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.

by Jason Lisk - Apr 24, 2025

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 2024 with the San Francisco 49ers in Week 4. San Francisco was the biggest favorite that week (-10.5, 82% win odds). Though their season would be ultimately de-railed by injuries, at the time, San Francisco still looked like one of the top five future value options.

The answer in these situations is largely: it depends.

In Week 4, we largely recommended San Francisco, but this was because of the other options. The second-highest spread and win odds that week belonged to Kansas City, a team with even higher future value. After that, the safety drop-off was notable. Because San Francisco had the highest EV of the week, they were a common recommendation, in a week where using San Francisco meant being able to save Kansas City instead, and avoid a big drop in value. But if there had been more alternatives that were closer to San Francisco in Expected Value and that had lower value for the future, the answer might have been different.

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 2024 season, Las Vegas in Week 3 and Indianapolis Week 17 were both examples of this phenomenon biting entries.

Las Vegas was at 19% popularity in Week 3, the second-most popular pick of the week, as a 5.5-point favorite (fifth-biggest of the week). The attraction to using Las Vegas was they would probably only be in play against the woeful Carolina Panthers, who had started 0-2 in two blowouts. But because of that high popularity, coupled with several other teams having higher or similar win odds with low popularity, picking Las Vegas was a low-EV play.

Indianapolis in Week 17 was a highly popular play driven by both past low usage (as they were a low future value team all year) and the fact that some of the other options were more attractive to save for the final week. As a result, the Colts’ popularity surged to over 35%, and they also had a poor EV because there were lots of other teams with similar or better win odds.

In our recommendations, we still had some subscribers who received Las Vegas and Indianapolis as a recommended pick (as part of portfolios, and depending on size and rules). Both were much lower than the public, though. The Raiders were a near-avoid at only 0.2% of our recommendations to specific entries, compared to the public rate, and all of those were in pools that would require multiple picks in a week at some point.

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 2024 was Jacksonville in Week 5. The Jaguars had started the season 0-4, and were only a 3.5-point favorite at home against Indianapolis. So as you might imagine, few people were eager to pick such a team and their popularity was below 3%. But in a week where Seattle, as a 7-point favorite, had 36% popularity, and there were no real “safe” options and most other picks were also favored by under a touchdown, Jacksonville actually had a good EV.

Our most common recommendation was San Francisco, as the biggest favorite of the week. But we recommended the Jaguars to over 15% of entries, and to a much higher percentage in pools that required multiple picks or had other specialty rules. As it turns out, both our most common recommendation, San Francisco, and the public’s overwhelming choice, Seattle lost, and the Jaguars held on in a shootout to win their first game of the season (one of only four all year).

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.