Balancing Expected Value And Future Value When Making NFL Survivor Picks

We go through some examples of situations involving Future Value and Expected Value and how our recommendations were made on those factors.

Ultimately, survivor decisions are based on both the Expected Value for that specific week, and how valuable it is to preserve that team for future value. Generally, the best survivor choices are those that:

• Have the highest win odds for that week;
• Are as unpopular as possible; and
• Do not have much future value.

Those are the platonic ideal for survivor choices. But reality is often far more complex and conflicting. Teams that tend to have high win odds also tend to be very popular, at least until other entries have already used them up as options. The best options by expected value also tend to have higher future value. A lot of the same teams tend to show up as favorites from week to week.

What happens when some of those goals conflict? That’s why we develop grades that incorporate both Expected Value and Future Value to make decisions in individual pools.

Those grades combine both elements to weigh the value of making a pick, and are customized by the particulars of each pool, including the size and the specific rules.

We will go through some archetype examples, using examples from the 2022 season.

High Expected Value and High Future Value

What happens when the team with the highest expected value also has the highest future value? We saw this in action in 2022 with the Buffalo Bills. In Week 5, the Bills were a big favorite against the Pittsburgh Steelers, with win odds of 86%. The Bills also had the highest Future Value. That’s because they had several other weeks where they were expected to be a large favorite. (This estimate was accurate: the Bills had win odds of 75% or more in seven additional weeks after Week 5, and were a key part of a tough stretch run.)

The answer in these situations is largely: it depends.

In Week 5, we largely avoided recommending the Bills. They did have the highest EV, but the differences weren’t massive from other options, because of their high pick rate. And they had a lot of future value over the second half of the season, during several weeks where a lot of the same teams (Bills, Chiefs, Eagles, and Cowboys) tended to be among the top favorites. Those who didn’t preserve any of those teams were hurting in 2022.

Good, But Not Great Expected Value and High Future Value

When a team has the best EV for that week, maybe the circumstances of your pool still dictates using the team even if they also have great Future Value. But when the EV goes to simply “pretty good,” things change.

This is illustrated by the case of the Kansas City Chiefs in 2022. Kansas City was favored in nearly every week, but also had great Future Value late in the season. In week 3, Kansas City was playing the Colts, and they were the most popular pick of the week at about 25%. This was a week where no team was favored by 7 points or more, so it was a difficult week. Maybe that factor led a lot of people to put their faith in the Chiefs, even though they were only a 4.5-point road favorite at Indianapolis.

But since they didn’t have the highest win odds, and were the most popular pick, Kansas City had a sub-par 0.90 EV for the week. Meanwhile, as it turns out, the Chiefs’ future value forecast turned out accurately. They were the largest favorite in three different future weeks, and had much higher win odds in several others.

You don’t want to typically use a team with great Future Value in a situation where they are not clearly a top EV choice. Those that avoided the popular Chiefs in Week 3 were also rewarded when the Colts won the game and knocked out the popular pick.

High Popularity and Low Future Value

You should NOT pick a team just because they have little future value. Usually, they have no future value for a good reason, and they also have little current expected value. But situations do arise where a team has little future value, but provides decent Expected Value, even if other teams have a slightly higher EV.

Whether these teams make for good picks often depends on their popularity, and how that impacts the EV of other options that week. There are times when the public goes overboard in taking a team because “this is the spot to use them.” That can lead to value elsewhere by not following the crowd.

For the 2023 season, Cincinnati in Week 10 and Washington in Week 11 were both examples of this phenomenon biting entries.

The Bengals were at 31% popularity in Week 10 against Houston as a 5.5-point favorite. Washington (32%) was the most popular pick in Week 11 as an 8.5-point favorite over the NY Giants.

In both cases, these teams were popular because they were available to a larger portion of the pool and had lower future value than other alternatives. But the high popularity, relative to the win odds and the differences with other options those weeks, led to fairly poor EV numbers, both below 0.95.

In our recommendations, we still had some subscribers who received Washington and Cincinnati s a recommended pick (as part of portfolios, and depending on size and rules). Both were much lower than the public, though, and the Bengals were a near-avoid at 3% of our recommendations to specific entries, compared to the public rate.

The best way to deal with these is on a case-by-case basis, sometimes you have to play these teams. But if you can do a better job of preserving future value early in the year, you can pivot and play higher value teams in these weeks where the public gets concentrated on a choice, and there’s a poor payoff for the public choice.

Low Popularity, Decent Expected Value, and No Future Value

The other situation to consider involving teams with no future value is when they are not popular, but have good enough win odds to have one of the Top 5 or 6 EVs for the week.

This is, in many ways, the opposite situation from the Kansas City example earlier. Here, Future Value (and lack thereof) push a team that otherwise merely looked like a decent option into one of the better plays in some types of pools.

One example of this in 2023 was Seattle in Week 9. Seattle had already been highly popular three weeks (58% when they played Arizona). So they had already been used by the “go with the obvious pick” crowd. As a 6-point favorite against Washington, they were being picked by only 2% of the public, while a big chunk was concentrated on Cincinnati that week as the pick, at 31%.

As a result of having similar win odds to the most popular pick, at a fraction of the popularity, Seattle had a pretty good EV. In fact, the only two teams above them were Baltimore and Dallas, two teams that projected to have several future spots to be useful.

We recommended the Cowboys to the majority of entries that week (they were after all a massive 17.5-point favorite against the Giants at home), but Seattle was the second-most common choice. It was the alternative to the most popular pick, while saving future value for other teams, and providing a decent EV in the process.

Preserving the Better Future Value Team In Close Calls

Finally, in other weeks, the differences between Future Value may not be as stark, but you can still trade out some Expected Value now for better Future Value. In Week 8 of 2019, the Minnesota Vikings (51%) were the most popular choice, while Pittsburgh (23%) were the second-most popular choice.

On the surface, it was a week very similar to Week 4 of 2019, when the Chargers were the most popular choice and had the best win odds, and the Rams were the second choice with the second-best win odds entering the week. In fact, the difference in both win odds and EV between the two choices in those weeks were almost identical.

The primary difference was Future Value. Pittsburgh had some Future Value after Week 8, but it was about half that of Minnesota. Meanwhile, the Rams rated slightly higher than the Chargers in Future Value in Week 4. Those Future Value differences solidified the Chargers as the better choice in Week 4, while it swung the recommendations to more likely using Pittsburgh in Week 8, and preserving the Minnesota Vikings to use in a future week.

So while Expected Value is still the primary driver of decisions on the best survivor values, Future Value does have a role to play when developing the best strategy for your pool.