2009 NFL Survivor Pool - Week 1 Pick

I'll assume you are familiar with the basic rules of an NFL survivior/elimination pool. If not, read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_fantasy_leagues or here: http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/survival

For my posts on survivor football, let's assume the ESPN power rankings (which are updated weekly) are the ultimate source of how good a team is and that the absolute value of the difference between two team's power rankings is perfectly correlated to how likely the favorite is to actually win the game.

Yahoo has a nice feature that shows you the distribution of everyone else's pick for a given week. For week 1 of the NFL season, 40% of America is picking New Orleans (currently power ranked #19) to beat Detroit (currently power ranked #32). That's a power ranking difference of 13. And also, for my system we will penalize the visiting team 5 ranks. So the adjusted difference becomes 18.

So is this the most lopsided matchup on the week 1 schedule? Nope. Jacksonville @ Indinapolis, KC @ Baltimore, Washington @ NY Giants, Buffalo @ New England, and SD @ Oakland all have power rank differentials (adjusting for home field advantage) between 19 and 25.

Jacksonville (rank 25) @ Indianapolis (rank 5) has the largest adjusted differential of 25. If all of this power rank differential stuff was accurate and was, in fact, the best possible prediction system, then you might be thinking that Indianapolis is the best survivor pool choice for week 1. But there's more to it than that.

Say in week 2, Indianapolis once again is predicted to be the most lopsided winner with a week 2 differential of 26 points. And also imagine that in week 2 all of the other 15 games on the NFL schedule are very close matchups with power ranking differentials all less than 5.

Now thinking back to week 1 again, in this scenario should you pick Indianapolis in week 1 (and leave yourself with no good options for week 2) or go with one of the other good options for week 1 and save Indianapolis for week 2. I think everyone will agree that in this case the latter strategy is better.

So now you know that you should look ahead when making your picks. --But you also don't want to look ahead to far. For example, what's the point of saving a great pick for week 17 if the entire surivivor pool is likely to end by week 12? For my model, I used a "decay factor" that down weights the power rank differential of all games in future weeks proportionally to the week of the game on the schedule (There will be more on my model in a later post).

Anyway, for my week 1 pick I am going with Indianapolis to win. It turns out that in this case, there is no better week so save Indianapolis for and now is the best week to use them. Yahoo is showing me that Indianapolis is the week 1 pick of 1.03% of Americans. I am guessing I am the only one of them not living in Indiana.