College Bowl Pool Strategy: How The Pros Dominate Bowl Pick’em Contests

Want to maximize your edge to win your college football bowl pick'em pool? Our 2023 strategy guide explains how to make the smartest picks.

Let's talk about how to run down your bowl pool competition (John Rivera/Icon Sportswire)

To give yourself the best chance to win your 2023 college bowl pick’em, you need to understand the smartest strategy for making picks.

It’s always going to take some luck to win a college bowl pool, but the smarter your strategy is, the less luck you’ll need to win a prize.

Our approach to winning bowl pick’ems and confidence pools has been proven across thousands of real-world contests (and thousands more regular season college pick’ems). Our premium subscribers have reported winning bowl pools 79% more often than you would expect, given the size of their pools.

Although the analytics we’ve built to deliver that edge are complex, the basic strategy boils down to several core principles that we will review.

To get our customized, game-by-game picks for your bowl pool(s), click the button below to subscribe to our Bowl Pick’em Picks product.

NCAA Bracket Picks

March Madness Picks

Brackets - Survivor - Betting

Learn MoreGet Picks Now

Strategy 1: Objectively Identify The Bowl Favorites

Picking the team you think is more likely to win in every bowl game is usually not the best strategy to win your pool. You also need to take pick popularity into account, especially in larger pools. (We’ll cover that in the next section.)

Making accurate game predictions is still important, of course. But if you’re like most people, you should think twice about trusting yourself in that department. Over the long term, humans — including you, your buddy that watches a ton of college football, and even the self-proclaimed “experts” on TV — are rarely the best college bowl game predictors compared to good computer predictions or the betting markets.

Human Bowl Pickers Are Biased

A good example came from the 2020 Gator Bowl between 4-6 Kentucky and 8-3 NC State. NC State was ranked in the AP Poll entering the game. Kentucky was not. Unsurprisingly, about 66% of all pool players took NC State to win.

However, Kentucky was actually the betting favorite. Our models also gave the Wildcats a 54% chance of winning. Because of COVID-19 restrictions that year, many teams, including the SEC, played a conference-only schedule. Due to the weird year, Kentucky faced a tough slate that made its record look worse than a typical bowl team.

Human pickers are often not very good at accounting for the differences in schedules, especially when they see a gaudy record going against a team with a worse one. But a team’s record, especially in college football, is less predictive than other metrics like point differentials and schedule strength.

Kentucky won a close game, 23-21, but a small percentage of the public earned wins on that game. However, it was not an upset in the betting markets.

Betting Markets Tend to React to Important News

Bowl games are a unique beast. Key players may decide to sit out, and teams do not have to reveal injuries, so staying on top of line movement and information can be key. The betting markets tend to incorporate this info, whether it be a coaching change, multiple player absences, or other factors. Those can sometimes run counter to how a team looked in the regular season. That means that people going with what they think their eyes told them from watching a team in October are at a disadvantage, because teams could be very different for a bowl game.

Here are some examples where you could have found value by following key news and market-line moves in recent bowl seasons:

  • Iowa vs. Kentucky (2022-23): Kentucky QB Will Levis and RB Chris Hernandez opted out of the bowl game, and the betting favorite switched from opening, to Iowa being favored by the time the bowl kicked off, and Iowa won 21-0 (you’ll be surprised to learn that the Under hit in an Iowa game).
  • Oregon State vs. Florida (2022-23): Florida QB Anthony Richardson and several other Florida players opted out of the bowl game, pushing Oregon State to a pretty big favorite, and they won 30-3 in the Las Vegas Bowl.
  • Western Michigan vs. Nevada (2021-22): Nevada opened as the 6.5-point favorite when bowls were announced, but by kickoff, it had switched to Western Michigan favored by nearly a touchdown. Nevada’s head coach left, numerous players sat out to transfer, and Nevada QB Carson Strong sat out the game in preparation for the NFL draft. Western Michigan won by 28.
  • Kansas State vs. LSU (2021-22). LSU opened as a 2.5-point favorite in this matchup between 6-6 power-conference schools, but several LSU players opting out (and LSU firing their coach) caused this one to go to Kansas State by 9.5 points. Kansas State won by 22.

In all those cases, some portion of the public did not react to the changed circumstances. All three of those teams that became favorites came as value plays.

Strategy 2: Use Pick Popularity To Identify Underrated Bowl Teams

To win a college bowl pick’em contest, you need to get at least one pick right that your opponents miss or score higher than everyone else in your pool in terms of confidence points.

This critical aspect of bowl pool strategy seems fairly obvious, yet it’s often ignored when it comes to making picks. Achieving some arbitrary number of correct picks (30, 35, whatever) or points does not guarantee you a win in a college bowl pool. The only way you can win is to finish at least one point higher than everyone in the final standings.

As a result, you’ll almost always increase your odds to win a pool by identifying opportunities to make or prioritize unpopular picks. Why? Because if you make a pick that most of your opponents don’t make, and you get it right, you’ll gain serious ground in the standings. On the other hand, if you get a pick right and your entire pool made the same pick, your odds to win the pool haven’t gone up at all.

How To Project Bowl Pick Popularity

Estimating how popular a pick will be in your bowl pool is never an exact science. With some resourcefulness, you can start by finding national pick popularity data published by some of the sites that host college bowl pools. Ideally, you should compare pick popularity data from multiple sites, because individual sites can be at least somewhat flawed.

For example, ESPN’s popular Bowl Mania game shows you national pick popularity percentages for each team when you enter your picks. However, ESPN’s pick popularity data is skewed by a number of factors, such as various “auto-fill” options for less serious players that are offered in the user interface. So ESPN’s pick percentages may not represent how your specific bowl pool opponents are likely to pick games, especially if your pool has more sophisticated players.

(We collect pick popularity data from multiple sources to reduce the impact of such biases, and we publish our composite popularity numbers in the Data Grid feature of our Bowl Pick’em Picks product.)

Using national data as a baseline, you can then make some adjustments for your specific pool. For example, let’s say you’re in a bowl pool sponsored by a sports bar in Manhattan, Kansas. It’s probably a safe bet that Kansas State will be a more popular pick in your pool than it is nationally.

NCAA Bracket Picks

March Madness Picks

Brackets - Survivor - Betting

Learn MoreGet Picks Now

Identifying Underrated Bowl Pool Picks

Of course, unpopular picks are often (but not always) risky picks like underdogs, so you need to evaluate both the risk and the likely reward of every bowl pick decision. One useful approach is to identify teams that fall into either of the following two categories:

Favorites that are being picked at a rate significantly lower than their odds to win

We often refer to these teams as “value favorites.” They are as close as you can get to no-brainer picks in a pool contest, as the more likely winner is also the underrated team. For example, in 2022, Duke was favored by a field goal over Central Florida in the Military Bowl. Their win odds in the betting market were 60%. Meanwhile, 39% were picking Duke to win in game-winner-based bowl pools, which means most entries were taking underdog Central Florida.

While that may not seem like a big swing, consistently taking teams that have a 60% chance of winning, but about 60% of the pool is taking the other side, is a good way to gain an edge.

Slight to moderate underdogs that are significantly underrated by the public

In bowl pools, you have to get picks right that others miss. At the same time, you cannot get too many picks wrong yourself that others get right. In most cases, the public will more heavily pick the favorites. The key in differentiating your entry can be to find slight underdogs who have a solid chance of winning (40% or better) but are extremely unpopular choices.

It will rarely make sense to make a lot of value-gamble picks where you take the underdog. That changes if you are in a huge bowl pool or your scoring system gives big point bonuses for upsets. Still, from a risk vs. reward standpoint, value favorites and value gambles represent your best opportunities to differentiate your bowl pool entry from the your opponents in the most intelligent way.

Smart Bowl Upset Pick Strategy

It’s also critical to stress that all bowl upset picks are not created equal. With few exceptions, one of the worst things you can do in a college bowl pick’em pool is to make a trendy upset pick.

Consider the following two teams from the 2022-23 bowl season:

  • Tulane: 20% pick popularity, 44% win odds vs. USC in Cotton Bowl
  • Utah: 66% pick popularity, 43% win odds vs. Penn State in Rose Bowl

If you wanted to take a gamble on one of the two teams above, you’d be crazy to pick Utah. Both teams were similar-sized slight underdog picks according to one of the most trustworthy metrics, objective win odds. But a Tulane win would have gained ground on around 80% of your opponents. A Utah win wouldn’t even gain ground on half of your pool, and in the more likely scenario, a loss, you lose ground with most of the pool.

Strategy 3: Compose A Pick Sheet Appropriate For Your Pool’s Characteristics

Now comes the toughest and most complex part of getting an edge over your bowl pool opponents. If you’re in a typical bowl pool, you need to figure out the exact combination of 30-plus picks that you should make, and you should potentially add a confidence-point ranking to each pick as well.

What’s so difficult about this process is understanding the strategy implications of the various characteristics of your specific pool. Factors like the total number of entries of your pool, its format (e.g. game-winner or spread), its scoring system (confidence points or not, upset bonuses or not, etc.), and its prize structure all play a role in determining the specific combination of picks and confidence-point rankings that will give you the best chance to win a prize.

We’ve built technology to evaluate all these factors, since the computation involved in getting to the right answer is beyond the scope of back-of-the-envelope math or spreadsheets.

However, here are a few high-level guidelines if you’re more of a do-it-yourselfer:

Pick Strategy for Smaller Bowl Pools

If you’re in a smaller pool (say, less than 50 entries), you should focus your picks on favorites. You need to be very selective about taking additional risks.

As boring as it sounds, picking a bunch of upsets is often the kiss of death in small bowl pools. Unskilled opponents in small pools tend to shoot themselves in the foot by getting too cute and making picks that are far too aggressive for this pool size. That means you can often get a solid edge by staying conservative.

Sure, you’ll inevitably miss some upsets. But with around 40 games to pick, the cumulative risk/reward strategy of staying extra conservative often pays off. It still may be worth considering highly underrated teams if they are only the slightest of underdogs, or perhaps making one calculated bet on one hugely underrated moderate underdog — just don’t go overboard.

Pick Strategy for Larger Bowl Pools

In bigger pools, unskilled players commonly make the exact opposite mistake; their picks are too conservative. Your chances to win a large pool are already quite low. Playing it overly safe rarely improves them. To maximize your edge in a big pool, you typically need to take multiple gambles on value picks, even if they’re fairly risky, and hope that most of them come through.

Another way to increase your chance of cashing in a big bowl pool is to play multiple entries. You can diversify your risk by making a different set of calculated gambles in each entry. Our Bowl Pick’em Picks product makes recommendations for playing up to three different entries in the same pool.

Pick Strategy for Bowl Confidence Pools

In bowl confidence pools, it’s important to understand the relative impact of every game. For example, you probably need to assign a unique confidence value of between one and 43 points to each pick. That means getting your 36-point pick correct is worth the same as getting all eight of your picks worth between one and eight.

As a result, it isn’t worth agonizing too much over your lower-confidence picks. Your strategy for your higher-confidence picks, and how those picks end up faring, is much more likely to determine whether or not it’s a prize-winning year for you. Instead of making a bunch of low-confidence upset picks, for example, think about concentrating your risk on a smaller number of bigger bets on the best-value picks of the 2022 bowl season.

Pick Strategy for Point-Spread-Based Bowl Pools

Many players fail to understand the role of the point spread as the great equalizer in pools. If your bowl pool features up-to-date point spreads for each game, you aren’t going to have much better than a 50/50 chance of getting most picks right.

(For reference, top professional college football bettors only hover around 55-60% long-term accuracy against full-game point spreads, and that’s with the ability to lay off most games and selectively pick their spots.)

Pick popularity becomes a bigger driver of optimal strategy in these pools. In cases where the public heavily favors one side, you’re usually better off picking the other way.

You also always want to be on the lookout for “stale” spreads — that is, games where the current point spread in real life is different than the spread in your pool, often because of line movement resulting from player participation news. Those “free points” can give you a solid edge over opponents who aren’t diligent enough to look for them.

Want Expert Help with Your Bowl Pool Picks?

We hope this article has been helpful in explaining some of the key strategies you can use to win more college football bowl pick’em contests. Is it complicated and time-consuming to apply this level of analysis to your 2022 bowl picks? Absolutely. If you’re serious about winning, though, the expected long-term payoff can easily justify the effort, especially if you’re playing for some solid prizes.

If you’d rather outsource all of the number-crunching to the office pool experts, we’re here to help. We aggregate all the data mentioned in this post (up-to-date betting odds, algorithmic game predictions, public picking trends, etc.), and we use that objective data to deliver customized, game-by-game pick recommendations for your college bowl pick’em or confidence-point pool. It’s all in our Bowl Pick’em Picks product.

It’s still going to take some luck to win in any given year. But over the long term, our technology and analytics have proven to deliver an edge.

NCAA Bracket Picks

March Madness Picks

Brackets - Survivor - Betting

Learn MoreGet Picks Now