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College football bowls best bets: Picks for the biggest games

Doug Kezirian, Bill Connelly, Preston Johnson, David M. Hale and Seth Walder provide their best bets for some of this season's bowl games. More games will be added as bowls approach.

Note: Lines from Caesars Sportsbook by William Hill.

Completed games

Capital One Orange Bowl

No. 5 Texas A&M Aggies (-8.5, 65) vs. No. 13 North Carolina Tar Heels

Final: Texas A&M 41, North Carolina 27

(at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida)

Hale: The typical SEC narrative for any bowl that's not a playoff game is an easy one: We don't really care. In fact, Dan Mullen made that explicit after getting blown out by Oklahoma. But for Texas A&M, this one's a little different. There's a point to prove here, that the committee got it wrong, that the Aggies deserved a shot at the big one and that we all missed out on a better semifinal than the Rose Bowl provided. The point isn't that any of that is true so much as Jimbo Fisher is no doubt ensuring his team believes it.