9 Value Picks for College Bowl Pick’em Pools (2025)

Maximizing your edge a bowl pick'em pool often requires calculated bets on underpicked teams. Here are some top bowl value picks of 2025.

by Jason Lisk - Dec 11, 2025

In this post, we highlight high-value picks to boost your chances of winning a 2025 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 81% 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.

What Causes Value Picks in College Bowl Pick’em Pools? 

With 47 bowl games to pick in 2025 (if your pool uses every playoff 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 squad is actually the favorite in the betting markets. The poll ranking misleads the public 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 the harder strength of schedule faced by the team with the worst 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 leads the public to pick the well-known team at a rate higher 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 one that earned its way there during the regular season, and this phenomenon seems to be growing each year. When important players enter the transfer portal, opt out of a bowl game to prepare for the NFL draft, or the head coach and key staff members move on, a 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

Identifying underrated teams in bowl pick’em pools takes several steps, a lot of data, and some specific know-how 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. For example, 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.

9 Value Picks for College Bowl Pick’em Pools

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

Here are some college bowl picks in 2025 that are worth highlighting as of Thursday, December 11.

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.

3 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 mainly on the other side.

1. Army (vs. Connecticut, Fenway Bowl) 

• Date: Saturday, December 27
• Line: Army favored by 6
• Win Odds: Army 66%, Connecticut 34%
• Pick Popularity: Army 41%, Connecticut 59%

Our top value play features two teams from the Northeast meeting in the Fenway Bowl. This will be Connecticut’s second trip in a row to Boston for a bowl game. Still, this time they will be without head coach Jim Mora, who took off for Colorado State at the end of the regular season (the school hired Jason Candle of Toledo as his replacement).

Army, meanwhile, is still playing (against Navy) and has the coaching staff intact, and is getting healthier on defense. Motivation and coaching concerns have moved this line, but the public is on 9-3 Connecticut. That provides an oddsmaker-versus-public showdown where you can take the favorite, but more than half the pool is on the other side.

2. NC State (vs. Memphis, Gasparilla Bowl)

• Date: Friday, December 19
• Line: NC State favored by 6
• Win Odds: NC State 69%, Memphis 31%
• Pick Popularity: NC State 58%, Memphis 42%

Our next value pick also gives us a “coach just left” situation, as Memphis head coach Ryan Silverfield departed to take the Arkansas job. NC State is being picked a little more often than Memphis, but there is value here as the line has moved up to 6 points. Memphis (8-4) has lost three straight and will now be coached by interim coach (and DB coach) Reggie Howard, while NC State won 3 of the last 4 by double digits to qualify for the bowl, including a win over Georgia Tech.

3. Washington (vs. Boise State, LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk) 

• Date: Saturday, December 13
• Line: Washington favored by 9.5
• Win Odds: Washington 78%, Boise State 22%
• Pick Popularity: Washington 73%, Boise State 27%

We get an early value play in the first FBS bowl game of 2025, as Washington and Boise State meet in a bowl game hosted by Gronk. Washington is the big 9.5-point favorite, which is tied for the 6th-largest spread at the start of bowl season across the 47 games. While most people are picking the Huskies, there are enough taking the underdog Broncos that there is value here.

Washington is only the 25th-most popular favorite. Bowl pickers are about twice as likely to pick the upset here as they are in other bowl games with similar spreads, and they are less popular than a few teams favored by around a field goal.

So grab the early value out of the gate on the favorite.

Other Value Favorite Picks in 2025

As of Thursday, we are showing nine other teams that qualify as value favorites in 2025, with pick popularity in bowl pools lower than that of teams favored by a similar amount.

In nearly all formats of bowl pick’em, these are the teams you definitely want to pick to win. In bowl confidence pools, it also often pays to assign them higher confidence point values.

You can see recent betting odds, pick popularity, model predictions, and value calculations for all 84 bowl teams (with some playing more than once due to playoffs) in our Bowl Pick’em Picks product (see below).

6 Value Gamble Picks 

Up until now, we’ve been talking about finding underrated but favored teams. But the biggest rewards (and risks) often come from backing underdogs.

However, in bowl pick’em pools, all underdogs are not created equal. If you’re going to take a risk on an upset pick, you want to focus on underrated teams that have a legitimate shot to win, and avoid trendy upset picks or teams that are too risky.

Since you have dozens of games to pick, you rarely have to get a huge long shot pick right to win a bowl pool. In fact, making one or more huge upset picks often lowers your odds of winning a prize.

The 2025 bowl game slate features many relatively close matchups where the public is on the opposite side of the betting market favorite. In that context, you may not even have to pick many upsets to give your entry the best shot to win.

Still, in bigger pools, it’s often advisable to take at least one or two calculated gambles on high-value upset picks. Here are some teams that fit that criteria at post time:

1. Hawaii (vs. California, Hawaii Bowl)

Line: California favored by 1
Win Odds: Hawaii 47%
Pick Popularity: Hawaii 34%