I think a smart thing to do—or at least a fun thing you can justify—is to adjust your strategy in betting pools depending on the size of the pool. An example, using bowl season: I’m (allegedly) joining a pool run by a friend’s cousin, and I can’t imagine the pool is gigantic. In that one, I’m going to pick very chalkily. On ESPN, though? Where the only way to get close to the top of the leaderboard is to be perfect, or extremely close? I’m going to pick some underdogs.
The idea here is that when you have a pool of, say, 100 people, others will outsmart themselves enough that you’ll have some space in the middle, picking favorites. When the pool is in the thousands? There, you’re better off positioning yourself as one of very few people with your specific interests. If the chance of favorites winning is, say, 2%, but 5% of pickers have that scenario, that isn’t very good value. You’d rather be among the 0.1% of pickers in on a 0.5% scenario. It’s not quite that simple, but that’s the thinking here.
For the chalky set of picks, here’s how Movelor lines up the games, with confidence points. Why Movelor, instead of the markets? Well, we do think the markets are more accurate, but we’d like to differentiate a little bit, and we’re curious how Movelor will do against the markets. This is one way to test it out.
| Winner | Confidence Points |
| SMU | 43 |
| Oregon | 42 |
| LSU | 41 |
| Penn State | 40 |
| UTSA | 39 |
| Ohio State | 38 |
| South Alabama | 37 |
| Kansas | 36 |
| James Madison | 35 |
| San Jose State | 34 |
| Notre Dame | 33 |
| Kansas State | 32 |
| Syracuse | 31 |
| Michigan/Alabama Winner | 30 |
| Ohio | 29 |
| Iowa State | 28 |
| Florida A&M | 27 |
| Tennessee | 26 |
| Texas A&M | 25 |
| Georgia | 24 |
| UCF | 23 |
| Clemson | 22 |
| Utah | 21 |
| Minnesota | 20 |
| Texas | 19 |
| Troy | 18 |
| West Virginia | 17 |
| Oklahoma | 16 |
| Louisville | 15 |
| Miami (FL) | 14 |
| Texas Tech | 13 |
| Old Dominion | 12 |
| Michigan | 11 |
| Jacksonville State | 10 |
| Fresno State | 9 |
| Boise State | 8 |
| Virginia Tech | 7 |
| Auburn | 6 |
| Appalachian State | 5 |
| Rice | 4 |
| Georgia State | 3 |
| Northern Illinois | 2 |
| Toledo | 1 |
For the less chalky set, we’re mostly taking the favorites above, but with 14 the expected number of upsets, we’re going to take seven underdogs. Thoughts behind the seven we’re taking:
- USF: Syracuse is undergoing transition, and USF’s shown a high ceiling at times.
- Georgia Tech: Georgia Tech seems to have some momentum as a program, and while we like where UCF’s at, this seems more like a routine season for them.
- Arkansas State: This is just a tossup. We didn’t take a lot of tossup upsets, but this helped get us to seven when we went down the list.
- Eastern Michigan: South Alabama’s been overvalued by a lot of people at a lot of times this year.
- Bowling Green: This is partly just for fun. BGSU’s wins tend to be exciting.
- USC: USC’s going to have more talent than Louisville, and while Louisville is the better team, USC probably isn’t as much of a mess as they’ve been made out to be.
- Rutgers: Miami, on the other hand, we still believe to be a mess, and we could see Rutgers playing a little more to win with the game at Yankee Stadium.
