The Cowboys host Tampa Bay tonight, and Pinnacle has them at -449. Take out the book's cut and that is 79%, the biggest number on the week 5 board, against a team starting an undrafted rookie at quarterback. RotoWire's survivor pool has 44.7% of its entries on Dallas.
Circa Survivor started the season with 25,017 entries. It has 5,972 left. Last week was the first quiet one: the Vikings and Ravens held, and only 320 entries went out. This week the most popular pick plays first, on a Thursday, and if it loses, close to half of a typical pool is gone before anyone else kicks off.
Lines are as of Thursday morning, October 8. Where one book is quoted, it is named. Pick percentages come from published projections and are attributed where quoted. Probabilities past week 6 rest on thin early lines. Read them as estimates, not prices.
The board, as the market prices it
The ten biggest favorites this week, with the consensus line, Pinnacle's line, the blended win probability, how many books stand behind it, and the best game each team has left. Kansas City and Carolina are on bye.
| Matchup | Consensus | Pinnacle | Win | Books | Best later week |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cowboys vs Buccaneers, Thursday | -450 | -449 | 80% | 46 | 86%, wk 17 vs Giants |
| Texans at Titans | -364 | -384 | 76% | 45 | 83%, wk 7 vs Giants |
| Jaguars vs Eagles, London | -354 | -362 | 76% | 46 | 84%, wk 11 at Giants |
| Bengals at Dolphins | -303 | -316 | 74% | 46 | 78%, wk 8 vs Titans |
| Lions at Cardinals | -238 | -256 | 69% | 45 | 81%, wk 16 vs Giants |
| Commanders vs Giants | -183 | -196 | 63% | 46 | 62%, wk 10 at Giants |
| Patriots vs Raiders | -178 | -183 | 63% | 46 | 81%, wk 18 vs Dolphins |
| Broncos at Chargers | -174 | -177 | 62% | 45 | 84%, wk 13 vs Dolphins |
| Falcons vs Ravens, Sunday night | -171 | -172 | 61% | 43 | 59%, wk 17 vs Saints |
| Rams vs Bills, Monday | -164 | -173 | 61% | 43 | 83%, wk 6 vs Cardinals |
Four teams sit in a band of six points at the top, and then the board drops off a ledge to Detroit. Nothing below the Lions is a survivor pick this week.
Look at the last column. Four of the six best later games on this board are against the Giants. The Giants are 3-1 and lead the NFC East. The handful of books that posted those games back in September had all four well shorter than our board does, and have since taken them down. Every week the Giants keep winning, the case for saving Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville and Detroit for them gets weaker.
What moved since Monday
Two games started the week at the same price, -208, and went in opposite directions.
Section 2 · Line movement
Three days of injury reports
Consensus win probability on Monday morning, October 5, and Thursday morning, October 8. Baltimore was the favorite at Atlanta on Monday and is the underdog now.
Jacksonville.Lane Johnson retired on Tuesday after fourteen seasons at right tackle. Saquon Barkley hurt his hamstring in the first quarter against the Rams and did not return. DeVonta Smith has a hamstring too, and NFL Network's Mike Garafolo called him questionable at very best for London. Tank Bigsby is on injured reserve after core muscle surgery, and Landon Dickerson was already there. The Jaguars are 3-1 and healthy. The market moved ten points in three days, and none of it was about Jalen Hurts.
Baltimore.Jackson left the Titans game after the second quarter with an ankle sprain, and Ian Rapoport reported he has an outside chance to play Sunday night. He did not practice Wednesday. If he sits, Tyler Huntley starts. Atlanta at 61% is a coin flip with a little weight on it, and not a survivor pick either way.
Cincinnati.Ja'Marr Chase is in the concussion protocol after a facemask grab twisted his helmet against Jacksonville, and Tee Higgins is day-to-day with an adductor injury. Zac Taylor has not ruled out either one. The Bengals slipped three points anyway, against a Miami team that is 0-4.
Then the Texans.
Houston.Will Anderson Jr. did not practice Wednesday with a new ankle injury. Tennessee sat Tony Pollard and Jeffery Simmons the same day. The market moved toward Houston, not away, and Pinnacle now has the Texans at -384 in a game between two winless teams.
The Dallas question
Dallas hosts Tampa Bay tonight, and DraftKings has the Cowboys at -470, FanDuel at -460. Baker Mayfield dislocated the thumb on his throwing hand against Minnesota in week 3, and the AP reports he will miss at least two more games. Jalon Daniels, an undrafted rookie, makes his second start and his first on the road. In his first, a 17-14 loss to Green Bay, he threw two interceptions in the first half that the Packers turned into ten points.
You use a team once. A team with a better game later costs you that game when you spend it now. That is future value, and it is the whole argument this week, because the four teams at the top all have one.
-
Dallas Cowboys DAL
79% at Pinnacle, the best number on the board, at home to an 0-4 team on a short week. Covers counts Dak Prescott at 19-2 at home when the Cowboys are favored by a touchdown or more. Sportsbook Review counts Tampa's ten straight one-score games, the longest streak in team history, and the Bucs lost eight of them. Dallas has two later games on our board in the low to mid 80s, Arizona in week 8 and the Giants in week 17, so using them now costs a few points in one of those weeks. RotoWire's pool has nearly half its entries here. That's Dallas tonight: the safest pick on the board and the most crowded one.
-
Houston Texans HOU
76% at Pinnacle, at Tennessee, two winless teams in a division game. Covers notes Houston has beaten the Titans in six of the last seven meetings. C.J. Stroud threw for 347 yards against Dallas last week and has not thrown an interception all season. Their best later game is the Giants in week 7, which the market has barely priced. Is Houston the 0-4 team, or the team that lost three of those four by five points or fewer? Pinnacle says the second. 4for4 projects a little under an eighth of the public on them.
-
Jacksonville Jaguars JAX
76% at Pinnacle, in London against an Eagles team that has lost its right tackle, probably its running back and probably its best receiver this week. Covers notes the Jaguars have more London experience than anyone. Their best later games are the Giants in week 11 and Tennessee in week 12, both in the low 80s on our board. RotoWire has them on 2% of its entries, the same price as Houston with almost nobody aboard. Plenty of Circa can't use them: more than 8,100 entries got through week 1 on the Jaguars.
The Bengals and Lions are a step behind. Cincinnati at -316 is fine against the worst scoring margin in the league, but the Bengals may be without both of their receivers, and they have Tennessee at home in week 8 at about the same price. Detroit lost at Carolina on Sunday night and flies to Arizona on a short week; Pinnacle has the Lions at -256, and their best game left is the Giants in week 16. Both are better saved.
Washington is the team with nothing to save. The Commanders host the Giants at -196 at Pinnacle, and their best game the rest of the season is worse than this one. Jayden Daniels is due back from a dislocated elbow, with Marcus Mariota out with a sprained knee. Is Washington the 1-3 team, or the team getting its quarterback back? At 64% this week, it does not matter much. It is the pick a plan makes when it has already spent everything better.
Section 3 · The cost of the pick
What each pick costs you later
Week 5 consensus win probability next to each team's best remaining game on our board. Later weeks are priced by far fewer books and should be read as estimates.
This week
43–46 books per game
Best later week
estimate
wk 17 vs NYG
wk 7 vs NYG
wk 11 at NYG
wk 8 vs TEN
wk 16 vs NYG
wk 10 at NYG
Where the crowd is going
RotoWire's pool has 44.7% of its entries on Dallas and 2% on Jacksonville. 4for4 projects 12.9% of the public on Houston. Covers and RotoWire both call Dallas the most popular pick of the week. No two sources count the same pool, and they agree on the shape: one team holds somewhere near half of the crowd, and the two teams priced closest to it hold a fraction.
That is why pick popularity matters. Your equity in a pool is your share of the prize if you survive, times your chance of surviving. When a pick half the pool shares loses, everyone else wakes up owning nearly twice as much of the same prize. When a pick nobody shares loses, nothing changes for anyone else. Tampa Bay wins this game about one time in five. If it does, the survivors of tonight split a pot that just lost half its claimants.
Our model of the crowd spreads the chalk wider than the published counts do. It has Dallas on about a seventh of entries, level with Houston and Jacksonville. Even there, the plans built to win the pool rather than to survive it take Houston on every path we ran. If RotoWire's count is closer to the truth, the edge in fading Dallas is bigger than our numbers say, not smaller.
What a full-season plan does with week 5
Our optimizer looks at every team's win probability in every remaining week and finds the sequence of picks, one team per week and no team twice, that survives to week 18 most often. The full-season plan is that sequence. The greedy plan takes the best available team each week without looking ahead, which is what most people do by hand. The contrarian plan weighs each pick's popularity against its win probability and hunts for the sequence that wins the most pools.
By week 5 nobody is a fresh entry, and the right pick depends on what you have already spent. Most of Circa took the same road through September: the 49ers in week 2 carried two in five of the survivors, more than half of what was left rode Kansas City in week 3, and better than four in five took the Vikings or the Ravens last week. Week 1 went mostly to Jacksonville. For the entries that started somewhere else, we used the Eagles, a week 1 winner none of these plans wants back. So we built pools on four of those paths, plus one fresh entry for second-chance contests starting this week, and ran every plan from where each entry stands, against a field of 5,972.
If you took the Eagles, 49ers, Lions and Ravens.Every survival plan takes Dallas. Houston costs more than half a point of season survival here, because this path wants the Texans for the Giants in week 7.
If you took the Eagles, 49ers, Chiefs and Vikings.The one path where the full-season plan skips Dallas. It takes Detroit at Arizona instead, and the reason is three months away: without the Chiefs, it needs Buffalo against Miami in week 11, which leaves week 17 for Dallas against the Giants. Taking Dallas now costs about a third of a point. The greedy plan takes Dallas anyway. I would too. Jacksonville, which this path still has, costs a little more than Dallas and comes with a fraction of the crowd.
If you took the Jaguars, 49ers, Chiefs and Ravens.The full-season plan takes Washington, the team with nothing to save. Dallas and Houston both cost less than a tenth of a point against it, which is smaller than the error on any week 17 line priced by one book. All three are the same pick on survival.
If you took the Jaguars, 49ers, Lions and Vikings.Same answer, same reason. Washington by the narrowest margin, Dallas level with it, Houston a hair behind.
If you are a fresh entry.The full-season plan takes Dallas, then the Rams against Arizona, Houston against the Giants, Cincinnati against Tennessee and Seattle against Arizona. It survives to week 18 about one season in sixteen. The contrarian plan opens with Houston instead and survives less often, and it carries the higher equity.
Section 5 · The plans
Dallas or Houston, path by path
Chance an entry survives from week 5 through week 18 on the current board with the week 5 pick fixed and every later week planned by the full-season optimizer, in a 5,972-entry field.
Take Dallas
survives to week 18
plan: DET, 5.5%
plan: WAS, 4.4%
plan: WAS, 3.8%
Take Houston
survives to week 18
Those numbers look small because fourteen more weeks is a long way. Survival says Dallas, by somewhere between nothing and a point. Equity has Houston ahead on all five paths, clearly on two of them.
If you have three entries.Our portfolio planner solves the entries together so they don't all die on one game. Given one entry on each of the Eagles-Chiefs-Vikings, Jaguars-Chiefs-Ravens and Jaguars-Lions-Vikings paths, it plays Houston, Detroit and Cincinnati. It does not use Dallas at all. The chance all three go out this week is about one in fifty.
The pick
Close to half the pool plays tonight. If Dallas wins, nothing changes. If it doesn't, everyone still standing on Friday morning owns nearly twice as much of the same prize.
Sunday. Houston at Tennessee.
Take the Texans.
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