College Football Bowl Confidence Pool Picks & Predictions

College Bowl Season is upon us, and that means you will soon be contacted by that guy in your office or that casual friend you only hear from once a year to join his bowl pool. We are hoping we can help give you an edge this season with some recommendations for bowl confidence pools based on the current money line odds and the win probability that they imply.

How Do NCAA Football Bowl Confidence Pools Work?

The first step in a confidence pool is picking the team you think will win the matchup outright. Once you have done that for each matchup, as the name implies, you rank each team based on how much confidence you have in them winning. With 40 bowl games on the schedule, a confidence rank of 40 would be given to the team that has the best chance of winning, with the team you feel least confident about given a confidence rank of 1.

It is really that easy! Most casual participants will run down the list of games and pick the team with the better record, or the school with more prestige. More savvy players will include the point spread to make some of their picks, but not many are going to use it down the line, which is where we think we can help. The table below ranks every bowl matchup based on the implied probability that each team will win. The moneyline is the ultimate tool in this situation because it is the closest thing we have to an accurate probability for each team to win. Is it perfect? Of course not! Once the probability starts to fall, there will no doubt be upsets. Our hope is that you can use this information to make more informed picks in your pool.

Pick ‘Em Contests

You can also use this information for so-called Pick ‘Em contests, where you just need to pick the winner of the game outright. As with any pool, you’ll want to shake things up by taking a few upsets here and there, however, don’t go overboard. You want to stick with smaller underdogs and not waste points on a team like James Madison, who is very unlikely to pull out an upset.

Odds are accurate as of the date this article was last updated. The spreads are bound to change leading up to these games, meaning the probabilities will shift as well. I would recommend waiting as long as you can to submit your picks. We will keep this table updated as lines move so that the recommendations are as accurate as possible all the way until the first game kicks off. Good luck!

College Football Playoff Impact on Confidence Pools

The new playoff bracket format introduces a new spin on confidence pools because not all matchups have been determined. The rules of your specific pool are going to determine how you want to approach this, however, you’ll still want to use the odds to help make your selections.  In general, I’d check the odds to win the College Football Championship and use that as my guide of who to take in those spots. The trick is going to be assigning a confidence value to teams in the playoff because most pools I have seen so far give the confidence points you assign to that team for each round the team wins. That could be a massive advantage if a first-round team ends up winning the whole thing. It introduces a lot of new strategies. This is something we will have to experiment with and see what the best approach might be. Given the potential, it may be best practice to take playoff teams with higher confidence than you might otherwise because of the potential they have to advance and earn more points. Let’s take a look at this season’s odds and see what we should consider.

College Football Playoff Participants & Odds to Win the Championship

Ohio State +220
Indiana +290
Georgia +550
Oregon +750
Texas Tech +900
Texas A&M +1700
Alabama +2200
Miami (FL) +2200
Ole Miss +2200
Oklahoma +4500
James Madison +70000
Tulane +75000

Given this information, we’d want to take a hard look at teams like Oregon who have pretty good odds to win it all and have additional games because they don’t have a first-round bye. Again, this is entirely dependent on the rules of your pool, but it is something to keep in mind.

2025-2026 College Bowl Confidence Pool Projections