College Football Pickem League Primer: Play Free & Win Big!

College football popularity has grown exponentially in recent years.  The BCS era created fantastic matchups and new TV networks gave fans access to their favorite teams and conferences.  The result?  The sport has never been more popular, or generated so much revenue.  The fantasy aspect of college football is no exception.  With more Fantasy and Pickem leagues being born every year, the average fan has numerous options when it comes to what type of league he is interested in, how much time he wants to invest, what he’s willing to risk to play and how much he can win.  This primer should help with these decisions and get you signed up in a great league before the season kicks off.

Pickem

Most people are vaguely familiar with Fantasy football leagues, but few are as knowledgeable about Pickem.  The general concept behind Pickem is to select the winners of college football games each week and earn points for doing so.  Some leagues use straight winners, while others use spreads.  Some use confidence points to allow you to score more points for certain games, while others keep them all equal.  Still others introduce unique rules like one game that you must get right each week or bonus points for choosing multiple games right.  The exact number of games, how you select them and how many points you score will vary from league to league, but the purpose is to pick em right, hence the name Pickem.

The advantage of Pickem over a Fantasy League is primarily the time commitment.  Pickem allows the more casual fan or the die hard fan with a hectic schedule to participate in a league without it being a major time drain.  Picks must be selected each week, but can take as little as five minutes.  In addition, some leagues provide a prize for weekly winners, or whoever does the best that week.  This way if you miss a week of picks, or aren’t doing well overall, you can still play for those weekly prizes.

Here is the breakdown of some of the leagues out there.  While you can always create your own, these have the groundwork already in place.

ESPN

games.espn.go.com/college-football-pickem/2014/en/

The current king of sports entertainment has offered a Pickem league for the past few years.  While hard statistics are difficult to come by, it is nearly certain that this is the largest league out there and growing.  In 2012, this league had over 150,000 participants while last year they had over 200,000.  While there is major competition for prizes in this league (at most only 17 winners over the course of the season) if you are able to score one it is significant.  The overall winner takes home a $2000 Best Buy card while the runner up gets $1000.  Weekly winners also earn $100, also to Best Buy.  There are numerous groups to join here, but they are all competing for the same prize money, so it is all really one league.  One interesting rule for ESPN is that you must select winners of all ten games provided, so everyone will be picking the same games.  Many leagues offer a larger set of games and allow users to pick their favorite five or ten, providing some variability.

Yahoo Sports

football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/college

While this is perhaps the second largest collection of college Pickem users, there is a significant drop off in the organization and infrastructure to this league.  The major difference is that while ESPN runs a league, Yahoo simply hosts a platform to allow users to create their own leagues.  Different leagues have different rules, and there is a great forum section that allows users to advertise for their league or search for one to join.  Some collect money to play and offer prizes, but you are going on the honor system as Yahoo is not involved with any prizes.  Many other leagues available here are free.

CBS Sports

www.cbssports.com/fantasy/football/games/office-pool-manager

While CBS is primarily set up for NFL Pickem, they do offer an office pool manager tool that allows users to set up their own leagues using NFL, college or a combination of games.  The rules can also be customized to a degree, allowing for spreads, straight winners and a few different point schemes.  While the tool seems a step up from Yahoo’s, the major disadvantage here is that you need someone to run it, and there are no prizes unless you provide them.  If you’re the guy that wants to be the commissioner, great!  If not, setting up your league, recruiting players, collecting prize money and keeping things running can be a lot more work than most Pickem players are interested in.

CFPickemX

www.CFPickemX.com

A disclaimer here, this league was created by the author, and while he intended to list a bunch of independent leagues here, there don’t seem to be any other easily locatable ones still operating.  The College Football Pickem eXperience is set up similar to ESPN’s league in that it is free to play and all players are competing for the same prizes, but individual custom leagues can be formed as well.  The major difference is that because the number of users is currently less than one hundred, the odds are much better to win.  First place takes home $300 to Sports Authority and the runner up grabs $75.  In addition, CFPickemX uses the lock rule, which means you are randomly assigned one game per week you must get right in order to score points.  This creates a bit more excitement when watching your lock game on Saturday.