2019 NFL Survivor Pool Picks Advice: Potential Fade Teams

NFL is back, baby! And we are back for another season of weekly NFL Survivor Pool picks. Here in the week before the leadup to Week 1 of the regular season, I will provide some possible fade teams to look to play against in the 2019 season.

Many NFL Survivor Pool contestants like to use “fade teams” to propel them through the pro football season. Every season there are a few really bad teams. If you can spot one of these bad teams early in the season, you can go against them almost every week with success. In 2016 and 2017 the Cleveland Browns were the epitome of a great fade team. They won one game combined in those two seasons and went winless in 2017, joining the 2008 Detroit Lions in that historic ignominy. Remember, you can’t use a fade team EVERY week since they play teams in their own division twice. But you can use them most weeks.

I don’t blindly use fade teams, but they for sure can be valuable if there are no obvious great picks for the week or if you are still playing late in the season without any obvious solid matchups to exploit.

So, how do we find these fade teams? You can do hours of research on all the teams in the NFL. Or you can do it the easy way and just look at the sportsbooks season win total odds as they do all the work for you. And the oddsmakers are some of the smartest guys in the world when it comes to analyzing teams. Every year the sportsbooks assign a number of wins for each team, and bettors can wager on the “over” or “under”.

Remember, however, that the oddsmakers set their betting lines with their customer base in mind and not how they think the season will play out on the field. For example, they know mainstays like New England will be popular with bettors, so they might inflate the season win total for that team. On the other hand, they know teams like Tampa Bay will not be popular, so they might offer a lower team win total in order to avoid action from sharp bettors. Therefore, these win totals should be used as more of a guide than anything. But they are a good place to start when looking for possible fade teams for the upcoming season.

Last year there was no perfect fade team like the Browns in 2016 and 2017. The Arizona Cardinals were the worst team in the NFL in 2018 with just three wins. Three teams (Jets, Raiders and Niners) had four wins each. There were three teams (Jaguars, Giants and Buccaneers) with five wins apiece. These results are pretty average for a typical NFL season, and that is why I never blindly use fade teams, because even the worst NFL teams normally win a few games. In 2017, aside from the winless Browns, there was one team (Giants) with three wins and two (Colts, Texans) with four wins. In 2016, the Niners won two games and the Bears and Jaguars won three each.

It seems like parity is taking over the league. This season the lowest win total at the sportsbooks is the Dolphins at 4.5 wins. There are two teams at 5.5 wins, two teams at 6 wins, and one at 6.5. There’s a good chance the worst team in the league will come from this group of squads. With a couple key injuries early in the season, any team in the NFL could fall apart, so keeping up on NFL news daily is always a good idea in hopes of Survivor Pool success.

Here we will look at some of the best possible fade teams in the NFL for the 2019 season with their season win total odds in parenthesis:

Miami Dolphins (4.5 Wins): The Dolphins won seven games last season, but they are expected to be much worse in 2019. This team didn’t make many moves in the offseason that will improve the team immediately. They have a first-time coach in Brain Flores. They traded for second-year QB Josh Rosen from Arizona, and the signal caller had a really tough rookie year in the desert. He is battling journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick for the starting job. They have a pretty tough schedule. But this team did have enough talent to win seven games last season, and if Rosen improves in his second season then this team could win four or five games. This is a team to look to play against but not an automatic fade. I have a hard time believing that when Week 17 is in the books that the Dolphins will have the worst record in the league.

Cincinnati Bengals (5.5 Wins): This team is horrible. I think there’s a decent chance they could be in the running for the worst record in the NFL. They finally got rid of long-tenured coach Marvin Lewis, and that result was a long time coming. But there will be growing pains before things get better. It’s pretty obvious by now that QB Andy Dalton is not the next coming of Tom Brady, and this team will be without their best WR for an undetermined time as A.J. Green heals. A new coach equals new philosophies. And with a lousy roster, this team should be in for a rough season. They play three of their first four games on the road, so this is a great team to play against for an early-season fade.

Arizona (5.5 Wins): The Cardinals were the worst team in the league in 2018, and as a result they got the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft, where they picked Heisman winner Kyler Murray from Oklahoma. They also have a new coach in Kliff Kingsbury, who will bring his air-raid offense to the desert. Murray has a much higher ceiling than Rosen, in my opinion, but a team having a rookie QB is always a good one to pay attention to for a Survivor Pool fade, especially early in the season. This team should be exciting to watch. They will probably win a handful of games and pull an upset or two along the way. Their schedule is a mixed bag through the first half of the season, but there will definitely be a couple good fade spots before (or IF) this team finds its footing.

Oakland Raiders (6 Wins): This team should be much improved from last year’s four-win team. Whether they can parlay that into three or four more wins is yet to be seen. This seems like the type of team where if they get some bounces to go their way that they could be an eight-win team. Or they could completely implode and win two or three games. They had a pretty good draft, and they signed Antonio Brown, arguably the best WR in the game. But this team has a lot of distractions. This will be their last season in Oakland, and they have one foot out the door. Brown has had a myriad of offseason issues. This looks like a very dysfunctional team that has a chance to be decent or fall on its face. I probably will want to see how this team looks for a couple weeks before labeling them as a solid fade team.

New York Giants (6 Wins): This is looking like a transition year for the Giants, who at some point will probably switch from long-time starting QB Eli Manning to raw rookie Daniel Jones. This team is lacking talent in a lot of spots on the roster. They are solid at RB with Saquon Barkley, but they relied on him too much last season, and there’s a great chance he could miss time if they put too much demands on the young back this season. This team would probably be at the top of my list of fade teams, but they have a pretty easy schedule. They open at the Cowboys, which is probably the only spot to fade them in the first four weeks of the season. They have such an easy early-season schedule that they might win a few games and delay the transition from Manning to Jones. A rookie QB leading a lousy team is Survivor Pool fade gold, so later in the season might be the best time to go against this team on a weekly basis once the inevitable change is made.

Detroit Lions (6.5 Wins): This is the last team we will look at and the one with the highest season win total of this bunch of likely lousy teams. This team is the clear worst team in their division, with the Packers, Bears and Vikings all playoff contenders. They will be in tough to get any wins in the NFC North. Besides a Week 1 game at Arizona, which is no sure win for the Lions, they play five straight playoff contenders and will probably be in a huge hole by the halfway point of the season. While I do think this team can muster up four to six wins, they will for sure be a team to fade early in the season with that brutal schedule.