How to Play College Football: Perfect Season

Six spins, six signings, one NIL budget, one season. Free to play in your browser, no download and no account needed.

The six spots

Four of them take one position each. The two FLEX spots each take a running back, a receiver or a tight end, whoever the wheel puts in front of you. There's no tight end spot of its own, so a good tight end is a choice you make in the flex, not one the roster makes for you: sign one for a two-way front, or load up on receivers and throw it around.

The rules

1. A wheel gives you a year, then a school from that year. Sign one player off it.
2. Six spins fill six spots, and you have $11M of NIL money. It won't cover six stars, so every spin is a question of whether this is the one you spend on.
3. Don't like the draw? Re-spin the year or the school for $500K, then $1M, then $1.5M, off your budget.
4. Players with a history together build chemistry, which lifts the whole roster. A quarterback and the receiver he actually threw to is the strongest tie there is, then teammates on the same team the same year, then brothers, then two men who played at the same school in different years, then a shared head coach, a shared home state and, last, a shared conference.
5. You can sign at most two running backs, so the second flex has to be a receiver or a tight end. Some players are listed at two positions, from what they really did that season, and count as either one.
6. Shape matters as much as talent. A quarterback who can't throw wastes your receivers, and stars alongside nobody get found out.
7. Play all 12 games. Finish in the top 12 of the country and you're in the College Football Playoff. Where you finish is your record first, then how far you won by and who you played: two teams at 10-2 are separated by the schedule, and the one that beat somebody ranks ahead.
8. Once your team is genuinely good, it is everybody's biggest game. Against the strongest teams on your schedule the other side raises theirs, and the better you are the more they raise it. It costs an ordinary season almost nothing. It's why running all twelve is hard.
9. It's a real twelve-team bracket. Five plays twelve, six plays eleven, seven plays ten and eight plays nine; the top four seeds skip the first round and wait for the winners. You see the whole field, and it advances a round at a time around you, so who you get next is whoever actually won. The field is selected, not dealt: every team in it qualified on the same measure you did, so nobody is in the bracket on a season that would have left you out of it.
10. One playoff loss ends it. Miss the field but win at least six games and you go bowling instead, from the New Year's Six down to the smaller ones, sorted by where you finished. There's even a RunThe.GG Bowl if the draw lands your way.
11. Win everything without losing and you finish undefeated national champions. That's the perfect season, and it's rare.

Conference Draft

The same game with the wheel locked to one of the Power 5: the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC or Pac-12. Every spin comes from that conference, and from the teams that were actually in it that season, so a Pac-12 draft is the real Pac-12 rather than wherever its members ended up. Each conference has its own leaderboard, because six spins from one conference and six from the whole country aren't the same competition. It needs a free account, which is the same thing those five leaderboards need to be worth setting a time on.

How you're ranked

There are no conference standings to climb. You're ranked the way a real team is: on your record, on how comfortably you won, and on who you beat. Beat a ranked team and you move. Beat a top-five team and you move a long way.

Two losses don't end it, and three nearly do. A 10-2 team almost always makes the field, and one that won its games by three touchdowns is ranked well ahead of one that scraped home every week. Go 11-1 and the bye usually follows; go 12-0 and you're first in the country. Below that the line is hard rather than closed: a 9-3 that beat everybody in front of it by four touchdowns can still sneak in, and a 10-2 that squeaked past a soft slate can still be left out.

The final ranking is settled on the field rather than in the poll. The champion finishes first, the team it beat finishes second, and so on down the bracket. Miss the playoff and you finish wherever your season put you.

Team overall

One number for the roster you built, and it's exactly what the simulation scores a week with: what your six score a game, multiplied by your chemistry, multiplied by how well the six fit together. All three are printed on your results screen, and the answer is the overall itself, so you can check it by hand and you always know which of the three to go and improve.

There's no maximum. It is points a game, so there's no number it can't pass and nothing is scaled or capped on the way to the screen.

Every ten points is about a win and a half. Around 70 is a losing season. Around 80 is bowl-eligible, seven or eight wins. Above 90 is a real team: nine wins and a playoff case. By 95 it is ten wins and a seed you can defend. Above 100 is a contender, and the range that plays for the national title.

Those numbers used to be far kinder and far closer together, and the game was worse for it. A roster at 70 still won eight games and one at 100 won under three more, so the twenty-odd points a draft actually moves you were worth about two wins, and one roster's record wandered by as much season to season. Everybody finished 8-4, 9-3 or 10-2 whatever they had drafted. The opponent is stronger now and the teams on your schedule are closer together, which together mean the roster you built is the thing deciding the record.

The bracket gets harder round by round, and how much harder is set by your overall. Who you play is the bracket's business: the field is drawn on Selection Sunday, seeded so a one is a better season than a twelve, and it advances the way a bracket advances. What your rating decides is how far above you each round is pitched. A team that scraped into the field can win a first-round game; the team left standing in the final is a different question. So where your season ends moves up as your overall does: no bowl at all in the sixties, a bowl in the seventies and eighties, the bracket in the nineties, and the title game above a hundred.

There's a floor under the trophies. Under 84 the national championship is out of reach, and every point above that makes the last game a little more winnable. A perfect season asks for the same 84 and nothing more: going unbeaten and then winning the bracket is the proof, and the floor only has to agree with the one on the trophy.

Fit is in there because it decides games. A quarterback who can't throw to your receivers costs you the same whether or not the number admits it, and for a while the number didn't: two teams showing the same overall could be worth very different seasons depending on how they were shaped. Now the number goes up every time your team gets better.

Achievements

More than two hundred badges, from reaching a bowl to winning the title from the 9 seed to signing all twenty Heisman winners. They're worked out from the seasons you have finished, so a badge added later lights up for seasons you have already played. Your seasons are kept in this browser.

Where the numbers come from

Every player is priced and scored from his real game by game statistics for the season you draft him from, so a card reflects that year rather than his whole career. Player and team data comes from CollegeFootballData.com, covering every season from 2005 to 2025.

An independent fan project from RunThe.GG. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NCAA, the College Football Playoff, any conference or any school. All results are simulated for entertainment.