Week 2 Football Pick’em Contest Strategy & Advice (2024)

Week 2 of the 2024 NFL season can often be a big overreaction week. We look for values to include in your picks in pick'em contests.

Welcome back to Week 2 with our 2024 Football Pick’em Picks product. This is always a big week for Pick’em contests, as it’s the week most prone to extreme public reactions on some teams based on the first game. Looking back at our weekly wins historical data, it’s the second-highest win rate week for PoolGenius for NFL pools over the last decade, with 14% of subscriber entries reporting a win in weekly pools.

We hope that we can find some of those value plays this year as well.

In these columns, we explore strategies to maximize your edge in NFL and college football pick’em contests. We also provide some of the rationale behind picks potentially recommended by our premium product.

We plan to periodically update this post through Sunday of Week 1, so check back for updates. Here’s what’s available now:

• 9/12: TNF: Bills at Dolphins
• 9/11: Line Shift in Giants-Commanders
• 9/10: Week 2 Value Picks
• 9/10: Week 1 Results
• FYI: Notes About Picks We Highlight
• FYI: About Our Pick’em Pool Advice

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Important Notes About Picks We Highlight

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

1. Optimal pick’em contest strategy balances risk and potential reward.
   Maximizing your odds to win 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 to do so. For example, taking a betting market favorite being picked by less than 50% of your opponents is usually a great opportunity.
2. 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 several of the picks we mention in this post for your pool specifically—especially the upset picks. The best pick strategy for you depends on a number of factors such as your pool’s size, rules, and prize structure (a concept that’s covered in part by our article on season vs. weekly prize strategy).
3. 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) current at the time 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 major data changes occur for picks we’ve mentioned, so make sure to check back. However, there’s a much better way to stay on top of changing data trends throughout a 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 whenever you want via the My Pool Picks screen. The updated picks will incorporate the most recent data we have.

About Our Pick’em Pool Advice

What makes pick recommendations from our Football Pick’em Picks product different from other sites is that it isn’t generic.

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 give pick advice that makes sense for every one. An underrated 6-point underdog could be a great pick in a big 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 with 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 football pick’em strategy articles.

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Thursday 9/12

TNF Bills at Dolphins 

The Buffalo Bills travel to Miami for an AFC East showdown to start Week 2. Miami is the 2.5-point favorite at home, as these two teams are seen as pretty evenly matched. Our models give Miami a 56% chance of winning. The popularity is the closest split of the week, with 60% taking the Dolphins versus 40% picking the Bills.

In season-long formats, you should see Miami as the pick. Our pick recommendations are likely to still recommend Miami as well in weekly, but it’s at low confidence, and often showing up as the lowest confidence pick of the week in such pools. So if you want to switch it up on personal preference, this is the game where our pick recommendations have the lowest confidence and going in either direction is roughly similar.

In spread pools, you will likely see Miami in season-long as well, at under a field goal spread. However, that could shift in weekly prize formats.