As you would expect, daily fantasy college football is very similar to daily fantasy NFL. Because of the similarities, a background in daily fantasy football is very helpful. We’ll go over a few of the similarities that the college football side of the game shares with the NFL side, and also a few of the differences.
Team Rosters
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NFL rosters consist of nine players: QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, TE, Flex, and DST. The CFB roster is similar, but with a little bit of a twist to make things a bit more interesting when it comes to roster construction. CFB rosters also consist of nine players, but instead of a DST, DraftKings gives us the ability to roster a second QB. The salary cap is the same as it is for NFL, $50,000.
How you approach roster construction will depend on the type of games you’re playing, which we will cover in a later lesson. The second QB opens up a lot of options and allows a higher expected point total, which makes daily fantasy college football a ton of fun.
NCAAF vs NFL
One of the biggest differences between college football and the NFL is the amount of points scored in a given game. In the NFL, a team that scores 35 points in a given week has a chance to be one of the highest scoring teams that week. Last season, 28 different NCAA teams averaged 35+ points per game and 50+ points by a team in a given week isn’t a rarity. College football is full mismatches as the difference in talent from the top to the bottom of any conference is much more extreme than the talent difference between any two NFL teams.
The major scores are more frequent in the first couple weeks of the season, as major programs like Ohio State and Oregon will play smaller programs like SMU and Bowling Green to “warm up” for the season. These games are very valuable to us as DFS players because they are generally somewhat predictable. We obviously don’t know when a team is going to score 70 points, but we can get an idea of when a blowout is going to happen and we can exploit it. Early in the season, coaches tend to let their first string players play deeper in to games, even when the game is out of reach. Teams pile on the points and, as a result, you can pile on the fantasy points be exploiting the great matchups.
Research
Just like every other fantasy sport, sound research is vital to being successful. As the DFS industry grows, more and more sites are offering content to help with lineup construction. As always, never follow the touts blindly; figure out a process that works for you and stick to it consistently and use the tout articles as a loose guideline to give you an idea who you might want to look at. The more information you take in, the bigger edge you can gain over your competition, just make sure what you’re reading is from a respectable source.
Vegas will always be a viable source of information when it comes to any DFS sport. Useful information like Over/Under, point spread, and player props can all be used to project a certain team or player and get an idea of what will happen on a given Saturday.
Continue Reading CFB Training Camp
CFB Rookie – Lesson 01 – Welcome to Daily Fantasy College Football
NEXT LESSON – CFB Rookie – Lesson 02 – Scoring Tips and Tricks
CFB Rookie – Lesson 03 – Using Player Cards to Build Lineups
CFB Rookie – Lesson 04 – Drafting Lineups for Different Game Types
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