Week 3 Football Pick’em Contest Strategy & Advice (2024)

Last weeks underdogs have turned into this weeks favorites as Week 3 of the 2024 NFL season brings new top picks for your pick’em contests.

Andy Dalton is taking over at QB for Carolina in Week 3 (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire)

Last week’s underdogs have turned into this week’s favorites as Week 3 of the 2024 NFL season brings new top picks for your pick’em contests. After a wild week full of upsets, we are back with Week 3 pick’em strategy analysis to accompany our 2024 Football Pick’em Picks product. Through two weeks, we’ve already seen big upsets and surprising teams get off to a hot start.

This column explores strategies to maximize your edge in NFL and college football pick’em contests. We also provide some rationale behind picks potentially recommended by our premium product.

We plan to periodically update this post through Sunday of Week 3, so check back for updates. Here’s what’s available now:

Important Notes About Picks We Highlight

Keep in mind three things about picks we highlight in this article:

Optimal pick’em contest strategy balances risk and potential reward.
Maximizing your odds of winning a pick’em pool generally requires exploiting the best opportunities to differentiate your picks from your opponents’ picks. Ideally, you want to fade the public while taking on minimal additional pick risk. For example, taking a betting market favorite and having it picked by less than 50% of your opponents is usually a great opportunity.
Not all of the picks we highlight are suitable for all pools.

Don’t be surprised if our Football Pick’em Picks product doesn’t recommend some of the picks mentioned in this post for your specific pool—especially the upset picks. The best pick strategy for you depends on several factors, such as your pool’s size, rules, and prize structure (a concept covered in part by our article on season vs. weekly prize strategy).
Picks we highlight may no longer look compelling by game day.
We analyze and write about picks using data (e.g., win odds and pick popularity) that is current when we publish each section of the article, but that data can change before kickoff. For example, a key player being ruled out or a shift in public sentiment about a team can erase the differentiation value that a pick initially offered.

We’ll provide periodic updates in this post if significant data changes occur for the picks we’ve mentioned, so check back often. However, there’s a much better way to stay on top of changing data trends throughout the week, which all sharp players need to do.

Our Football Pick’em Picks product automatically imports the latest win odds and pick popularity data multiple times per day. You can see the latest information in the Data Grid.

After you generate customized picks for your pool, you can also update those pick recommendations via the My Pool Picks screen. The updated picks will incorporate the most recent data we have.

About Our Pick’em Pool Advice

What sets our Football Pick’em Picks product apart from other sites is that its recommendations aren’t generic—they’re tailored specifically to your pool.

In any given week, the best picks for your football pool depend on a number of variables. Your pool’s size, rules, and prize structure all influence strategy, as do factors like your current place in the standings and how many weeks are left.

So many different scenarios exist that it’s impossible to provide pick advice that makes sense across the board. An underrated 6-point underdog could be a great pick in a large weekly prize pool and a terrible pick for a small season-long pool where you’re currently in the money.

Technology to the rescue

As far as we know, we’re the only site that has built algorithms to evaluate all these strategy factors and provide you with customized pick recommendations every week.

The result? Every year, an average of 74% of our subscribers win a prize (season-long or weekly) in a football pick’em contest.

If you want to see all the Week 1 picks we recommend for your football pick’em contest, use our Football Pick’em Picks product.

Why we write this column

At the same time, we know our subscribers like to understand the rationale behind picks our product may recommend, especially when those picks go against the grain. So, over the years, we’ve started to write more about the “why” behind our approach.

This column can also help educate our readers about pick’em pool strategy. We highlight tactics proven to result in more pick’em pool wins over the long term and point out common pitfalls to avoid.

We hope you enjoy reading, and we encourage you to check out more of our F0otball Pick’em strategy articles.

Sunday 9/22

Sunday Week 3 Pick Rundown

Two weeks down, two very different weeks in how the favorites did. We’ve also seen that the biggest favorites have fallen hard so far, with the teams favored by a touchdown or more going 0-3 this season. Obviously, that’s not expected to be a season-long trend, so it’s not wise to overreact to it.

How will this week go? Here is our summary of where our picks are heading in different pool types, on average, across our entire PoolGenius subscriber base.

(Just keep in mind that individual advice can vary when it comes to the teams the product recommends. Different contest lines, pool sizes, and other rules can influence the optimal pick in various situations. So if we mention picking a team heavily and it’s not part of your pick set, there are valid reasons for that difference.)