Value Picks for 2024 College Bowl Pick’em Pools

Maximizing your edge a bowl pick'em pool often requires calculated bets on underrated teams. Here are some top bowl value picks of 2024.

In this post, we highlight high-value picks to boost your chances of winning a 2024 college football bowl pick’em contest.

From underrated favorites to underdogs with real upset potential, the picks in this article strike a balance between risk and reward, offering a strong opportunity to climb the standings in your bowl pool.

For those new to PoolGenius, we encourage you to check out our college bowl pool strategy guide. It explains our proven, value-driven approach that has helped subscribers win bowl pick’em contests nearly 80% more often than expected.

If you’re pressed for time or want customized game-by-game recommendations tailored to your specific pool(s), consider subscribing to our Bowl Pick’em Picks product.

Common Causes Of College Bowl Value Picks

With 47 bowl games to pick in 2024 (if your pool uses every playoff round game), 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.
• Coaching Changes, 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, or the head coach and key staff members move on, 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.)

2024 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 2024 that are worth highlighting as of Friday, December 13.

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. Oklahoma (vs. Navy, Armed Forces Bowl) 

• Friday, December 27
• Oklahoma favored by 8.5
• Win Odds: Oklahoma 78%, Navy 22%
• Pick Popularity: Oklahoma 73%, Navy 27%

Navy has the better record (8-3 pending the Army-Navy result), but Oklahoma (6-6) has played the far tougher schedule. The Sooners are favored by over a touchdown in this game, with fairly high win odds. Enough of the public is willing to pick Navy that this looks like a spot to just stick with the favorite.

2. Texas-San Antonio (vs. Coastal Carolina, Myrtle Beach Bowl)

• Monday, December 23
• Texas-San Antonio favored by 8.5
• Win Odds: Texas-San Antonio 77%, Coastal Carolina 23%
• Pick Popularity: Texas-San Antonio 64%, Coastal Carolina 36%

The Myrtle Beach Bowl may be a home game for Coastal Carolina, but it is still Texas-San Antonio who is the big favorite. Coastal Carolina QB Ethan Vasko entered the transfer portal, as did his backup Noah Kim. So Coastal will turn to redshirt freshman Tad Hudson, who has yet to throw a pass this year.

The public is still giving Coastal Carolina more of a chance, with 36% picking the underdog. As a result, you have a good value opportunity in playing against the team with the potential quarterback issues.