There’s nothing more exciting than winning an NFL Survivor Pool. Fantasy football championships are great, but winning a survivor pool takes you to a whole new level.

If you’ve been with Fantasy Alarm in previous seasons, then you know I am speaking from experience. Over the years, I have won my fair share of survivor pools, but last year was a special one. I was the last man standing and, as the sole survivor, took down the $25,000 prize on my own.

 

 

 

But while the concept of a survivor pool is simple, winning one is still a daunting task. That’s where we come in to help!

Here are the basics for your 2024 NFL Survivor Pool, as well as strategies to use when making your weekly decisions. It’s not an exact science, but following certain guidelines and survivor pool strategies will put you in the best position possible to win and take down the grand prize.

What Is An NFL Survivor Pool?

The premise of an NFL survivor pool is very basic. All you have to do is pick one team each week that will win their game outright. If your selected team wins, you advance to the next week. Pick a team that loses and you’re out. Make it all the way through Week 18 and you win the pool. Simple, right?

Where the difficulty arises is that you can not pick the same team twice. For example, if you take the Cincinnati Bengals to beat the New England Patriots in Week 1, you can not use them again for the rest of the season. No more Joe Burrow and Ja'Marr Chase for you.

That means you need to be strategic with your picks each week so you don’t end up sitting there in Week 15 hoping the Carolina Panthers can somehow upset the Dallas Cowboys.

There’s plenty to factor in, including what picks your competition can make each week, so keep reading.

Picking The Right Survivor Pool Matters

First and foremost, you must pick a pool that is run by someone you trust. Money is collected before the season begins and should be held in an account that remains untouched throughout the season. Over the years, I have heard some horror stories about commissioners not paying out in a timely fashion at the end of the year and we all have a pretty good idea as to why.

Web sites such as LeagueSafe offer services for collecting and protecting league dues, but if the money is simply being collected by the person running the pool, you either trust them implicitly or trust someone in the pool to vouch for them.

Some survivor pools allow for multiple entries and/or buybacks. Depending on cost and your budget, using multiple entries allows you to use multiple teams each week, spread some risk and maybe even behave in a contrarian manner with one of your picks. Most survivor pools tend to have a limit on the number of entries you purchase, but don’t cap the number of people participating, so a pool with multiple picks allowed offers you a much bigger return at the end of the year.

A buyback in a survivor pool allows you to do what exactly? Buy back into the pool should you lose in a given week. In most cases, it becomes a continuation of your original entry, so you won’t be able to use any of the teams you’ve used prior. You can’t use all the best teams, lose one week and go back to using all the best teams again. There is also a cut-off week where buybacks are no longer allowed. In one of my pools, if you lose at any point up to Week 8 of the NFL season, you can buy back in, but from Week 9 and beyond, it is single-elimination. 

If you are looking at multiple pools, pick the one that suits you best. Entrance fees, multiple picks, buybacks – all of these rules vary from pool to pool. Of course, you can join as many as you like, but stick with the ones that work best for you overall.

2024 NFL Survivor Pool Strategy

The Seven Steps To Winning Your Survivor Pool

No matter what specific NFL survivor pool you end up in for the 2024 season, there are battle-tested strategies you can use to give yourself the best chance possible.

Here are the seven parts of the NFL survivor pool strategy I followed to win $25,000:

1. Use The Home Team Advantage

Over the last four seasons, home favorites won their games outright 66.3% of the time and last season that number was almost at a 70% clip (69.8% to be exact). Remember, we don’t care about the spread. It doesn’t matter if the team was favored by one point or by 14. Home teams have been crushing for years. 

Even during COVID times, we were still looking at a winning percentage for home favorites in excess of 60%. When you are making your weekly selection, keep this in mind, regardless of the matchups. I’m not saying you ignore the 49ers as a road favorite by 14, but the preference should always be the home favorite.

2. Trust Vegas – They Know Something

Placing your NFL survivor pool strategy into the hands of Vegas oddsmakers might make some people cringe. But the simple fact of the matter is that using point spreads and money lines is extremely helpful when making your survivor pool picks each week. 

Remember, all of those big, beautiful hotels in Vegas were built on the public being wrong, so accept the fact that the oddsmakers probably know more than you do. Hubris is a very dangerous thing.

When you sit down to analyze your picks for the week, identify the home favorites. Then look at the bigger point spreads and see who has the most advantageous matchup. Over the last 20 years, favorites of 10 points or more have compiled an .842 winning percentage and teams favored by seven points or more have compiled a .792 winning percentage. 

Once you’ve established that, take a look at each game’s money line. A team with a minus-235 money line is definitely more attractive than one sitting at minus-160. Not that the second money line is bad, but you’re looking for the team Vegas feels has the strongest chance to win. Just be sure you are looking at straight-up money lines and not ones in conjunction with the point spread. The books have everything laid out pretty clearly, but always double check.

3. Exploit The Bad Teams

Picking against bad teams goes hand-in-hand with picking the large favorites. Every year we start to see certain teams that are just plain awful. Last year, everyone was targeting the Carolina Panthers, and rightfully so. The year before that, it was the Chicago Bears.

There is nothing wrong with targeting against the worst teams in the league. It sounds so simple, but some people overthink their survivor pool picks at times. As part of your survivor pool strategy, use the opportunities when a non-elite team is playing at home against one of these league bottom-feeders.

4. Be Contrarian When Necessary

In order to be the last person standing, you have to learn when to be contrarian. To zig when others zag.

You can not just follow the herd and pick the same team everyone else in your survior pool is picking. You can still play it safe and take a heavily-favored home team, but maybe not the extreme favorite who you know everyone likes and hope for an upset in that game. There comes a point in the season where this approach will increase your chances at winning the pool.

The site you use for your pool will probably not release the percentage of players taking teams X, Y and Z until after all picks are in. Others like ESPN and Yahoo allow you to see what percentage of people are taking those teams across their platform. If you like two teams in Week 10, perhaps you take the team with the lower ownership percentage so more teams will be knocked out if there is an upset, thus adding to your chances.

5. Do NOT Pick The Thursday Night Game

A gross oversimplification here is that “strange things happen on Thursday Night Football.” When it comes to a winning NFL survivor pool strategy, “strange” is not something we like to willingly walk into. 

With a short practice week, teams have a very limited time to get ready for Thursday night games. On top of that, minor injuries may not have fully healed and the level of play for some of those players may not be up to par. Why take the chance on a Thursday night debacle by a beat up team that would have benefitted from a few more days’ rest? 

It’s not an exact science and you’ll probably be tempted to take the Philadelphia Eagles over the Washington Commanders on Thursday of Week 11, but stick with Sunday or Monday. You will have more time to research and get it right.

6. Wait Until The Last Minute To Make Your Pick

If during one week you have a few teams from which to choose, especially early in the season, do yourself a favor and wait until the last minute to make your pick. Obviously, don’t cut it too close, but waiting until 30 minutes before your pick deadline is the best way to ensure you are properly informed. 

Injury updates, weather updates and changes in Vegas odds are continuously coming in before the action starts, so gather as much information as you can. Spotting late movement on the money line can be the difference between rolling around in a pile of cash and sitting on the toilet thinking about what could have been.

7. Do NOT Map Out A Rigid Plan

This one is probably the toughest one for people who think they know everything. It’s easy to look at the NFL schedule and try to map out a plan for the season, trying to save some of the better teams for later in the campaign. But ultimately, your survivor pool strategy needs to be flexible.

Maybe you see the 49ers at home against the Patriots in Week 4, but you want to save them for Week 14 when six teams are on a bye and they host the Bears? It sounds reasonable, but so much can happen between the two games that you have no idea if this is even a good matchup anymore. 

What happens if the Niners trade Brandon Aiyuk mid-season and lose Christian McCaffrey to an injury? What did you save them for? That’s not to say you use up all the good teams first. You just don’t want to bypass a favorable matchup to look 10 steps down the road. If you want to look down the road, two to three weeks ahead is probably the most I will look. Saving teams without actually knowing the future could be the fast track to going home.

While it may sound simple, winning an NFL Survivor Pool is a very difficult thing to do. Injuries and upsets occur everywhere and usually at the absolute worst times. But if you stick to the strategies outlined in the seven steps above, you should be in a good position to be in the hunt at the very end.

I’ll have a weekly column this season outlining my favorite survivor pool picks of the week, with thoughts about future weeks included. You can also hit me up in the Fantasy Alarm Discord as well.

I’m your Survivor Pool ride-or-die this season. Together, we’ll be celebrating in the money!

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