Winning a college football bowl picks contest in 2022 will take some luck, but using the right pick strategy will always give you the best chance to win. Based on nearly a decade of proven results in thousands of real-world bowl pick 'em pools, we'll provide tips and lay out a three-step process to help you maximize your edge.
This analysis comes from PoolGenius, a site that uses advanced analytics and game theory to help people win more sports pools. Since 2014, PoolGenius subscribers have reported winning college bowl pools 76 percent more often than expected, based on the size of their pools. They offer a free bowl pool strategy guide, bowl betting picks, and the only product that optimizes picks for bowl pick 'em contests. Click the link below to check it out.
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College Football Bowl Picks 2022: How to win a college bowl pick 'em pool
Know who the favorites really are
Picking the team that you think will win each bowl game is rarely the best strategy to win a bowl pick 'em pool. A big reason why is because you almost certainly can't trust yourself to accurately judge every team's chances. Humans tend to be notoriously biased when it comes to making bowl predictions. They often put too much stock in a team's win-loss record, without even realizing the role that luck (especially in close games) may have played in determining it. They can overvalue a team's performance in one or two widely watched games or marquee matchups. Regional biases also come into play, since there aren’t many regular-season matchups between top teams in different conferences.
Let's take the 2020 Gator Bowl between 4-6 Kentucky and 8-3 NC State as an extreme example of some of these biases. NC State was ranked in the AP poll entering the game while Kentucky was unranked, and a large percentage of bowl pick 'em players picked NC State to win. However, Kentucky was the favorite in the betting markets, and our data-driven prediction models gave the Wildcats a 54 percent chance to win.
Because of COVID-19 restrictions during the '20 season, many teams (including the SEC) only played conference opponents. As a result, Kentucky faced an abnormally tough schedule that season and didn't play any non-conference cupcakes. Meanwhile, NC State got to play an overall weaker slate of opponents in the ACC. Most bowl pick 'em players (and, arguably, the AP Poll voters, as well) didn't adequately evaluate that dynamic. Kentucky ended up beating NC State, 23-21. As a result, only a small percentage of the public earned points for that game in bowl pick 'em contests, but it was not an upset in the betting markets, nor according to our models, and we had advised our subscribers accordingly.
If you want to know who the favorites really are in each bowl game, don't trust your gut. You need to research betting market odds and smart computer projections that are far more objective methods for evaluating each team's chance to win.
In addition, you need to keep an eye on those numbers both before and during bowl season, since factors like players opting out and postseason coaching changes can have big impacts on a team's win odds to win its bowl game. (We explore that topic more deeply in our full bowl pick 'em strategy guide on PoolGenius.)
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College Football Bowl Picks: How to identify underrated teams or upsets
Use pick popularity to identify underrated teams
Even if you do use betting odds and data-driven models as the basis of your 2022 bowl game predictions, in most cases, picking all the favorites still won't maximize your edge. To ensure you're making the best call on every game, you also need to take pick popularity into account.
Pick popularity is simply the percentage of entries in your pool that end up picking a specific team. Bowl pool hosting sites like ESPN often publish aggregated pick popularity data from their users, which you can use as a guide. For example, at writing time, ESPN's Bowl Mania game is reporting that in the CFP Semifinal between Georgia and Ohio State, 86 percent of players who have made picks so far have picked Georgia to win.
The importance of pick popularity in bowl pick 'em pools boils down to a simple principle. When you're competing in a picks contest against a bunch of other people, you can only win the contest if you get at least one pick right that your opponents get wrong. To give yourself a chance to finish with the most points, you have to do at least some zigging while your opponents zag (and the bigger your pool is, the more of it you need to do).
That fact seems fairly obvious, but it's often ignored or forgotten when many bowl pick 'em players make their picks. Picking favorites is always safer in terms of your chances to earn points, but earning points is not necessarily the ultimate goal. Ideally, you want to earn points that your opponents miss. If you get a pick right and your entire pool also made the same pick, you've gained no ground in the pool standings. (Confidence points do add a wrinkle here, and we discuss those more in our full article on bowl pool strategy.)
As a result, you need to evaluate both the risk and the potential reward of every potential bowl pick you can make, and you also need to consider picking some underdogs since underdogs are often unpopular picks. Of course, all favorites and all underdogs are not created the same, and pick popularity data is the key to identifying the most attractive propositions. One useful approach is to identify teams that fall into one of the following two categories:
1. Favorites picked at a lower rate 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 college bowl pool, as the more likely winner is also the team being underrated by the public.
Georgia vs. Michigan in last year’s CFB Semifinal in the Orange Bowl is a good example of a value favorite. Georgia was favored by more than a touchdown in the betting markets, with objective win odds of around 80 percent. However, only about 68 percent of the public in bowl pick 'em pools was picking Georgia to win. That wasn't a huge difference (80-percent win odds vs. 68-percent pick popularity), but it's a very strong reason to stick with Georgia and not even think about Michigan as a potential upset pick. Around 80 percent of the time (e.g. four years out of five), you should gain ground on nearly a third of your pool opponents by picking a team with Georgia's profile. Moderate underdogs are significantly underrated by the public
In most cases, the public will pick favorites very heavily. Consequently, the key to differentiating your bowl pool entry often comes down to finding some slight underdogs that have close to a 50/50 chance of winning but are highly unpopular picks compared to other similar underdogs. Then, you make some outsized bets on a few of those high-value underdog picks.
Again, pick popularity is the deciding factor here. If you're going to pick an upset where the underdog has a 45-percent chance of winning, you'd rather do it when only 10 percent of your opponents are picking that same underdog as opposed to when 40 percent or more of your opponents are also picking it (e.g. a "trendy" upset pick).
An example of a value underdog play from last bowl season was UAB, a 5.5-point underdog against BYU in the Independence Bowl. UAB was a pretty risky pick with only about 33-percent implied win odds according to the betting market, but their pick popularity in bowl pools was a minuscule six percent. In a larger pool where your chances of winning are already small on account of the number of entries, that’s the type of pick that can make for a smart gamble.
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College Football Bowl Pool Picks: How to find the best strategy for risky teams
Taking the right amount of risk for your pool
Last, but definitely not least, comes the toughest and most complex part of manufacturing an edge in bowl pick 'em contests. If you're in a typical bowl pool, you need to figure out the exact combination of 40-plus picks that will give you the best chance to win the contest. You also may need to add a confidence-point ranking to each pick you make. That's a very tall order because to do the best job of it, you have to adjust your picks based on multiple factors that influence the optimal strategy for a specific pool. For example:
Pool Size: If you only need to beat 10 or 15 opponents, it pays to stay more conservative and not pick too many upsets. If you need to beat 300 or 1,000 opponents, though, you have to take more calculated gambles. That could mean making a decent number of moderately risky but unpopular picks, shooting for the moon with a couple of huge value long shots, or some mix of the two approaches.
Pool Format: If you're in a winner-based pool, you may find several teams being egregiously underrated by the public. In spread-based pools, it's much rarer to find huge imbalances between a team's odds to cover the spread and its pick popularity. That situation often rewards making a higher number of contrarian picks in spread-based pools.
Pool Rules: If you can't change your picks once bowl season starts, you need to do your best to project how a team's win odds will end up by game time since key players could opt out, coaching situations could change, etc. If you can change your picks and/or confidence point values up until kickoff time, it usually pays to build more future flexibility into your pick strategy, like saving some high confidence-point slots for the later games.
Scoring Structure: If every win is worth the same amount, making unpopular picks (e.g. upsets) is the only way to differentiate your pool entry from the masses. In confidence-point pools, however, you can focus a contrarian strategy on assigning very high confidence points to a few top value picks, and those picks can also sometimes be favorites.
Prize Structure: If your pool is winner-take-all, you need to design a pick strategy that is more boom-or-bust since a "great but not exceptional" final score is unlikely to yield a prize. In a much flatter prize structure that awards many top finishers, you likely want to opt for the more conservative option in any close calls between favorite and underdog picks.
In short, there are so many angles to consider when deciding how risky vs. conservative your overall pick set should be that it's impossible for a human brain to precisely evaluate them all. That's why we had to build technology to do all the associated calculations.
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Get expert picks from the "Bowl Pool Pros"
We hope this article has provided some useful advice to win college football bowl pick 'em contests, or at the very least, to understand what it takes to win more often. 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 payoff can easily justify the effort.
If you'd prefer to outsource all of this analysis and number crunching to the sports pool experts, we're here to help. We collect and analyze all the data mentioned in this post (e.g. recent betting odds, algorithmic game predictions, public picking trends), and we use that analysis to make customized pick recommendations for your college bowl pool.
Simply tell us a few details about your pool, and in a few seconds, you get the game-by-game picks that give you the best chance to win. Click the link below to get picks now.
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Note: The team behind PoolGenius also offers algorithmic college bowl betting picks and (new for 2022) staff betting picks for the bowls. During the 2022 regular season, college football staff picks went 21-12 against the spread for +7.3 units of profit.