College fantasy football plays a lot like NFL fantasy — draft a roster of real players, set a starting lineup each week, and score points from what they actually do on the field. This guide walks through the whole loop on SNS, from creating your first league to setting your Week 1 starters, so you can go from zero to your first live-scored Saturday in one sitting.
Step 1: Create or join a league
Everything starts at the Leagues hub, where you can create a new league or join one a friend has already started. Creating a league makes you its commissioner, which means you set the rules everyone else plays under. If you'd rather just play, ask whoever is organizing your group for an invite instead of starting your own.
Step 2: Set your league's rules before draft day
As commissioner, you'll choose a handful of settings up front — decide these before you invite people so nobody drafts under the wrong assumptions:
- Scoring format: standard or PPR (points per reception). See PPR vs Standard Scoring if you're not sure which to pick.
- League format: redraft (everyone starts fresh every year), keeper (carry a set number of players forward), or dynasty (keep your whole roster and draft only incoming players).
- Draft format: a snake draft (pick order reverses each round) is the default and the simplest for a first league; auction drafts (everyone bids a shared budget on every player) are also supported if your group wants more control over who lands where.
- Roster size and bench spots. A typical starting lineup is 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 TE, 1 Flex and 1 Kicker, with 6–8 bench spots — see Setting Up Your Team for the full breakdown.
If your league is coming over from another platform as a keeper or dynasty format, you can import your existing roster rather than re-drafting everyone from scratch.
Step 3: Draft your roster
On draft day, managers take turns picking real FBS players — Power 4 and Group of 5 both — until every roster is full. In a snake draft, whoever picks first in Round 1 picks last in Round 2, so the order keeps rebalancing. Set a reminder for your draft time — miss your slot and an auto-pick fills your roster for you, usually not as well as you would have. A few basics that make a real difference once you're actually on the clock: prioritize running backs and wide receivers early since they're scarcer than quarterbacks, know your league's scoring format before the draft starts, and don't draft blind — bring at least a rough set of rankings. The full walkthrough is in Draft Strategy 101.
Step 4: Set your weekly lineup
Once the season starts, your roster splits into starters (who can score) and bench (who can't, until you move them in). Before each week's games kick off, set which players are active in each roster slot. Miss the deadline and whoever was set last week usually stays locked in — so it's worth building a habit of checking your lineup a day or two before kickoff, especially around bye weeks. Start/Sit Decisions covers how to actually make the close calls.
Step 5: Work the waiver wire and make trades
Your roster isn't fixed after the draft. Players who go undrafted — or get dropped by another manager — sit on the waiver wire, and you can claim them using FAAB (a fixed bidding budget you spend across the season) to fill needs as injuries, breakouts and bye weeks come up. You can also trade directly with other managers to fix a positional imbalance. See FAAB Bidding Secrets and Trade Value Guide — or run a proposed deal through the Trade Analyzer before you send it.
Step 6: Chase the playoffs
The regular season runs Weeks 1–13, with your win-loss record (and total points as a tiebreaker) deciding playoff seeding. The top 4–6 teams advance into a single-elimination bracket over the final few weeks of the season, and the last manager standing wins the league championship. Making the Playoffs covers qualification in more detail, and Playoff Roster Strategy covers how to build a roster that's actually built to peak there.
Make it yours
None of this is required to compete, but it's worth five minutes: SNS lets you set a custom team name and pick a school affiliation from your account settings. It doesn't affect scoring, but a real identity makes the league chat and the weekly matchups a lot more fun than facing "Team 7" all season.
Quick-start checklist
- Create or join a league at the Leagues hub.
- Confirm the scoring format, league format, and roster settings before draft day.
- Show up to the draft with at least a rough set of rankings.
- Set your lineup every week before kickoff — don't let a bye week or an injury catch you with an empty slot.
- Check the waiver wire after games finish, and don't be afraid to make a trade that solves a real need.
- Play for the last few weeks of the regular season like they matter — because they decide your playoff seed.
That's the whole loop. It costs nothing to create or join a league, and the same core mechanics — draft, start, waiver, trade, make the playoffs — repeat every season, so the second league you play is always easier than the first.