Week 18 Survivor Picks Strategy & Advice (2024)

The Week 18 survivor pick options could range from Baltimore and Tampa Bay, to Atlanta, Indianapolis, or the Los Angeles Chargers.

A lot of people will be counting on Atlanta rookie QB Michael Penix in Week 18 (Lee Coleman/Icon Sportswire)

The final week of the 2024 NFL regular season is here. Congratulations if you have made it to Week 18 with a survivor entry intact.

With just this week remaining in many pools, the future is now. There is no saving for later, and the options are getting pretty limited. We’ll explore those options in this article, periodically updating through Sunday of Week 18. Here’s what’s available now:

1/5: Week 18 Sunday AM Pick Overview
1/3: Friday Week 18 Strategy Rundown
1/2: Seattle Odds Rise with Rams’ Rest News
12/31: Five Most Popular Survivor Picks
12/31: Last Week’s Survivor Recap
FYI: Survivor Strategy Articles
FYI: About Our Survivor Pool Advice

Survivor Strategy Articles

If you’re serious about winning more survivor pools, it pays to learn the strategies that give you a long-term edge.

You can start with our free survivor strategy articles, which explain a number of the concepts we apply to our customized Survivor pick recommendations:

We also have written a survivor strategy e-book that goes more in-depth into many key topics for Survivor, which you can download for free here.

About Our Survivor Pool Advice

We break down the pros and cons of various Survivor pick options in this column, but none of our advice is ever absolute.

Why can’t we tell you the “best” survivor pick of the week? Because there is no universal “best pick” across the board for NFL survivor pools.

The best weekly pick for your pool depends on various factors, including the number of entries still alive and your pool’s rules. For example:

Bigger survivor pools reward more risk-taking.
The more entries in your pool, the lower the chance you have to win it. These types of pools typically go deeper into the season, require more picks, and necessitate digging deeper into the teams by taking on more risk. As a result, your best strategy for bigger pools generally demands more of a focus on avoiding the most popular picks to try to benefit when the popular crowd pick falls flat.
Non-standard rules change optimal pick strategy.
If your pool requires double picks late in the season, or if it’s a strike pool (i.e., your first incorrect pick doesn’t eliminate you), you don’t want to use the exact same pick strategy that you’d use in a standard-rules survivor pool. Those rule variations significantly influence decision factors, such as whether you should be more inclined to save a good team for later vs. use it now.

And then there’s all this stuff:

What if you’ve already picked the team (or teams) that some article says is the best pick this week?
What if the point spread for that “best pick” has gotten several points worse since the article was published?
How should you spread your picks across multiple teams if you’re playing more than one entry?

Technology to the rescue

We believe we’re the only site with algorithms that evaluate all key strategy factors in survivor pools. We provide customized Survivor pick recommendations that are updated multiple times a day.

The result? Since 2017, our subscribers have reported over $6.0 million in survivor pool winnings using our data-driven picks and tools.

If you want to see all the picks we recommend for your pool, use our NFL Survivor Picks product.

Why we write this column

We know our subscribers want to understand the reasoning behind picks, especially when they go against the grain. This weekly article gives us a chance to explain the “why” behind our approach. It also allows us to detail unique situations as they arise.

This column can also help educate our readers about Survivor pool strategy. We highlight tactics proven to result in more survivor 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 survivor pool strategy articles.

Sunday 1/5

Week 18 Sunday AM Pick Overview

Here’s where our customized subscriber pick recommendations stand as of Sunday at 9:30 AM ET, comparing public picking trends to the percentage of picks we’re recommending to PoolGenius subscribers (the “PoolGenius” column).

The last six columns in the table show how our recommended picks vary by subscriber pool format/rules. The table shows every team with at least 2% public popularity. Ordinarily, we show every team drawing at least one recommendation from PoolGenius, but those teams are again lengthy with multiple picks dominating our entries, and so many bad teams making up the bottom quarter of the league in pools who are nearing the end with lots of teams used. Every favorite but Cincinnati and Philadelphia was recommended to at least one subscriber, and a couple of entries are getting an underdog in multi-pick pools running out of options.

Team	Public	PoolGenius	Standard	Strike	Rebuy	Multi-Pick	Playoffs	Late Start
Tampa Bay	11.3%	23.6%	36.5%	22.7%	16.8%	12.0%	2.6%	24.5%
Denver	10.9%	18.8%	9.6%	15.9%	14.7%	14.8%	7.7%	20.0%
Seattle	4.0%	16.7%	9.6%	9.1%	9.5%	23.2%	10.3%	18.6%
Baltimore	7.2%	10.0%	1.9%	18.2%	16.8%	3.3%	10.3%	10.2%
Atlanta	24.2%	8.5%	23.1%	9.1%	16.8%	11.2%	0.0%	5.8%
Green Bay	11.4%	5.3%	0.0%	6.8%	8.4%	4.3%	0.0%	5.6%
Arizona	3.9%	5.3%	3.8%	4.5%	9.5%	10.0%	2.6%	4.6%
LA Chargers	4.9%	3.0%	3.8%	4.5%	1.1%	5.7%	0.0%	2.9%
Indianapolis	5.4%	2.5%	1.9%	0.0%	1.1%	5.1%	2.6%	2.4%
Washington	1.9%	2.5%	9.6%	4.5%	3.2%	2.8%	0.0%	1.9%
Tennessee	1.8%	2.3%	0.0%	4.5%	1.1%	4.9%	0.0%	2.1%
Houston	1.8%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Cincinnati	1.6%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%

Entries can fall under more than one category. For example, a pool that requires multiple picks in future weeks and allows a strike would be separately included in the percentages for each.

The Pittsburgh loss has resulted in the Chargers moving up to -7 this morning, and that’s because the Chargers can now get the No. 5 seed (and play Houston instead of Baltimore) if they win, so they should be playing all out.
The grades tend to go by win odds, since survival is of utmost importance. The only exception is some teams with similar win odds and better EV (Seattle, the Chargers, Washington) are going above Atlanta due to EV/popularity.
Tampa Bay is actually the most common recommendation for the second week in a row, at a rate about two times higher than the public.
About 29% of the public is picking one of the three biggest favorites, while 52% of our pick recommendations are on one of those three.

Week 18 Expectations

Before we get to expectations, we want to say thank you to all of you. The popularity of survivor pools is growing, and we can see that with how many are playing in pools that now start after Week 1. There are over 1,000 entries in play today using our product, on top of several that won pools with last week’s results. The specific results you need may differ, some of you in pools with lots of options and some at the end of lengthy pick runs and down to just a few. But best of luck in getting that final result you need.

Here are the overall expectations across all pick recommendations as of this morning.

The expectation is for high survival based on the options. Our recommendations are at 81% to win in the final week, while the public average is at 73%.
Atlanta is the one big leverage point today, and an Atlanta win or loss is the biggest factor in determining the size of the pot split for pools that are almost certainly heading for one. Our subscriber base being at one-third the popularity on Atlanta allows the possibility of many of you benefitting there.

Friday 1/3

Friday Week 18 Strategy Rundown

The final week of the season is here, and there is not a lot of strategic future planning, unless your pool extends into the postseason. It’s time to play your best available picks, and try to get to the end of the season.

If you have a specific strategy question, you can submit it to our Q&A Forum.

Here’s a breakdown of the preference order for your picks. You may have a widely differing range of options depending on your pool type, and when it began. Some late-start pools that have been making one pick per week might have the top options available. Entries that are at the end of a long multi-pick week stretch could be quite limited in who is available.