2025 College Football Bowl Pick'em and Playoff Bracket

It's the most wonderful time of the year - college football bowl season! The college football conference championships were played this past weekend which means the 2025 NCAA college football bowl season is here again. It’s time to make your picks and predictions about who you think will win each bowl game. One of the best times of the holiday season is being able to talk trash to your relatives about their terrible bowl picks.

This year has the added bonus of the new, expanded college football playoff - it's the second year of the twelve team playoff. As such, I've included a college football playoff bracket within this Excel file. There is the option to play just the bowls, just the playoff bracket, or both! If you've used my Super Bowl Squares template, you'll be familiar with how it works - there is a setup screen where you pick your options then click a button and the spreadsheet adjusts to how you want to play.

The bowl prediction sheets include the football helmet designs for every team (taken from my 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!

There are multiple ways to play college football bowl pick'em. What I call "regular" is every game is worth 1 point. The other way I call Confidence Picks: each player "bet" points 1 to 35 on each game based on how confident they are their choice is correct. Player with the most points wins. Example: player bets 35 points and gets it correct = 35 points. Bets 25 points on another game, gets it wrong = 0 points awarded.


For the college football playoff bracket, the pool manager can decide if each game is worth the same amount (1 point) or if each round the points increase: round 1 = 1 point, round 2 = 2 points, etc.

Download the 2025 CFP Bowl Prediction Pool Manager.xlsm file here

2025 Bowl Game Trivia

• Second year of 12 team playoff bracket
• 35 bowl games with 70 teams
• 3 teams with a losing record (5-7)
• Best record: Indiana 13-0
• Birmingham Bowl features two teams from the same conference (SUN vs SUN)
• 11 teams with 6-6 record (18 teams last year)
• 18 teams with double digit wins (23 in 2023, 16 in 2022, 23 in 2021, in 2020 there were 5, 22 in 2019)
• Teams with winning records that declined bowl games: Iowa State at 8-4, Kansas State at 6-6 and Notre Dame at 10-2
• Other teams that declined bowls: Florida State, Auburn, UCF, Baylor, Kansas, Rutgers, Temple
• Lopsided matchups (in terms of records): Utah 10-2 vs Nebraska 7-5, Wake Forest 8-4 vs Miss st 5-7
• Does anyone actually want to watch this?
• 6-6 Georgia Southern vs 5-7 App State (already played this year)
• 5-7 Rice vs 6-6 Texas State

Download the CFP Pool Manager and Single Entry Form here

Have fun! As always, I welcome any feedback or ideas for improvement.