NFL Survivor Contest/NFL Eliminator Pool – The greatest possible pick for week 1

NFL Survivor Contest (a.k.a. Eliminator Pools) are one of the more fun ways to enjoy NFL betting – even if the game is intuitively easy to learn and infuriatingly difficult to win.

For the uninitiated, the concept is simple. Buy your entry to compete in a pool of usually a few thousand or more contestants. Choose one team to win its game straight up in the upcoming week. If your team loses, you’re done for the season. If your team wins, you get to pick a team the following week, but here’s the wrinkle: You may not choose any team more than once in the entire season.

Once Survivor Contests got popular enough, the prime basic strategy emerged and was disseminated: When possible, don’t bet *for* a good team, bet *against* a bad team. Such a strategy eliminates (sorry) the need to decide if this is the week you’re covering, likesay, the Chiefs when instead all you need to considered is who’s playing likesay, the Bears.

But in week 1, NFL bettors must come to grips with the fact that they know next to nothing about most teams before each plays that first 60 minutes of real game under real conditions. Sure, you can guess with decent accuracy that some teams will be quite good (Buffalo, Kansas City, Green Bay) and some will be quite bad (Chicago, Atlanta, Houston probably), but in this season particularly NFLbets sees a lot of marginal teams.

So, here’s your extra-scintillating, high-strategizing, superduper certain to win pick for your week 1 NFL Eliminator Pool: Take the Jacksonville Jaguars over the Washington Commanders.

Part of this about the winner: Even if we do believe that the Jaguars are markedly improved after Urban Meyer’s scorched-earth season as head coach, what’s the ceiling here? 7-10 to 8-9? Even the combination of competence and a fourth-place schedule won’t make for many opportunities to side with the Jags in a Survivor Contest this season.

Then there’s the opposition, the Washington football team playing its first game as the Commanders. Over the past five seasons, Washington has amassed a 31-51 SU/39-43 ATS record and have never bettered 7-9 SU in a given year. In 2020, the then-Football Team leveraged a weak schedule and weak competition of the NFC East into a 7-9 mark (imagine that) and a playoff spot. This success appeared to have been based mostly in defense led by young Chase Young. Fair enough, but part of last season was Young spent injured, and he starts ’22 on IR for at least four games.

The first-ever Washington Commanders starting quarterback – though the 11th since Kirk Cousins departed after the 2017 season – is Carson Wentz, last seen throwing for a combined 333 yards while taking 7 sacks in final two games of ’21. At 44-40-1 in the regular season as a starter, plus 0-1 SU/ATS in the playoffs, Wentz is exactly the sort of mediocre QB that Washington’s been going with since .500 was enough to win the NFC East.

So with no sign that the Commanders will top .500, then, we’ll go with the team happy to be free from the clutches of a madman.