Going to College (Football)

Written by The Fool on September 29, 2004

If your fantasy baseball season has gone anything like the Fool's, August and its promise of fantasy football couldn't come soon enough.

But for the Fool, August this year brought a double football dip -- professional and college.

Thanks to the success of our experiment with fantasy college basketball the last two seasons and, just as important, the willingness of one of our friends to coordinate the effort the Fool is tackling fantasy college football this fall.

It will be years before you find an online service to help you run such a league. The legality of using college players, their names and statistics for what essentially amounts to gambling is sketchy at best.

Even the popular EA Sports video game NCAA Football pushes it by using nearly everything but real college athletes' names; it's also why you can't purchase official college jerseys with active players' names on the back. If money is involved with the names and likenesses of college athletes, it's a touchy situation.

That's why the Fool is fortunate to have friends with plenty of time on their hands which is essential to starting a fantasy college league.

Want to give it a try? Here are some tips:

• Pick a conference or two at the most. Using the entire NCAA pool will make the teams in your league too competitive. It will also make keeping track of the stats a nightmare for your commissioner, who instead of just checking one conference could end up surfing all over the Internet to find numbers for one team's backfield.
• Set up your own Web site to keep everyone in touch and informed. There are a number of free options, especially with the popularity of Web logs such as Blogger or TypePad. You can have everything you like from a free fantasy site such as Yahoo! message boards, rosters, schedules and a list of rules except for the stats service.
• Conduct an e-mail draft. This has worked well for the Fool and friends in college basketball, and we're getting ready to start it for football. Think about it: You probably already have at least one or two fantasy NFL drafts scheduled for this month; trying to fit in another with a date that's agreeable to eight or more folks would prove near impossible. With an e-mail draft, you use the "reply all" function with everyone in the league, make your pick and pass it along. If everyone is fairly diligent and prepared, it should take less than a week.
• Make sure you have a dedicated, trustworthy commissioner. A commish with a lot of time on his hands also is nice. In the case of our college venture, our guiding force is unemployed -- truly the best option for any fantasy league.

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Check out the Fantasy Fool's ACC Fantasy Football Web. And yes, that is the Fool in first place - nothing new there.

John Taylor's Fantasy Fool column appears from time to time in the sports section of The Washington Times.

-- Written by The Fool on September 29, 2004