How to Setup a College Fantasy Football League in this Bizarre Season?

To be honest, you have probably thought that between 4 different conferences postponing to the spring plus the schedules all getting changed, that college fantasy football might just be too difficult to navigate this season.

I think there are several different ways to make things work if you are open to a little flexibility and perhaps changing things up a bit from past seasons.

What Teams to Use?

You may have been in leagues in the past that only used power 5 conference players, but with the Power 5 now really the Power 3, my recommendation would be to do a league on Fantrax and use all FBS teams that are still planning to play this fall – ACC, Big 12, SEC, ACC, CUSA, Sun Belt and a few independents. This gives you 70+ teams and also helps overcome the different conference schedules (more on this in a bit).

Or you could just choose to use the Power 3 conferences, but you may need to push your schedule back a week or so. And if you run a league with deep rosters you might scale back your starting roster spots depending on the number of teams in your league, or perhaps scale back your bench spots creating more waiver wire/free agent possibilities.

How to Schedule? Based on how schedules stand now:

Right now there are a smattering of games the weekend of September 5th, but not enough to support a fantasy schedule, especially with most power conference teams still off. Big 12 & ACC teams (along with the rest) mostly begin either Sept 12th or Sept 19th, while the SEC kicks-off Sept 26th. You could choose to wait to start your league Sept 26th, but with deep enough rosters, could easily start Sept 12th/19th just having to do a little additional roster work those first two weeks to adjust for a lighter schedule.

While some teams don’t finish until Dec. 5th, many teams are done Nov 28th. If you run a four-team playoff I’d likely suggest running playoffs the weeks of Nov 21 and Nov 28, although you could push to Dec 5th but teams in the finals may have to do some roster juggling.

What Rosters to Use? Some recommendations:

  • Power 3 only leagues – since the player pool is smaller than the Power 5 I’d recommend either using smaller starting rosters, or allow deeper benches to account for unique scheduling. or you could use smaller starting rosters and smaller benches to create a larger available player pool for those weeks you are in a pinch
  • All 6 conferences leagues – I think you can use a normal starting roster as in past seasons; if you normally use all 130 FBS teams you might make the benches a little smaller to allow for a larger available player pool to help with unique scheduling. Or the flip side of the coin, make benches bigger to allow stashing of players when scheduling gets tough.

I like to run an all FBS league with a fairly deep starting roster as well as bench, normally around 23-25 total spots per team. Barring any changes I plan to keep roster sizes the same, start the weekend of Sept 12th, and run four-team playoffs Nov. 21 and 28. It will make for a shorter season than usual, possibly with fewer options on the waiver wire than some years, but ultimately should run fairly similar to a normal season.

If your league has a unique setup for this season send me an email or tweet at me and let me know!