Bowl Picks, Confidence

So many reasons to love bowl confidence pools. There’s still a ton of noise, but so much more signal than when just picking games. You can enjoy this at Superbowl Betting Sites, enjoy betting at the same time while watching the bowl pools. Couple that with a healthy 41-game slate and it’s not a bad situation for identifying the better models and experts. Really we need about 10 years to do that, but there’s enough here to make it worth the effort.

Consider this your algorithmic guidance. We’ve not tweaked our numbers for any of the typical playoff bowl narratives – coaching changes, players sitting out for the draft, which teams really want to be there, travel, elevation etc. SO many stories. Hard to know which are real and which imagined so we just play it straight. Permute at your own risk.

A few quick notes:

• We don’t have numbers on North Carolina A&T and Grambling so we just use the market line.
• We also don’t have numbers on UAB since priors (drawing on 2016 data) are so important in our model. Again, market line.
• Our line in the national championship game is just the expected value given the various probabilities and pairings.
• We recommend putting a probability on each pick and calculating expected pool points. That way you can track your luck, good and bad. Keeps you honest. For example, we’re showing an expected 605 points (out of 861 possible). It’s a good bracket, but to really be competitive we’ll need some of what Rufus calls “positive variance”.

Enjoy.