Succinctly put. This is the crux of it, and the part I was missing.
What are some names?
This is such a clever thing. It makes just plain watching a game seem so one-dimensional. It almost makes me want to learn something about football. 
Do people do this with college teams?
A bunch of friends of mine are considering doing it this year - only two of us know or care anything at all about football, so we expect it to be a hoot. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to be drafting for cutest guys or funniest names. I may do most comically fat players.
Which of course you know means that my fatty team is totally going to beat the guys’ carefully picked team full of know-how and subtlety.
I’ve played fantasy football with the same 10 or so guys for about a decade now, using the Yahoo! website.
It’s basically a way for us to keep in touch with each other (most of us are college buddies or our siblings) since we live in something like 5 or 6 states, and to tease each other. There’s no money involved, unlike a lot of other work-related leagues, and there are only 3-4 of us out of 10 or so that have ever won.
The names of my fantasy teams tend to reflect my nerdy interests outside of sports. Last year, I had the Hobbiton Burglars in one league, and the Mos Eisley Womp Rats in another.
It wouldn’t surprise me if someone does, but I’ve not seen it. I’m not sure that the logistics of college ball (about 100 teams in the BCS division, or whatever they call it these days) lend themselves to fantasy play as easily.
I don’t think any internet sites do it just because a) it’s a much bigger database of players and b) the licensing rights might be tougher because they’re amateurs and c) the gambling aspect of it would make it tougher because they’re amateurs.
*Yes there is fantasy sports based on the teams like pick 'ems and of course March Madness but nothing that involves the selection of individuals, as far as I know.
My ex and his friends were seriously obsessed with fantasy football and still are, I’m sure. They would have a big group meeting to choose their players right before the football season started. There were usually about 12 guys playing and they would partner off two to a team. Then they drew numbers to determine who would get the first “draft” pick to select their roster of players. As the season went on, they could trade players with each other or were allowed to drop a set number of players and select different ones.
Oh and they played for money. Each team of two guys had to pay to play and then the pot went to the winners at the end of the football season. My ex and his partner almost always won.
He and a few friends also had an online game going with a website and paying customers way before ESPN or anyone else got in on the game. This would have been back around 1995. Their game and website was featured in quite a few magazines as the game to play. Then the BIG networks came in with all their money and we couldn’t compete with that so we discontinued it.
Curious about how much money was involved? $10’s… $100’s… $1,000’s?
All of the above. Some do it just for fun, our league is a $50 buy in per team, with the pot split between first, second and third, and a spouse of one of my coworkers is in a League with a grand prize of $5000. I have no doubt there’s ones with five figure payouts.
Here’s a list of Christmas themed team names. And here’s a top ten list.
They do, but it’s not as good. Because there are so many college teams, and because there are so many minor conferences where scoring can get inflated, it tends to be really rare. Even when you limit the player pool to specific conferences, week-to-week matchups can really vary widely (for instance, Alabama may play Ohio St. one week for pretty conservative scores, then the next week plays Lousiana-Lafayette for grossly inflated numbers). College is better suited to a pick-em format (everybody picks that week’s winning teams from a list of 20-30 games).
Very clever!
Going to slide this over to the Game Room.
No wonder I couldn’t find it this morning.
It’s a first! Me in the Game Room!
<Thelma stands with both arms straight up in the air>
CBS runs leagues. I did one last year and had plenty of fun.