College Football Bowl Pick’em Selections and Strategy
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Other than March Madness, the College Football Bowl Season is one of the most popular times for pick’em contests and office pools. Most pools are designed to select straight up winners, ranking each game by confidence. This is the format we will provide our picks in. All of the picks will be put together and averaged out to derive an “official TSE recommendation”. You will be able to view each handicapper’s picks individually as well.
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18 thoughts on “College Football Bowl Pick’em Selections and Strategy”
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MAXIMIZE YOUR EDGE
A friend sent me some interesting stats about how revenge can be overrated when it comes to bowl games. Though it’s considered a great motivational tool by coaches, and another chance for the players to beat the team that took them down earlier in the season, most of the time this strategy backfires in the bowls under certain circumstances.
So what are the circumstances? You DON’T want to play a bowl game based on revenge where one team lost a close game to the other during the regular season. What we DO want is a bowl team who lost by 24 or more points during the regular season.
You also want to play that revenge team off at least a 10 point win to finish the regular season. That shows they are at least primed and ready to extract revenge on their opponent. The other requirement is we don’t want our revenge team to be too big of a dog. Not more than +6 or a favorite of any number.
I’m not sure how big of a period this is for, but revenge teams that don’t make this requirement have a terrible bowl record of 2-15 ATS covering just 11% of the time. I know this situation doesn’t come up too often. But it can be a powerful handicapping tool.
The only game that I’m seeing where two teams played each other in the regular season is Tulsa/Iowa State (PK). Just keep in mind that the last 17 teams who were in Tulsa’s revenge spot covered just 11% of the time.
have to be careful with Iowa St – Stanze (QB) may not play. Not sure how that affects the offense as they lost a close one v WVa to end the season. Lost fumble in end zone as they were going in to tie the game.
Sometimes a freshman on the bench gets a chance and turns into johnnny football !
Coaching changes can make a big difference too.
Jim, I agree about the ISU QB situation with Jantz. My numbers favor Tulsa in this game. But ISU’s strength of schedule is much better (#26 to #86).
Whichever is the first rule that applies…
1. Bet on any school with “State” in the name west of Oklahoma
2. Bet on all SEC schools
3. Bet against the whole Big Ten
4. Bet against the whole ACC
5. Bet on the Big East
6. Bet the underdog
Should be a winning system….what do you think?
A lot of people are looking to fade Big Ten and ACC teams this year due to their poor performances in recent bowl season. These two conferences have 13 bowl teams combined, yet only two (Florida State and Virginia Tech) are favored. The Big Ten has no favorites; in fact, they have three double-digit underdogs (Nebraska, Minnesota, Purdue).
Anyone laying DD in a bowl game is nuts IMO. I would also suspect that there are probably several Big 10 teams (maybe not so much any ACC teams. LOL!) that have value precisely because they haven’t performed well in bowl games in the past and the entire conference as a whole was “down” this year.
The opposite is probably true of the SEC. Every single team is favored in their bowl game this year and I would suspect that several of them have inflated lines.
A few of these Big 10 teams have improved since early in the season. So buyer beware. Don’t believe everything your seeing in these forums. Automatic fades are just about the worst thing you can do in these bowls.
Sabert is an SEC homer. LOL!!!
Straight up?! Absolutely! ATS will probably be a little bit of a different story, but not much.
You’re drinking too much ESPN Kool-Aid.
Thank you for the valuable info, definitely helps. Are you guys planning on posting ATS picks in this thread or in another post?
ATS and O/U picks will be in a separate post, much like they were in the regular season. This post is strictly for straight up confidence picks for bowl contests and office pools.
hey guys!! any way you could possibly post your ATS spread picks by thursday night? thanks so much really appreciate it!
I second this if possible.
hey pez and saber if u cannot get your picks on here by thursday night…could you juss tell me who you like in the arizona and utah st bowl games?
Quick question for Saber. In your selections you make BYU 2* rating, but in the picks listed above you show SDSU as the pick. Just curious as to why? Maybe I’m confused just trying to understand. Thanks.
Are you running the football pickem contests this year(2014) Please be kind enough to email me the URL of the contest and info I will need to enter
Thank you very much
Gary Bevington
jbevington@neo.rr.com