Key takeaways
- Thanksgiving week was the single most destructive survivor pool slate of 2025. 94.5% of the remaining Circa Survivor field was eliminated in one week.
- The Lions, Chiefs and Ravens all lost on Thanksgiving. That alone killed 360 entries. The Bears then upset the Eagles and took 489 more. Two results, 849 entries, gone.
- This was not a fluke week. It was the fifth massacre of the season. Week 5 wiped out 54% of the field. Week 8 took 51%. Week 9 delivered the biggest upset of the year. Week 10 cut the field to roughly 1,000.
- The lesson of 2025 is that "safe" has stopped meaning anything. Double-digit favorites have lost outright repeatedly, and the most-picked team of the week has been the most dangerous team of the week with alarming regularity.
- Contrarian is not a style choice anymore. It is the only survivable approach. When the consensus pick dies, everyone who made it dies together.
There is a version of a survivor pool where you lose alone. You take a team nobody else wanted, it loses, you feel stupid, and the pool moves on without you. That is the normal way to go out.
Thanksgiving week 2025 was the other kind. This was a survivor pool extinction event, and it took out almost everyone at once. When the dust settled on Week 13, 94.5% of the remaining field in the $18.7 million Circa Survivor contest was gone. Not 94.5% of the original entries. 94.5% of the people who had already survived twelve weeks of this nonsense.
If you were still alive going into the holiday and you are not alive now, I have bad news and slightly better news. The bad news is you are out. The better news is that you had a lot of company, and the reason you lost was not that you were dumb. It was that the entire theory of survivor picking that worked for a decade stopped working this year.
What actually happened on Thanksgiving
The Thanksgiving triple-header is normally a gift to survivor players. Three games, usually featuring a couple of teams laying big numbers, all resolved before you have finished the pie. It is the easiest week on the calendar to find a pick you feel good about.
This year all three of the popular sides lost. The Lions lost. The Chiefs lost. The Ravens lost. Detroit and Kansas City and Baltimore, three brand names that survivor players have been trained by years of muscle memory to trust, went 0-for-3 in a single afternoon. That combination alone eliminated 360 entries.
Then the Bears upset the Eagles and took out 489 more.
Add it up and two results killed 849 entries in a field that had already been ground down to a fraction of its starting size. There is no clever escape from that. If you had a pool card that avoided all four of those teams in Week 13, you were either extremely disciplined about saving your unpopular sides or you got lucky, and at this point in the season I am not sure the distinction matters.
Survivor pools do not kill you for being wrong. They kill you for being wrong at the same time as everybody else. Thanksgiving 2025 was the whole field being wrong in unison.
The 2025 survivor pool body count
What makes Thanksgiving remarkable is not that it happened. It is that it was the fifth time this season the field got shredded. Look at the sequence:
- Week 2: The Rams lost as 8.5-point favorites to San Francisco. The Cardinals lost as 7.5-point favorites to Tennessee. The Bills lost to the Patriots as 8-point favorites. Three of the tidiest-looking picks on the board, all dead, in the second week of the season. We flagged the pattern in our Week 2 piece on favorites falling and it turned out to be a season-long thesis rather than a blip.
- Week 5: The 49ers beat the Rams 26-23 in overtime. Los Angeles was an 8.5-point favorite and the single most-picked team of the week, carrying 3,254 entries. 54% of the remaining field was wiped out in one game. We wrote that one up as a massacre and thought it would be the worst of the year.
- Week 8: The Dolphins and the Jets both won outright. Two of the top three most-selected teams lost. 51% eliminated.
- Week 9: The Panthers won 16-13 in Green Bay as 13-point underdogs, the biggest upset of the season. The Vikings won in Detroit as 9.5-point dogs, the second biggest. Another 20.5% of the field went out, and only about 9% of entries survived the week clean.
- Week 10: The Panthers lost to the Saints, taking roughly 28% of the remaining entries with them, and the Bills lost to the Dolphins. The field was cut to around 1,000.
- Week 13: Thanksgiving. 94.5%.
That is not variance. That is a structural feature of the 2025 season, and if you are still playing anything that involves picking favorites, you need to update your priors.
What 2025 has proven about survivor pool strategy
Three things, and I would argue all three are permanent lessons rather than one-year curiosities.
One: the most-popular team is a liability, not an asset. The Rams in Week 5 carried more entries than any other team and cost the field more than half its survivors. The Thanksgiving trio was popular for the same reason: name recognition. When you take the consensus side, you are not reducing your risk. You are correlating it with everyone else's, which means a loss does not just eliminate you, it eliminates you without gaining any ground on the field. The upside case for a popular pick is that you survive along with 3,000 other people. That is not upside.
Two: parity has eaten the double-digit favorite. A 13-point underdog winning in Green Bay is supposed to happen once every few years. This season it happened in Week 9 and it was not even close to the only outright dog win that mattered. The gap between the top of the league and the middle has compressed to the point where a big number tells you more about public perception than it does about the likely outcome.
Three: your future-week plan matters more than this week's pick. Everyone who died on Thanksgiving had used up a better option earlier. That is the actual failure mode. The pick that kills you in Week 13 was set in motion in Week 4 when you burned a team you should have saved.
Build the ladder, not the rung. Before you make any survivor pick, write down the team you plan to use for each of the next four weeks. If a team appears in only one of those four slots and looks strong there, save them. If a team you like this week also profiles well in three other weeks, use one of the others. The people left standing in December are the ones who did this in September.
Why holiday slates are structurally dangerous
There is a specific reason Thanksgiving keeps producing this outcome, and it is worth understanding rather than just cursing.
Holiday games are scheduled for television, not for competitive balance. The league puts brands on the marquee — the Lions and the Cowboys have standing appointments, and the third slot goes to whoever the schedule-makers think will draw. That means the Thanksgiving field is systematically skewed toward famous teams, and famous teams get inflated lines because the public bets names. You end up with a slate where the perceived-safe picks are all priced badly at once.
Then add short rest. Teams playing on Thursday after a Sunday game are working on three days of preparation, which flattens the coaching and scheming advantage that good teams normally enjoy. Flatten the advantage and the underdog's chance goes up. Do that in three games simultaneously, on the week when the largest share of the field is making picks off brand recognition, and you get 94.5%.
The pick'em angle: what to do if you're still alive
If you survived, congratulations, and please understand what you are now playing for. In a pool this thinned out, the math changes completely. You are no longer trying to avoid elimination. You are trying to beat a handful of specific people, and their picks are as important as yours.
Practically, that means two adjustments for the rest of December:
- Stop optimizing for win probability alone. With a tiny field, taking the same team as everyone else guarantees you never gain ground. If you can find a side with a slightly lower win probability that almost nobody else can use, that is often the better play.
- Inventory your remaining teams against the remaining schedule. Late-season games get weird — teams rest starters, backups play, and motivation becomes a real variable. A team that looks great on paper in Week 17 may be sitting half its roster.
And if you are out, you are out of survivor, not out of football. Weekly pick'em is where the rest of December gets decided, and this season has been an absolute gift to anyone willing to take points. Get your Week 14 card in and treat every double-digit spread with the suspicion it has earned.
What December looks like from here
The remaining survivor field is small enough now that a single Sunday could end the whole thing, and honestly it might. That is the natural conclusion to a season that has spent thirteen weeks explaining that nobody is safe.
The broader point for the rest of your December, whether you are playing survivor or pick'em or just trying to win a fantasy title off a waiver pickup nobody drafted, is the same. The 2025 NFL season has no reliable favorites. It has teams that are slightly better than other teams, playing games decided by a couple of possessions, priced by a market that keeps overpaying for reputation. Bet the gap. Pick the gap. Stop paying for logos.
Week 14 is coming. If history is any guide, it will find a new way to hurt somebody.