Skip to main content

College Bowl Pools: How The Pros Dominate Bowl Pick’em Contests & Confidence Point Pools

College Bowl Pools: How The Pros Dominate Bowl Pick’em Contests & Confidence Point Pools

If you want to maximize your odds to win your 2019 college bowl pick’em contest, you need to make smarter picks than your opponents. 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.

In this post, based on over six years of proven results in thousands of real-world pools, we’ll lay out a three-step strategy for maximizing your edge in your 2019 bowl pick’em contest or bowl confidence points pool.

TeamRankings is the only site that uses advanced analytics and game theory to optimize picks for college bowl pools. Check out their 2019 Bowl Pick’em Picks and bowl betting picks.

How To Win A College Bowl Picks Pool

Since 2013, we’ve helped thousands of players outsmart their opponents in college bowl pools. Although the analytics we’ve built to deliver an edge are complex, our proven approach is centered around three basic strategy principles, which you can use to shape your own bowl pool entry:

1. Objectively Identify The Bowl Favorites

When it comes to college football bowl pools, humans tend to fall prey to irrational biases, false assumptions and misleading information. In most years, the betting markets and objective computer projections do a better job predicting games than popular sentiment does.

Let’s take this year’s Las Vegas Bowl between 12-1 Boise State and 7-5 Washington. Over 80% of players in ESPN’s Bowl Mania contest are taking Boise State. Why? Probably because Boise State is ranked No. 18 in the AP Poll (always a popular measure, despite its flaws) while Washington is unranked, and Boise State also has a much better win-loss record.

However, at post time, Washington is a 3.5-point favorite in the betting markets, and our data-driven predictive ratings have Washington as 4.8 points better than Boise State on a neutral field. What gives?

Several factors likely account for why the public is so far off the betting markets. One is failing to account for the difference in the schedules they faced; the Pac-12 is a tougher conference than the Mountain West. Another is focusing too much on win-loss records and not more predictive measures like point differentials. Washington had an unlucky 0-4 performance in close games, including losses to Utah and Oregon at home, both in close contests. A couple more lucky bounces in those two games and Washington’s season could look much different on paper.

Add in what might be a dose of concern about Washington coach Chris Petersen stepping down after this final game, and the public is way off the betting markets on this game. And this is just one of several games we’ve identified in our Bowl Pick’em Picks product being impacted by irrational public biases.

2. Use Bowl Pick Popularity To Identify Underrated Teams

In order to win your college bowl pick’em contest, you will need to get at least one pick right that your opponents get wrong. That’s the only way to finish with the most points.

This critical aspect of bowl pool strategy seems fairly obvious, yet it’s often misunderstood. In short, how many picks you get right has a lot less to do with your odds to win a pool than most people think. Your goal is not to get some arbitrary number of picks correct; your goal is to finish at least one point higher in the final standings than your next-best opponent.

As a result, you’ll almost always increase your odds to win a college bowl pool by exploiting the best opportunities to make unpopular picks. Why? Because if you make a pick that all your opponents think is crazy, and you get it right, you’ll gain serious ground in the standings. If you get a pick right and your entire pool made the same pick, you gain nothing.

How To Project Bowl Pick Popularity

Estimating how popular of a pick every team will be in your bowl pool is never an exact science, but with some resourcefulness you can find 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 those percentages may not represent how your specific bowl pool opponents are likely to pick games — especially if your pool consists of more sophisticated players. We collect pick popularity data from multiple sources to reduce the impact of such biases.)

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 East Lansing, Michigan. It’s probably a safe bet that Michigan State will be a more popular pick in your pool than they are nationally (where around 58% of the public is taking the Spartans to beat Wake Forest in the Pinstripe Bowl).

Identifying Underrated Bowl Pool Picks

Of course, unpopular picks are often (but not always) risky picks, so you need to evaluate the risk of making every possible pick along with the reward associated with getting it right. The most useful approach is to use win odds and pick popularity data to identify teams that fall into either of the following two categories:

  • Teams favored to win, but being picked by less than 50% of the public. We often refer to these teams as “value favorites,” and they are as close as you can get to no-brainer picks. Washington versus Boise State, highlighted earlier, is an example of this type of game.
  • Teams that are slight to moderate underdogs, but significantly underrated by the public. Iowa State is a 3.5-point underdog against Notre Dame, but the Cyclones are only being picked by around 16% of the public. While taking Iowa State involves some risk, their win odds are more than double their national pick popularity, providing some decent value if you are willing to take on more risk.

In almost all pools, it won’t make sense to make all of the picks that happen to match these two sets of criteria — especially the underdogs in the second category. However, from a risk vs. reward standpoint, these teams represent your best opportunities to gain ground on your opponents in the pool standings.

Smart vs. Dumb Bowl Upset Picks

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 is make a trendy upset pick. Consider the following two teams:

  • Iowa State: 16% pick popularity, 3.5-point underdog vs. Notre Dame
  • Boise State: 56% pick popularity, 3.5-point underdog vs. Washington

If you want to take a gamble on just one of the two teams above, you’d be crazy to pick Boise State. Both teams are 3.5-point underdogs, but if Iowa State wins you’d gain ground on nearly 85% of your opponents. If Boise State wins you’d gain ground on less than half of your opponents.

Using win odds and pick popularity data to avoid mistakes like these is one example of what separates the pros from the Joes in college football pools.

3. Compose A Pick Set With The Right Amount Of Risk For Your Pool

Now comes the toughest and most complex part of getting an edge over your opponents. You need to figure out the exact combination of picks you should make with each of your bowl pool entries, and potentially add a confidence point ranking to each one as well.

What’s so difficult about this process is understanding the implications of the various characteristics of your specific pool. Factors like the size of your pool, its format (e.g. game winner or spread, confidence points or not), its scoring system, and its prize structure all play a role in determining which picks will give you the best chance to win a prize.

The approaches we use to optimize game-by-game pick recommendations for bowl pools are beyond the scope of this post; it’s taken us years to develop algorithms that customize bowl pool picks to give you the maximum edge in your specific pool. However, here are a few high level guidelines:

Picks For Smaller Bowl Pools

If you’re in a small pool (say less than 50 entries), you should focus your picks on favorites and be very selective about taking additional risks. As boring as it sounds, feeling that you need to make a bunch of upset picks is often the kiss of death in small bowl pools. Unskilled opponents in small pools tend to shoot themselves in the foot by making picks that are far too aggressive, and you can often get a solid edge simply by staying conservative.

However, it’s usually still worth considering underrated teams if they are only the slightest of underdogs, or perhaps making a calculated bet on a hugely underrated moderate underdog.

Picks For Larger Bowl Pools

In bigger pools the most common mistake unskilled players make is the opposite; their picks are too conservative. Your chances to win a large pool are already quite low, and playing it relatively safe rarely improves them. To maximize your edge in a big pool, you typically need to take multiple gambles on big value picks, even if they’re fairly risky (e.g. maybe Iowa State over Notre Dame this year), and hope that some or most of them come through.

The other way to increase your chance of cashing in a big bowl pool is to play multiple entries, and 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, and creates pick diversity across those entries.

Picks For Bowl Confidence Points Pools

In bowl confidence pools, it’s important to understand the relative impact of every game. Typically, you need to assign a unique confidence value of between 1 and 41 points (assuming your pool includes the Celebration Bowl this year) to each pick. That means getting your 28-point pick correct is worth the same as getting all seven of your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 point picks correct.

As a result, it’s not 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.

Picks For Point Spread Based Bowl Pools

Sports books are good at what they do, and if your spread pool features up-to-date lines for each game, you’re not going to have much greater than a 50/50 chance of getting most picks right — especially when you have to make a pick for every single bowl game. (Even the top professional college football bettors only hover around 55-60% long term accuracy, and that’s with the ability to lay off the majority of games and selectively pick their spots.)

Put another way, spreads act as an equalizer between smart and dumb players in bowl pools, because when you’re picking against the spread there is a limit to how dumb you can be. One side is never going to be far less likely to win than the other side. So a monkey throwing darts to make his picks probably has a much better chance to win a spread based pool than to win a game winner based pool.

As a result, pick popularity tends to be a bigger driver of optimal pick strategy in spread pools than in game winner pools. If you assume point spreads are pretty efficient, unless you’ve got strong data supporting a particular side, in bowl pools you’re often better off making big gambits on the most unpopular spread picks.

You should also be on the lookout for stale lines in spread based bowl pools. These are games where betting odds in real life have shifted, while betting lines in your bowl pool don’t change. If you wait until the last minute to submit your picks, you can often get “free points” that give you a considerably better than 50% chance to cover the point spread in your pool.

Get The Bowl Pool Pros In Your Corner

We hope this article has been useful in explaining some of the 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 2019 bowl picks? Absolutely. If you’re serious about winning, though, the expected payoff over the long term can easily justify the effort, especially if you’re playing for some solid prizes.

At the same time, figuring out the optimal picks for your pool takes a lot of math (and coding). A lot of people who are serious about winning bowl pools just don’t have the time or skills to do it, and that’s where we come in.

If you want to outsource all this number crunching to the office pool experts, we’re here to help. We collect all the data mentioned in this post (up-to-date betting odds, objective computer predictions, public picking trends, etc.) and provide customized, game-by-game pick recommendations for all of your college bowl pools. You answer a few questions about your pool, and our algorithms identify the picks that give you the best chance to win.

Learn more here:

Bowl Pick’em Picks from TeamRankings.com

College Bowl Value Picks For 2019

Bowl Picks 2019

More Articles

18 Dynasty Players to Buy Low & Sell High (2024 Fantasy Football)

18 Dynasty Players to Buy Low & Sell High (2024 Fantasy Football)

fp-headshot by FantasyPros Staff | 7 min read
Dynasty Rookie Mock Draft: PPR (Fantasy Football 2024)

Dynasty Rookie Mock Draft: PPR (Fantasy Football 2024)

fp-headshot by Tom Strachan | 6 min read
Players I’m Already Sold on for 2024 (Fantasy Football)

Players I’m Already Sold on for 2024 (Fantasy Football)

fp-headshot by Tera Roberts | 2 min read
Best Ball Ideal Roster Construction & Strategy (2024 Fantasy Football)

Best Ball Ideal Roster Construction & Strategy (2024 Fantasy Football)

fp-headshot by Tom Strachan | 3 min read

About Author

Hide

Current Article

6 min read

18 Dynasty Players to Buy Low & Sell High (2024 Fantasy Football)

Next Up - 18 Dynasty Players to Buy Low & Sell High (2024 Fantasy Football)

Next Article