sure enough, using the plan laid out above was the ideal strategy. While there may be a few less than ideal choices at the beginning of the season, this is a long game strategy. Losing in week 1 is no different than getting second place in this format. Aim for the stars! Caesars Sportsbook actually lets you make a parlay of every game. The odds of the parlay of all of the 18 games above are about +14000. I don’t know about you but $100 to win $1.5 million sounds a lot better than $100 to win $14k!
Pitfalls of Optimized Selections
Of course, no strategy is bulletproof. Optimizing the schedule does take a bit of mathematical knowledge, but it was not that difficult. Others may have this exact strategy, too. Also, while the selections above may be the most likely combination when the win probabilities are multiplied together prior to week 1, the season may not shake out this way. A multitude of factors could affect future selections.
Injuries are unfortunately a big part of football. If the Chiefs are the optimal choice in week 10, but Patrick Mahomes goes down in week 9, not only would we be hesitant to choose the Chiefs in week 10, but we potentially wasted 9 good games to use the Chiefs. Be cautious about waiting too long on teams you are confident are good football teams.
Teams also may just be better than expected. The 2023 Houston Texans, practically universally expected to be a terrible team, ended up with a very solid 2023 season. The emergence of CJ Stroud made the Texans a team nobody would take lightly. Be cautious about holding a team for the "perfect" matchup against a basement dwelling team, as it may not be what you are expecting once it is time. For 2024, that team is evidently the New England Patriots. They are the chosen opponent six times. If they are better than expected, this entire strategy is dead in the water.
Lastly, upsets happen. Look back on any past NFL season and you will see plenty of results that'll surprise you. Even the optimized selections have only a 0.31% combined probability of winning. The Cincinnati Bengals, the team with the highest winning percentage and the optimal choice in week 1, still have a 24% chance of losing. Survivor is hard! (UPDATE 9/13/2024: The Bengals did in fact lose to the New England Patriots in week 1. Hopefully you picked someone else!)
Good Luck!
You have any further questions or want to talk about Survivor strategies? Let me know on twitter @ Timboslice003. Link to my bio below!