For some, December means it’s the holiday season. But for others, the last month of the year means it’s college football bowl season. If you fall in the latter, then you are undoubtedly looking forward to making college football bowl confidence picks for many of the 43 games on the slate. From the College Football Playoff to the New Year’s Six to everything that comes before those, this is as exciting time as any for a college football fan.
But this season also presents quite a task for even the biggest of fans who have tough decisions to make. Should you back the Power 5 team that had a middling season or get behind the Group of Five juggernaut who dominated its conference? And which side do you go with when two heavyweights go at it such as Oklahoma vs. Oregon in the Alamo Bowl? Before entering your college football bowl confidence pools, be sure to see the college football picks from SportsLine’s Matt Severance.
Matt Severance is a well-connected writer and handicapper who has worked in the industry since 2005. He wrapped up the 2021 college football regular season as one of SportsLine’s top experts, ending the year on a 49-32 run on his college football picks, returning almost $900 to $100 bettors during that span. Anybody who followed him saw some huge returns.
So before filling out your college football pool picks, you need to see Severance’s college football bowl picks. He’s using a season’s worth of data gathered from game film and analytics. He has analyzed each bowl matchup and ordered every game by level of confidence. He’s only sharing his final picks over at SportsLine.
Top college football bowl confidence predictions
One pick we’ll give away: Severance likes Florida over UCF in the 2021 Gasparilla Bowl. In fact, he has assigned 41 confidence points to that selection, his second-most confident pick. “UCF might have won this game with QB Dillon Gabriel, but he’s in the transfer portal,” Severance told SportsLine. The Gators fired coach Dan Mullen late in the season but finished the year strong with a win over rival Florida State.
Florida can go toe-to-toe with anyone in the country as evident by its two-point loss to No. 1 Alabama early in the season. It was the smallest margin of victory for the Tide all year across their 12 victories. Meanwhile, UCF’s biggest game saw it get blown out by 35 points to No. 3 Cincinnati.
While UCF has been one of the top Group of Five teams in recent years, it has struggled when stepping up in class versus SEC schools. The Knights have lost five of their last six vs. SEC teams and have just a 3-18 all-time record against the Southeastern Conference. Add in that they’ve been relying on a backup QB for most of the season since Gabriel got hurt, and Severance is all in on the Gators.
How to make college football bowl confidence picks
Severance also is assigning a huge confidence ranking of 27 to a smaller program playing one of the Power 5 schools. This sneaky team is playing an SEC squad that lost its regular-season finale and hasn’t won a bowl game in seven years. Picks like these could be the difference between winning your 2021 bowl confidence pool and going home empty-handed. You can see who it is and get every pick for every game at SportsLine.
So which teams should you rank in which order in your football confidence pools? And what team outside a Power 5 conference do you need to be all-in on? Visit SportsLine to see the full college football bowl confidence picks, and see what teams won’t disappoint, all from the No. 1 college football expert who crushed sportsbooks this season.
