Value Picks for College Bowl Pick’em Pools in 2023

Maximizing your edge a bowl pick'em pool often requires calculated bets on underrated teams. Here are some top bowl value picks of 2023.

In this post, we identify some high-opportunity picks that should help increase your odds to win a 2023 college football bowl pick’em contest.

From underrated favorites to underdogs that have a solid shot to win, the picks we mention in this article balance risk and reward in a way that gives you a great chance to leapfrog opponents in your bowl pool standings.

If you’re new to PoolGenius, we recommend you read our college bowl pool strategy guide for a deeper explanation of the logic behind our value-driven approach to bowl pool picks. It’s a proven strategy that has helped our subscribers win bowl pick’em pools nearly 80% more often than expected.

Alternatively, if you’re short on time or just want to see the game-by-game picks we would recommend for your specific bowl pool(s), subscribe to our Bowl Pick’em Picks product.

Common Causes Of College Bowl Value Picks

With 43 bowl games to pick in 2023, there are plenty of opportunities for bowl pool players to fall prey to suboptimal decision-making. The reasons why can vary, but we often see the public at large make unwise picks in some specific bowl scenarios:

• Ranked vs. Unranked Team: A team that is ranked in the end-of-season AP Top 25 is playing an unranked team, but the unranked team is actually the favorite in the betting markets. The public is misled by the poll ranking and overvalues the ranked team.
• Great Win-Loss Record vs. Barely Winning Record: A team with only a few losses is playing a team that barely has a winning record (or in the case of last year’s bowl games, even a losing record!), but the team with the worse record is actually the better team. The public fails to account for a harder strength of schedule faced by the team with the worse record and overvalues the better win-loss record.
• Historical Powerhouse vs. Relative Unknown: A historically strong program from a celebrated conference has had a bit of a down year and is playing in a mid-tier bowl game against a much less famous school. The brand recognition of the storied program causes the public to pick the well-known team at a higher rate than warranted by objective metrics.
• Player Opt-Outs and Transfers: The team playing in a bowl game isn’t always the same as the team that earned its way there during the regular season, and this phenomenon seems to be growing yearly. When important players enter the transfer portal or opt out of a bowl game to prepare for the NFL draft, that team’s win odds can change significantly, but the public isn’t always following all the latest news.

Those are just a few of the dynamics that can give educated bowl pool players the edge they need to win bowl pick’em contests more often than expected.

Identifying Underrated Bowl Picks

Doing the work to identify underrated teams in bowl pick’em pools takes several steps, a lot of data, and some specific know-how that we’ve accumulated over a decade-plus of optimizing bowl pool picks.

The basic steps are as follows:

• Aggregate up-to-date betting odds on all bowl games from leading sportsbooks.
• Project every bowl game with market-leading computer power ratings.
• Collect bowl pool pick popularity data from multiple pool hosting sites.
• Adjust pick popularity data to account for biases inherent in those sites.*

(*This is the “specific know-how” part. As an example, pick popularity data from ESPN’s Bowl Mania game can be skewed by various “auto-fill” options the game promotes to users. As a result, ESPN’s data is less likely to accurately reflect pick popularity trends in smaller, private bowl pools not hosted on ESPN, so we adjust their data to counteract that skew.)

2023 College Bowl Value Picks

Once we’ve done our analysis, we generally group the value picks that stand out into two categories: Value Favorites and Value Gambles.

Here are some college bowl picks in 2023 that are worth highlighting as of Tuesday, December 12.

Note that news such as unanticipated player opt-outs or coaching changes can quickly change the calculus for picks mentioned below, so make sure to check the Data Grid feature of the Bowl Pick’em Picks product (subscription required) for the most up-to-date info.

Value Favorite Picks

The public usually picks teams that are favored in the betting markets at a high rate in bowl pick’em pools. For example, if a team is a 7-point favorite (which means it has about 70 percent odds to win), it’s not uncommon for 80 or 85 percent of the public to pick that team.

When a team favored to win in the betting markets is being picked by the public at a similar or lower rate than its implied odds to win, that’s as close to a no-brainer bowl pick as you can get.

We refer to these picks as value favorites, and they should feature prominently in most bowl pool strategies.

Think twice about picking against the teams listed below, since there’s almost nothing worse than making an unnecessarily risky upset pick that is also trendy among the public. In many of these cases, in fact, you can pick the team that is most likely to win, while also getting the benefit that the public is treating it like an upset, and mostly on the other side.

1. Missouri (vs. Ohio State, Cotton Bowl) 

• Friday, December 29
• Missouri favored by 2,5
• Win Odds: Missouri 59%, Ohio State 41%
• Pick Popularity: Missouri 37%, Ohio State 63%

If you went by the regular season, Ohio State would be the favorite in this game. In fact, they opened favored by about a touchdown. But as news about players and availability came out, that line has shifted, and Missouri is now the favorite. Ohio State starting QB Kyle McCord has entered the transfer portal, and it’s expected that several Ohio State stars with NFL aspirations will opt out of the bowl game.

We’ve seen these kind of big line moves in recent years as opt-outs and transfers increase, and in most cases, the team that moved to the favorite role has gone on to win. With the public still on Ohio State more often than not, that means value on Missouri in the Cotton Bowl.