I enjoy watching the NFL (go 49ers!), and I find more joy in playing in NFL-related competitions with friends. Typically Fantasy Football but recently, after Covid, I've been also participating in annual NFL Survivor Pools.

How it works: in an NFL Survivor Pool, you pick a team to win (in our Pool's rules, we're picking losers so everything is the opposite) each week. If that team loses/ties, you're eliminated. Once you've picked a team for that week, you can't pick them again. So you're looking at 18 weeks of regular season NFL and 4 weeks of playoffs with 32 teams to pick from. There's a $100 buy-in to the pool, and the last remaining player wins it all. (We have a pool of roughly 1804 participants)

My tool: is a spreadsheet designed to visualize optimal picks week-to-week. If we look at the 22 picks I need to make over the season, it shows that I'll need to eventually pick an above average team to lose. And my tool helps me look across the season to project when I should be taking those teams.

My tool is composed of 5 tabs:

• Live Seeding (visual depiction of color-coded choices, darker green is more optimal each week vs darker red) *note: Dark green choices will be the team most likely to lose that week.

• Last-Season Seeding (used during the first 3 weeks of selection, I need to use last season's stats for each team to roughly gauge where I think they will be ranked this season)

• Import Schedule (This is just a quick import to bring across all 32 NFL teams matchups each week, I'll use this to compare which picks should be taken when)

• Scrape Data for Live Standings (I'm scraping a NFL website to grab the latest win-loss record, and point differentials for each team)

• Data Sort (Sorts my data accordingly, I want to assign a "score" to each team based on their W/L record combined with their point differential to understand how teams stack against each other. The larger the "score difference" between the 2 teams, the more likely 1 team is to beat the other team. The larger the differential, the darker green the choice will appear in my Live Seeding chart.)

What was accomplished, and what are next steps to improve?