Welcome to the 2018 Eliminator Challenge. The rules are simple: Pick one team every week. If that team wins, you move on to the next week. If that team loses, your entry is eliminated. The only caveat is that you cannot use the same team twice. You can find all the rules here.
To determine the best picks each week, I lean heavily upon ESPN's Football Power Index (FPI). For more on how FPI is calculated, click here and here. I also look at the pick percentages for each team on the ESPN Eliminator Challenge page to see which teams the majority of fans are picking.
Week 1 is one of the trickier weeks to pick. Last year at this time, very few people had the Rams and Jaguars as two of the best teams in the NFL. However, favorites win outright 66.5 percent of the time in Week 1, just 0.5 percent less often than the season average, so in general, Week 1 is pretty average in terms of volatility. That means that there is no reason to play Week 1 any differently than any other week.
