Survivor: the new Fantasy Football?

Fans of Fantasy Football take notice: there is a new way to spend countless hours at the office pouring over statistics and devising cutting edge mathematical equations that have absolutely nothing to do with work. The game is called Survivor, and in my opinion, it is more fun than its older brother of football betting.

Here's how it works: every week, you must pick an NFL team to win its game. You do not have to beat the spread; you simply have to pick the winner. That's easy enough. The catch is that you cannot pick the same team twice. Otherwise, the game would be called the "pick New England" game, and that would not be very fun. 

Why do I like Survivor so much? First and foremost, since it involves picking teams and not individual players, you get to enjoy watching the dramatic twists and turns of the entire sweaty pageant we call football. As talented as Larry Johnson is, watching the Chiefs lose 34-14 is a high price to pay for the pleasure to be found in LJ running for 140 yards and two scores. The larger truth is that the Chiefs blow, so why not just bet on that?

Another interesting aspect of Survivor is the way in which competitors can join together to form pools wherein the potential winnings are quite large relative to the buy-in. It is conceivable (not that I would know personally) that a $25 buy in could boast a pot of over $25,000, should you a) win, and b) not have to split with other "Survivors." Fantasy Football leagues are constrained financially by the number of players (usually 16 max) and the resources each is willing to provide. Of course, betting is illegal in the United States and I am merely speaking hypothetically.

So what are some basic ground rules for success? At any given point in a season there are a handful of teams that are locks to win their games. Right now those teams would be New England Indianapolis and San Diego, provided that they aren't playing each other and that no key players are hurt. In Survivor, you will only want to pick these teams when you absolutely must. Given how unpredictable an NFL season is when you take into consideration injuries, playoff motivations and everything else, it is impossible to identify which weeks you will want to use these teams before the season starts. This means that, any given week, your first goal should be to identify those games that you think are relatively safe bets involving teams that aren't truly that spectacular. This week, for example, Jacksonville plays Atlanta at home. The Jaguars' loss last week to the Titans indicated that the Jags are not that good right now, and are by no means a safe bet to win most of their upcoming games. However, the Falcons were nothing short of abysmal last week against the Vikings, led by untested rookie Tavaris Jackson. Given that this is probably the only week where Jacksonville presents a safe bet, they are, in my opinion, the correct choice.

Unless of course you've already "used" Jacksonville. But in this case, were that true, you have lost last week, and your Survivor season ended rather unceremoniously.

One other rule of thumb I believe in heartily is to avoid, at almost any cost, picking an away team. Shitty teams somehow find a way to win +/- 4 games. Most, if not all of them, come at home, and at least one of them will involve a good team that overlooked them on their schedule. Similarly, some people don't believe in picking divisional matchups, but I am undecided on this.

By the end of the season, if by some stroke of genius you are still playing, you will have chosen 16 teams. Whichever 16 teams you choose are not likely to be the 16 best teams by any sort of powerranking system. Nonetheless, you will only have to pick half the teams in the NFL. Knowing that, my final piece of advice is not to get too cute with your selections by picking teams that have a couple interesting players but that really just aren't very solid (Arizona, Detroit). Each week, there should be at least one game that pits a good to mediocre home team against a struggling, hapless squad of posers. Put another way, you don't need to be a hero. You just need to survive.