If you’re reading this article, you’re likely a Fantasy Football junkie. It may have started out innocently enough: joining a league with your buddies, having the draft all together at a friend’s house, your friend drafting a player who retired 2 years ago. You all liked football, so it was just something to do for fun and bragging rights with your friends. That’s how it started for most of us. Then you found you loved it so much you joined another league. And then another. Sheesh, and then another! Soon you wanted to play all year round, so you joined a dynasty league.
That was fun for awhile, but you wanted to dig a little deeper into the upcoming rookies to gain an advantage over your leaguemates. In doing so, you found yourself in the devy world. And you started to enjoy the thrill of scouting these players while they were in college, being the first to discover how good a player was, and developing “your guys”. And now you’re hooked. You just can’t get enough of this new world you’ve entered into. So you’re asking yourself, “what’s the next step? How can I continue down this rabbit hole into the wonderland that is fantasy football and college player scouting?” Well look no further, because I’ve got your answer: Campus to Canton Leagues!
What is a Campus to Canton League?
Campus to Canton leagues are a relatively new league type that has really started to gain traction in the past year or so. With this newfound buzz you may be asking yourself, what is a Campus to Canton League? Great question! At its roots, a Campus to Canton league is two leagues with separate championships under a single umbrella. The first league is your standard dynasty league. You draft a team of current NFL players and have these players on your roster until you either trade them, or they retire and ride off into the sunset after many years of service to you and your squad. To replenish your roster, you draft the incoming rookies each year. There is a championship game for this “side” of the Campus to Canton league. But here’s where a Campus to Canton league starts to differ.
The second league consists of players currently in college. This can be anyone from that big name quarterback being touted as the next (insert name of generational QB here) all the way down to that small school gem that no one except you has heard about, and everyone in between. If this sounds like the taxi squad of a devy league where you can stash college players to you, that’s because it is similar. The difference however, lies in the scoring. In a traditional devy league, you draft a certain number of college players to your taxi squad, but you do not actually receive any points for these players’ productivity. They just sort of…sit there. And you have to wait until they reach the NFL draft until they can actually be of use to your fantasy team. But what fun is that?
This is where a Campus to Canton league really shines. You should be rewarded for drafting well, don’t you think? After all, you found that diamond in the rough first! He’s “your guy” and you want to be rewarded for how well he’s doing. Well in a campus to canton league, you can!
How is a Campus to Canton League Different from Devy?
The Campus “side” of the Campus to Canton League is essentially College Fantasy Football. The players on your college team score you actual points every week based on their performance in each week’s game, just like on the NFL side. So when you draft that QB who breaks records on his way to winning the Heisman Trophy, you get rewarded for having him on your team. When you draft that incoming freshman RB who sets the single game rushing record for his conference and ends up on the All-American team as a freshman, guess what? You get rewarded for that too! We’re a society of instant gratification, we want everything now and we don’t like to wait. I’m the same way! So why wait for 3 years to get rewarded for the players you put all the hard work into to scout, research, and draft? Why wait until their NFL rookie season to get the points those players are scoring while they’re tearing up the college ranks?
(Why Wait Till Sunday?) With a Campus to Canton league, you don’t have to!
Now you may be saying to yourself, “Okay Colin, I get it. You’re right, I do want to be rewarded for all of my hard work finding college players. But what about those players from tiny Group of 5 schools who will never really have much of a fantasy impact on my dynasty squad, but are big stat producers in college? If we get points for our players’ production in college, and if this is essentially a College Fantasy Football team, wouldn’t those players be valuable too?” Great question! Yes, those players are valuable too. If you had the QB from that MAC school that throws for 300+ yards every game in your starting lineup, you’re getting those points too.
This is where the true fun begins and the nuances to a Campus to Canton league start to take shape. This is where you need to decide what your goal is for this league. Do I only care about the Canton side of this league and want to treat my Campus team like a triple A farm team in baseball and only collect players who have a real shot at contributing at the NFL level? Or do I want to try to win on both sides of the Campus to Canton League and diversify my teams a little bit more? This is where personal preference and league settings come into play (check out Matt Bruening’s article for more on that).
The Best Thing About Campus to Canton
One of the best things about a Campus to Canton League is that, more than any other type of fantasy football league, you can mold your team however you want. There is no “right way” to play Campus to Canton. You can win on the Canton side, you can win on the Campus side, you can win on both! (Or lose on both, but no one wants that). When your Canton team is 1 player away from becoming that juggernaut that other teams are terrified to see on the schedule, you can trade Campus assets to get that player without sacrificing the depth of your Canton team. Or, when you hit on the incoming freshman that you drafted 3 years in a row and just need that one mega-producer at QB to really make you feel like your Campus team is unbeatable, you can move an aging asset on the Canton side and make a run at the title on your Campus side.
No matter what your strategy is, you can be successful in a Campus to Canton league. So if you’re ready to take that next step in fantasy football, expand your knowledge, and test yourself in new ways, then look no further than a Campus to Canton League – and Campus2Canton.com is here to help! Our rankings, articles, and podcasts are here to help guide you through this exciting new journey. It can allow you to continue to feed that year-long fantasy football appetite. And who knows, maybe it will even cause you to develop a love for College Football that you never even knew you had.
