The Survivor Football Pool, sometimes called a Knockout or Elimination Football Pool, is one of the easiest and most common NFL office pools available.  It’s the most popular format on HostedPools, with both the most pools and the largest pools.  It’s a format where one person will often set up multiple entries to take a shot at the winner take all prize.

Survivor Football Pool Basics

For each week of the NFL regular season, you pick a team to win their game that week.  If they win, or manage a rare tie, you proceed to the following week.  If they lose, you are eliminated from the pool.    Each entry may only select a team once for the duration of the pool.  The pool runs until you’re down to only one remaining entry, or the regular season ends.

If the pool makes it to the end of the regular season with multiple entries alive, they would split the prize money equally.  Entries may also choose to split the prize once the pool only has a few remaining.  We recommend a partial split with entries still playing to be the sole survivor.

On HostedPools, our deadlines are always at 1pm (Eastern) on Sundays, but we allow you to select a team from an earlier game as long as your pick is in prior to the listed game time.

Survivor Football Pool Options

Multiple Lives/Strikes

You can set up your Survivor Football Pool to allow for multiple chances for each entry, so you’re not eliminated until you’ve accumulated the necessary strikes.  It’s not a popular option for Football since the pool should last most of the season with enough entries.  A better option is a second chance pool.

Double Pick Weeks (coming soon)

If you have a large enough pool, and you want to try and trim the pool down mid-way through the season by adding a double pick week.  An entry would have to get both of their picks that week correct to survive to the following week.  We have made some modifications to our back end to accomodate these, but they won’t be available until the 2016 season.

Default Picks

Set up one of our default pick options, so when someone forgets, or is unable to make a pick, they still end up with a selection according to the default pick criteria.

Pick Losers

You can flip your Survivor Pool on its head by making your entrants pick against teams instead of for them.  So the team picked would have to lose or tie their game in order to proceed to the following week.

   Set Up Your Survivor Football Pool