A Harris Poll uncovered that college football is the third most popular sport in the US among adults, with pro football #1.  So why don’t the number of owners match up between the two fantasy games?  Chances are if you have played or ran a NFL Fantasy league, then you are already 90% of the way to knowing how to start a Fantasy College League.  As the CFO (Chief Fantasy Officer) for FantasyCollegeBlitz.com, let me explain the subtle differences between the two games and how you can get your own Fantasy College Football League started.

Do we draft players from all Div 1A schools?

There are 120 college football teams in the FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) broken into 6 BCS conferences, 5 Non-BCS conferences and 4 Independent schools.  So which college teams do you include? Obviously including all the schools is an option that allows your league to draft any player without discrimination to the conference.  This format should be used with a league filled with hard-core college football fans, as there is a ridiculous amount of players to track and research.  Many say that a negative to this is that the player pool is so deep that starting lineups will be stacked with studs at every position.  As we all know, there are great players on non-BCS schools.  However, many see the pool as too large to manage properly to include those schools into a fantasy league.

A popular alternative is to limit the player pool to BCS or Big 6 conferences (Big Ten, Big East, Big Twelve, SEC, ACC, Pac 10).  Of course, you can always include an “at-large” non-BCS school if your league chooses but the goal is to limit the player pool to make the game not be super-stars versus super-stars.  This type of league is more appropriate for owners that enjoy college football, are new to fantasy college football, or just love fantasy football and want to dip their toes into the college pool.  Let’s face it, these owners don’t care too much about the running back of Arkansas State.

While these are the two most popular formats, technically you can include any schools you want.   Certainly conference-specific leagues are out there for leagues with owners that only care about their team’s conference and a couple others due to geography.  You could also have owners vote on the teams to include and change it every year if you want to exclude the schools that are fantasy wastelands and include schools with fantasy talent (see Bowling Green, Boise State, Fresno State, etc.).  The main point to take from this is to cater the league to your owners and remember you can always tweak it the following year if your owners prefer/demand a change.

What about player scoring?

I recommend setting up the scoring similar to what you already use in your pro leagues with a few minor adjustments.  It is worth noting that college stars tend to put up much larger stats per game than pro players so you could make rushing points 1 for ever 15 yards instead of the standard 1 for every 10.  The idea behind this is to keep the scoring down to what people might expect in their traditional format. The Quarterback is a position that you might adjust as well since star college QBs tend to run for more yardage and throw fewer interceptions compared to their NFL counterparts.  Once again, just a few things to think about when setting up the scoring and customizing it to your preferences.

How the heck do I score the games?

For those of you who have been playing fantasy pro football for as long as I have can remember having to calculate the weekly scoring manually using box scores.  One of the reasons why I think the college version of fantasy football has been slow to adapt has been the lack of available quality commissioner services.  Up until recently, commissioners had little choice but to score old school paper and pencil. Fortunately, those days are quickly coming to an end. In the last few years there has been several commissioner services brought on-line offering just about all the features we enjoy from the pro game.  We recommend U-Sports.com .  It is thru this site that we will be hosting the Fantasy College Experts League for 2008.

Now for a bit of a twist, our associates at Consensus Draft Services have started their College Football Breakout League.  Rather than recreate the wheel, John Huss wrote an earlier article about them here . Since we know that people can’t resist being in multiple leagues, I highly suggest giving this one a try.

How Do I Make a Schedule?

You think NFL bye weeks are tough to manage? Take a deep breath on the random college bye weeks. The best approach to this question is to start backwards with your fantasy league’s Championship Game.  Based on which teams you have decided to include in your league, you want to ensure that at least 60-70% of the college teams are playing on this weekend.  This brings us to another issue as college football can have games played on any day of the week.

My experience says good practice is to have your fantasy week run from Tuesday thru Monday, especially with the Sunday Night games this year.  Once you have your Championship Game set, work backwards to set up weeks for the playoffs and then you will know when your season should end.

Here is a sample schedule to consider:

Week 1 (Thursday Aug 28th-Sept 3rd)

Week 2 – Week 10…each week afterwards (Saturday Sept 6th – Nov 4th)

Playoffs Week 1 (Nov 6th thru Nov 10th)

Playoffs Week 2 (Nov 13th thru Nov 17th)

Championship (Nov 20th thru Nov 24th)