The first NFL Sunday of 2017 is just a day away, and it’s time to make your NFL Week 1 survivor picks.

The 2017 survivor pool season started with jolt on Thursday night. 10% of survivor pool entries nationwide were eliminated after Kansas City, an 8-point underdog according to betting lines, dispatched New England 42-27.

Let’s take a look at some numbers and analyze a few of the top Week 1 survivor pick options.

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TeamRankings has provided data-driven picks, tools, and analysis for football pool and betting since 2000. You can check out their customized NFL survivor pool picks and NFL betting picks for Week 1.

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Week 1 Survivor Pick Data

Here are the key Week 1 survivor pick metrics (as of early Saturday morning) for the 10 teams with the highest Week 1 win odds according to our models.

Note that breaking news, betting line movement, and shifts in public picking trends may have happened since this post was published, and changed the Week 1 landscape. If you want the latest numbers before you lock in your Week 1 survivor pick, we update our NFL survivor pool picks and tools multiple times per day.

The teams in the table below are sorted by win odds, highest to lowest. If you want more explanation about what each column means exactly, it’s at the end of the post.

Week 1 Survivor Pick Analysis

• Buffalo and Pittsburgh are the most likely teams to win tomorrow (good), but both are also the most popular picks by a decent margin (bad). Pittsburgh’s very high future value is a major concern for using them so early, while picking Buffalo entails having the cojones to use a team we project to go 7-9 this year as your very first survivor pick — even if they are playing the Jets.
• The LA Rams look like a nice under-the-radar value play, but it’s worth noting that our models are more optimistic about their chances to beat Indianapolis than Vegas betting lines are. Still, LAR’s low popularity and negligible future value are attractive attributes.
• Atlanta is the third most popular Week 1 survivor pick, yet a clear step down in safety from Buffalo and Pittsburgh. Combined, that results in a relatively unattractive expected value, although that low EV figure is partially the result of our models being more pessimistic about the Falcons than Vegas is.
• Houston and Dallas are worthy alternatives to Atlanta. Both are in a similar ballpark in terms of safety (slightly safer than Atlanta according to our models, slightly riskier according to Vegas). However, Houston is less popular and has less future value, while Dallas is the least popular pick on the board with 60%+ win odds.
• Carolina has been drawing some chatter as a Week 1 survivor pick option, but we’re not seeing it based on the Saturday morning data. For example, even using the more pessimistic Vegas odds, the LA Rams are safer, less popular, and have less future value than Carolina.

Making Multiple Week 1 Survivor Picks

Keep in mind that if you are playing in multiple survivor pools, playing multiple entries in a pool, or both, you’re going to need to come up with a “portfolio” of picks that maximizes your expected profit from playing in survivor pools this year.

To diversify your risk, your Week 1 survivor pick portfolio should likely include a mix of teams, as opposed to picking the same team with all of your entries.

One of the unique features of our NFL Survivor Picks product is that it figures out your optimal pick portfolio each week, and recommends the specific team to use for each of your still-alive survivor pool entries.

Survivor Pool Strategy Recap

Hopefully you’ve read our previous post on value-driven picking in survivor pools, which explains why you need to look at more than just a team’s chance to win if you want to make the best survivor picks.

To summarize, there are three key pieces of data you need to evaluate for each possible pick each week:

1. Win odds
2. Pick popularity
3. Future value

Win odds refers to the chance that our TeamRankings predictive models give a team to win its game. Our win odds models factor in recent betting lines, but occasionally our models are more optimistic or pessimistic about a team than Vegas is.

Pick popularity is an estimate of how many survivor pool entries nationwide are picking a team. We calculate it using a weighted average of public picking trends data that we gather from multiple large survivor pool hosting sites.

Together, win odds and pick popularity drive Week 1 EV (expected value), which measures the expected payoff of picking a team this week. EV evaluates both risks (win odds) and rewards (pick popularity, how your opponent picks are distributed among the rest of the teams, and what’s likely to happen in those other games). However, it ignores future value.

Future value measures the relative sacrifice of using a team in Week 1 vs. saving it for later. For example, burning the Steelers as your Week 1 survivor pick may help you reach Week 2, but it also makes your entry worse off in future weeks. In the table above, we listed our future value scores for a 50-person survivor pool with standard rules.

Thanks For Having Us!

This article ends our five-part series on football office pool strategy on FantasyPros. Hope you enjoyed it!

If you’d like to read or learn more, you can listen to our guest appearance on the FantasyPros podcast, read all of the articles listed below, and of course, come visit us at TeamRankings.com.

TeamRankings has provided data-driven picks, tools, and analysis for football pools and betting since 2000. You can check out their products for NFL survivor pool picks , NFL pick’em pool picks, and NFL betting picks.