2015 NCAA Bowl Prediction Pool with Playoff Bracket

The 2015 NCAA college football bowl season is here again which means it’s time to make your picks and predictions about who you think will win each game. One of the best times of the holiday season (other than giving and receiving gifts) is gathering around the TV and rooting for your Alma mater or hometown football team. This year has the added bonus of not just single bowl games but the second year of a four team playoff to determine the national champion.

 

Features and upgrades for the bowl prediction pool over the previous college football bowl pool manager spreadsheets include the following:

• Easy method to make each bowl game worth a different point value, so the national championship game and semi-finals can be worth more points
• Updated leaderboard tab with new stats
• Separate entry sheet to pass out to participants/co-workers
• Complete NCAA college football bowl schedule with game times and TV stations
• New stat sheet to track each conference's record during bowl season
• The bowl prediction sheets include the football helmet designs for every team (taken from the 2015 college football helmet schedule spreadsheet), their win-loss record, and the logo for all bowl games. I added the helmets so those players who aren't big college football fans can pick a winner based on their favorite helmet design!

Fun Facts: Last year, Fresno State was the only team with a losing record (6-7) while Florida State had the best record at 13-0. This year, there are three teams with identical losing records of 5-7: Minnesota, Nebraska, and San Jose State.

The beauty of this football bowl manager is you will not have to change or modify any formulas yourself (unless you want to of course). Instructions are included within the Excel file and shows you exactly how to add more players (either manually or by using the button that is linked to a macro).

There are now three ways to add participant’s data:

1. Manual entry using the drop down lists
2. Copy and paste from the selection sheet to the bowl manager
3. Use the import macro to automatically import a player’s data into the pool manager by way of a macro (not yet ready to use, check back soon)

I will explain how it works in a later post. But if you were wondering about the nuts and bolts, my spreadsheet uses the rank without ties formula: =RANK(num, ref) + COUNTIF(range,num)-1. in column A, for bowl games with really long names (I’m looking at you San Diego County Credit union Poinsettia Bowl) I use the excel shortcut alt+enter to add text to the next line.

To download the college bowl pool spreadsheets simply click the link below which will take you to the box.com, where the file is hosted. Next, click on the “Download” link in the upper right hand corner. That’s it!

2015 College Football Bowl Pool Manager.xlsm download
2015 College Football Bowl Prediction Entry Form.xls download

Here's a quick screen capture video to show you quickly how the spreadsheet works and how to insert new player columns:


Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, find any bugs, or have any suggestions for improvement. I love that people are using this Bowl Prediction Game to help raise money for charity, that's so awesome to hear! What team are you rooting for?