The rules

Every manager in a league starts with the same $1,000 of play money and the same market of 138 FBS programs. You buy the teams you believe in, sell the ones you don't, and your fund's value moves with real results all season.

There is no real money involved anywhere in CFX — no buy-ins, no wagering, no payouts. The only thing at stake is the leaderboard.

Before Week 1, you spend your $1,000 however you like at each team's preseason price. Load up on a few blue chips, spread thin across the bargain bin, or anything between. Whatever cash you don't spend simply stays as cash and counts toward your total.

During the preseason the market is wide open — buy and sell freely while you settle on a book. Once Week 1 arrives, the weekly trading window applies.

Each program sits in one of eight tiers, assigned by preseason ranking. The tier sets the team's opening price and its dividend rate, and it never changes during the season — even if the team's price drifts well outside the band it started in.

Note the trade-off: the cheaper the tier, the higher the dividend. A Speculative Stock pays five times the rate of a Blue Chip.

This is the default template. A league's commissioner can rename tiers, redraw the price bands and change the dividend rates during setup, so check your own league's board.

After each week's games, every team is repriced by a percentage that depends on whether it won and — this is the part that matters — how highly ranked its opponent was. Your own ranking is irrelevant.

Read the table and you'll see the strategy: beating a top-five team is worth +10%, while losing to one costs only −3%. Playing up is rewarded. Losing to an unranked opponent is the worst outcome on the board at −6%.

Worked example. You hold Kansas State at $138. They beat a team ranked #3. That's a +10% week, so the price becomes $151.80 for everyone in the league.

Rankings come from the AP Poll released just before that week's kickoffs, and stay locked for the whole week. A bye is 0% — no movement either way. Prices are not capped: a team on a run can climb past its tier's original price band, and a collapsing one can fall below it.

College football doesn't keep to Saturdays — there are Sunday, Monday and even Tuesday games during the season. Rather than a fixed weekly slot that the schedule would eventually break, your commissioner opens and closes the market each week.

The market is open whenever your commissioner opens it. Your commissioner opens the market once a week's games are in and prices have moved, then closes it before the next slate kicks off. So you always trade against updated prices, and the board is read-only the rest of the time.

Buying is free. Selling carries a 2% brokerage feetaken out of the proceeds, so churning your book has a real cost. You can't spend more cash than you hold, or sell a team you don't own.

Hold a team for 3 consecutive weeks and it becomes dividend eligible. From then on it pays you a dividend every time it wins — nothing on a loss or a bye.

The payment is the team's post-update price multiplied by its tier's dividend rate, and it lands in your cash balance on top of the price gain. Dividends never affect the team's market value, so they don't dilute anyone else's holding.

Worked example. You've held a Growth Stock (1.25%) for three weeks. It wins in Week 4 against a top-five opponent, moving from $100 to $110. You collect $1.38 in cash on top of the $10 of value.

Selling resets the clock. Buy the same team back later and you start the 3-week count again from zero — which is the main reason not to trade purely on impulse.

Before the conference championship games, the market freezes permanently. No more buying or selling — whatever you're holding is what you ride to the end of the season.

Any team that is dividend eligible at the moment of the freeze pays triple dividendsfor every postseason win. Teams that hadn't reached eligibility still move in price as normal, but pay nothing.

The postseason — conference championships, bowls and the playoff — uses exactly the same scoring table as the regular season. No special rules.

Your fund value is your cash plus the current value of everything you hold. The leaderboard ranks every manager in the league by that number, and it updates after each weekly run.

Whoever has the highest fund value when the National Championship ends wins the season.