About
This is a page to document the college football competition organized yearly based on college football teams. In this game the players draft a roster of teams from all FBS, then pick a set of games each week, and are scored based on the performance of those teams.
Rules
This game is analogous to regular fantasy football, except instead of picking players and “playing” them in slots based on their position, you pick teams and “play” them in slots based on their conference.
Roster
Players are organized into pods of 4 players. In the 2026 season, this will be two pods of 4 for 8 total players. There will be inter- and intra-pod competition (see below), but for purposes of drafting teams and roster management, the two pods use completed isolated sets of teams; each pod has one of every FBS team and copies of teams can’t move between pod.
Each player has a roster of 25 teams. This seems well-balanced for 4 players because it allows an average of just under 3x coverage for each conference and a “free agent” pool of 36 teams.
There is no minimum or maximum number of teams per conference a player can have and, in fact, intentionally overloading one conference at the expense of others has been a major factor in the gamesmanship.
Teams are selected in a serpentine draft (1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3,…) where the first round is determined by the lowest to highest finishers from the previous year (see scoring, below). Each player can protect a small number of teams from the previous year. This number may change from year to year if protected teams are upending competitive balance. As of 2022, the number of protected teams is 3, with at least 1 from a Group of 5 (G5) and 1 from the Power 5 (P5). I keep this rule because I like the idea of each player picking a small number of teams to become familiar with and form the core of their roster which they then build their team upon, rather than simply picking the best teams in order.
During the season teams can be dropped and added by request. Priority is given to the lowest performer for the preceding week, who alone may drop and add teams on Sunday, then on Monday the last and next to last performers can drop or add teams on a first-come, first-served, basis, and from Tuesday until Saturday morning anyone can drop or add teams, again on a first-come, first-served basis. There is not currently a limitation on drops or adds per week, but changes may be made in the case of abuses.
Scoring
Weekly
Each player must submit a list of the teams they want to play in each position for the week. There is no hard and fast due date and time, but no team may be selected after their games have started. In theory, players could submit only their pick for Thursday and Friday games before those games start and the remaining teams on Saturday morning, but in practice it is difficult to know if those games will be played without evaluating all the Saturday games as well. Deadlines are currently based on the honor system; players are not required to have Tuesday-Friday games submitted before the game starts, but they must be honest and not pick the game if they had not decided to play the game before seeing the score (or must play it if they were going to play a favorite but saw that team is losing).
Players must pick or pass on one team from each conference, 3 flex teams from the P4 (ACC, Big 10, Big 12, and SEC), 2 flex teams from the G6 (American, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac 12, and Sun Belt), and 1 wild card from any conference, for a total of 16. Thus, the maximum number of teams from a single conference is 4 from a P5 conference or 3 from a G5 conference.
Teams will be selected by a selection form in the cfb application that will be shared with players.
Independent teams will be assigned to a classification of P4 Indepedent or G6 Independent. A P4 Independent can be played in any P4 eligible spot – any of the P4 conferences, any P4 Flex, or wildcard. Likewise the G6 Independent can be played in any G6 spot – any G6 conference, any G6 flex, or wildcard. For the 2026 season, only Notre Dame (P4 independent) and UConn (G6 independent) are available as independents.
Players will receive the net score for each of their teams, e.g. if the team wins 63-14 the player will receive 49 points, and if they lose 63-14, the player will receive -49 points. The sum of all played games will be the player’s sum for the week.
Note: it is mathematically possible to return a negative score for the week. While it has never been done, there have been a few comically, embarrassingly close calls.
Any of the teams that plays a “Week 0” and a Week 1 game can be played, but must be banked for later. Their score can be used in any spot the team can be used, during any of the first 5 weeks, but must be used, even if they lose. If it is not used by week 5, I will remove their wild card pick from Week 5 and replace it with their week 0 score.
Week 0 games can be easily seen yearly in the ESPN schedule on week 1; the true Week 1 game usually start on a Thursday so you can find the Week 0 games on a Saturday with just a handful of games before the big list of games the following Saturday. For the 2026 season, the week 0 games are all games occurring on August 29.
Season Standings
There are multiple branches of scoring over the season: total points, match play, and player-vs-player (PVP).
Total points
The total points scoreboard simply is a running tally of the weekly scores. This is an unadjusted scoring system and is cumulative over the full season.
Match Play
The match play scoreboard gives players a flat number of points based on their finishing place per week. For a 4-player pod, first place for the week receives 4 points, second place receives 2 point, third place receives 1 point, and last receives 0 points. This is biased towards winning weeks rather than consistently being moderately good to differentiate it from the total points scoring.
Beginning with the 2026 season and a 2-pod system, the scoring will be more complex. The players will be ranked 1-8. The baseline will be 1-point increments (1st overall gets 7, 2nd gets 6, etc down to last place which gets 0). The winner of each pod will receive 1 bonus point. Everyone in the pod that has more combined points that week will get 1 bonus point. Finally, the overall winner each week gets 1 bonus point. Therefore the max possible score for a week is 10, but it’s not guaranteed that someone will get 10 if their pod overall scores less.
PVP
PVP competition occurs in two phases: the “regular season” and the “playoffs”. Both occur during the CFB regular season. This game simply takes the weekly score and awards 1 point to whichever player in the matchup scores higher, or 0.5 points to each if they tie.
During the regular season PVP schedule, each player is matched up with another player every week. There will be a round-robin rotation of players where everyone plays each player from the other pod once and each player from their own pod twice for 10 total games. At the end of those 10 games, 6 players will make the playoffs – the best records from each pod, and then the next 4 best records overall. The playoffs will occur during the last 3 weeks of the season. There will be a wildcard round where the 4 wild card teams play each other (#3 vs #6 and #4 vs #5). During this week the #7 and #8 teams will be matched up for a consolation game to determine who gets the #7 spot and who gets the #8. The next week, the winners of the wildcard matches will play the pod winners in the semifinals, and the losers of the wildcard matches will play each other to determine #5 and #6. Then in the last week of the season, the championship will match the semifinal winners to determine the champion and the seminfinal losers will play in the bronze medal game. The playoff format is represented in the image below.
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Others
I periodically browse the results to try to find interesting trends, which I share as they come up. I additionally keep a list of some honorary awards which serve no purpose other than being mildly interesting. My current list (more will follow as I think of them):
| Award | Winner | Week | Value | Description |
| Best Week | Bob | 2022 Week 2 | 539 | Most net points in a week |
| Worst Week | Zach | 2019 | 38 | Fewest net points in a week |
| Best Offensive Week | Bob | 2022 Week 2 | 729 | Most points scored by teams played in a week |
| Best Defensive Week | Bob | 2022 Week 2 | 190 | Fewest points allowed by teams played in a week |
| Bad Luck Award | Bob | 2021 Week 2 | 430 | Most net points without winning the week |
| Really Bad Luck Award | Jacob | 2021 Week 1 | 419 | Most net points to finish 3rd in the week |
| Good Luck Award | Zach | 2021 Week 10 | 198 | Fewest net points to win a week |
| Nailbiter Award | Bob | 2021 Week 1 | 35% | Lowest percentage of total net points scored by the week’s winner |
| Blowout Award | Jacob | 2021 Week 5 | 53% | Highest percentage of total net points scored by the week’s winner |
| Big 12 Award | Bob | 2021 Week 8 | 312 | Most total points allowed by teams to still win a week |
| “What’s a Forward Pass” Award | New | New | New | Fewest points scored by teams to still win a week |
| Biggest Win | Bob | 2019 Week 1 | 72 | Biggest win in a single game |
| Biggest Loss | Bob | 2019 Week 5 | -51 | Biggest loss in a single game |
| Shootout | All | 2021 Week 2 | 1346 | Most total points by all players in a week |
| Defensive Battle | All | 2019 Week 6 | 454 | Fewest points by all players in a week |
The biggest loss column doesn’t necessarily capture the full schadenfreude of some truly horrific luck all players have suffered. Here is a far from comprehensive list of some of the most painful losses suffered by all players.
- 2019 Week 5 (current record holder), Zach: Hawaii beat Nevada 54-3 at Nevada. That’s right – the jetlagged team won by over 7 touchdowns. Nevada was a 3 point favorite.
- 2019 Week 12, Bob: tied for biggest lost against the spread; 11-point favorite Duke was beaten by Syracuse.
- 2021 Week 4, Jacob: Wisconsin (6 point favorites) went into the fourth quarter tied 10-10 with Notre Dame and proceeded to lose 41-13.
- 2021 Week 4, Bob: 31-point favorite Minnesota was beaten 14-10 by Bowling Green, widely considered one of the worst teams in football (hadn’t won more than 4 games in a season since 2015 including an 0-5 2020) and objectively the least experienced team in FBS.
- 2021 Week 6, Zach: Western Michigan, 12 point favorites, lost 45-20.
- 2021 Week 11, Bob: Indiana (7.5 point favorites) lost 38-3 vs Rutgers
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
I would love it if somebody else used and enjoyed this, but no monetizing it! Just for fun!