2019 NFL Survivor Pool Picks Tips and Help

Welcome to the 2019 season at SurvivorPoolPicks.com. This will be our fifth season offering weekly Survivor Pool picks and advice throughout the NFL season. Every week I will look at Opening Lines and analyze some of the best matchups on the board for that week. We will provide a YouTube video each week with predictions, and we also have a poll on our left sidebar where readers can see the most popular NFL Survivor Pool picks each week.

If you are reading this, you probably know the general rules for an NFL Survivor Pool. For most standard pools, you pick one team each week to win with no point spread. If that team wins, you advance to the following week and can’t use that team again. If they lose, you are out of the contest. (Ties, which are becoming more standard in the NFL, normally count as a loss). The last contestant standing at the end of the season wins the pool. Often in large pools, there are several contestants alive at the end, and in this case they would split the prize. There are many variations of Survivor Pools; in some you can lose twice, and in some you pick a team to lose every week. But on this blog, we will focus mainly on the standard Survivor Pool.

I wanted to offer some general NFL Survivor Pool picks tips and advice for the upcoming season. This will be a shorter blog post, but for a more in-depth article, click here.

Rule No. 1: Never Save Teams

I was one of the first people on the Internet to offer Survivor Pool picks weekly, on Doc’s Sports Web site, where I am the content manager for my full-time job. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry on the Internet is offering Survivor Pool advice. It can be really confusing to wade through the BS. Every year I see guys saying to save teams like the Patriots and Packers are later in the season. That is NOT the name of this game. The name of this game is to survive to the following week. Saving the best teams for a “later” that likely will never come is the dumbest thing you can do in a Survivor Pool. Always pick the team you think has the best chance of winning that week. The only time I look to future matchups is if I am absolutely 50/50 on two matchups for that week, and I might look ahead a little bit to see if either one of those teams has a favorable game in the next couple weeks.

Rule No. 2: Play Multiple Entries

In the pools I play in, it’s almost always a player with multiple entries that wins. It’s not rocket science; the more chances you have, the better your odds. The new NFL season can be very tumultuous for Survivor Pool players, even ones that do their homework in the offseason. Every single season there are a couple top teams that start off slow and a couple teams that come from nowhere to start the season hot. You will usually see at least a third of contestants get eliminated in the first few weeks of the season. Having multiple entries gives you a better chance of surviving the early-season purge, and it gives you a lot more options later in the season if you still have multiple entries alive.

Rule No. 3: Avoid Road Teams, Divisional Matchups

When it gets later in the season, and your options are limited, it’s tough to stick to these rules. But early in the season I normally throw out road teams and most divisional matchups. Home-field advantage in the NFL is more prominent than in almost any other sport. Even the teams that win only a few games on the season are probably going to get those wins at home. Division matchups are always rivalry games where the underdog is very familiar with the favorite, and they are less inclined to put together a horrible performance against a traditional rival.

Rule No. 4: Check the Point Spread

The first thing I do when I am thinking about my possible Survivor Pool picks for the week is to check the point spread for every game. The point spread should not be treated as gospel. Oddsmakers set the lines according to their clients’ betting patterns more than they do what they expect the outcome on the field to be. But checking the spreads will give you a general idea of the teams most likely to win for that current week. While they have not been as strong in the last couple years, betting favorites of 10 or more points are normally a very solid pick for Survivor Pools.

Rule No. 5: Wait to Submit Pick

If the Andrew Luck retirement taught us anything, it’s that the NFL news cycle is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is always some breaking news late in the week that could affect your Survivor Pool choices. Find out when the deadline is to submit your picks each week. Then submit them a few hours before deadline to give yourself the best chance to avoid any late-breaking news that could hurt your chances. But, very important, never miss your deadline as any good pool runner shouldn’t and probably won’t accept your picks after the deadline. There’s no worse way to lose your Survivor Pool than to get knocked out for submitting picks late!

Check the link at the top of this article for more NFL Survivor Pool tips and advice!