Survival Football Advice: Can you find two wins in Week 14?

Resources: Yahoo survival pool pick distribution • SurvivorGrid.com
Week 13’s biggest killer: San Francisco over Chicago (3.22 percent)
Week 13’s biggest success: LA Chargers over Cleveland (27.04 percent)
My picks so far: Buffalo – Oakland – New England — Seattle — Philadelphia — Atlanta (x) — Minnesota — New Orleans — Jacksonville — Detroit — Kansas City (x) — Cincinnati — LA Chargers

So close, yet so far away.

If you’ve made it this far, you only have four weeks to survive.

But with many survival pools now requiring two picks a week — that includes the Yahoo Sports $100K contest — you’re still only about 50-60 percent of the way there, provided your pool goes the distance.

Everything changes with the two-week picks. You can be dead to rights on one pick, but it won’t matter if you’re dead wrong on another.

Week 14 isn’t making things any easier. Seven road teams are favored and you’re already working on a big deficit with 13 teams off your board. The pickings, as they say, are slim.

After a fairly benign weekend that featured easy wins from highly-picked teams like the Chargers, Raiders and Rams, this Sunday promises to be an absolute mess.

At this point in the season, it’s hard to recommend an overarching strategy. Everyone left is in a different situation in terms of teams they’ve already used, how many other people are left in their pool, how big of a risk they’re willing to take.

I will say this: If you’re tasked with picking two teams, I think you’re best off trying to pick two teams from the pool of big home favorites. If you can’t select two teams there, move onto the pool of big road favorites.

Here are the two pools I stocked with possibilities, listed in the order of my confidence.

Big home favorites: Pittsburgh over Baltimore, Cincinnati over Chicago, Chargers over Redskins,

Big road favorites: New England over Miami, Packers over Browns, Cowboys over Giants

In my case, I’ve already used up the Bengals, Chargers and Patriots, so my picks for this weekend are the Steelers and Packers. No, I don’t really like going with Brett Hundley either, but I think the Giants chance of an upset is much better than the Browns chances of finally winning.

The only thing we know for certain, though, is that it’s going to be one crazy weekend.

Note: A few people asked why the percentages on our pick distribution page add up to over 100 percent. The reason is simple. With two picks week in play for many pools (including ours,) there are twice as many selections being made. That skews the overall total.