I think I've found a possible solution to get real-life scheduling into the game, and these custom schedules would only take about 30 minutes of user time to create.

The biggest problem that currently prohibits the creation of real-life schedules is the absence of FCS teams. The only alternative is to replace those teams with FBS opponents, which involves finding a substitute opponent on the same date. This becomes a nearly impossible task, because the FBS-FCS games take place during different weeks, so it's not just a matter of swapping out teams. Ultimately, it probably can be done after spending many, many hours on a single season schedule.

The workaround would be for an option to allow a generic FCS opponent to be scheduled, just call it "FCS Team" or something similar. Other games do the same thing. The old EA Sports NCAA College Football series had generic FCS opponents to round out schedules. No stats were kept for the generic FCS team, just the stats from the FBS teams. OOTP even allows the use of "ghost players" for minor league teams that don't have a full roster. The games keep the stats for the real players. For the purposes of this game, if it's too difficult to implement a low-level FCS generic opponent, just give the FBS team an automatic win and generate some cosmetic stats for their players.

If this feature was implemented, the user could take a real-life schedule and whip it out in .cvs format very quickly, week by week exactly as the games were played, without having to change anything.

What other benefits would this have? First, the scheduling is going to be a lot more realistic. As the game currently exists, if you're like me, and playing with a team like NC State, you start off with three non-conference games, then go through the ACC schedule. As you get down to the final two or three weeks of the season, you notice that you also have to play teams like Alabama and Ohio State to round out each team's non-conference schedule. Not anymore. Second, the bowl match-ups are going to be a lot more realistic, with more qualifiers. Fewer instances of teams like Michigan State going to the Potato Bowl because there aren't enough Group of Five teams that qualified.

Also, there are consequences to playing against FCS teams. Your strength of schedule is going to take a hit (as it does in real life), so it also allows the user to weigh the option of playing against an FCS opponent or not.

I'd be interested in hearing what others think of this idea.

If you do a custom league you could set up FCS Conferences (or just one conference called FCS) and then your custom schedule would work. Just set all of the FCS teams to like 25 prestige or something so they aren't really poaching top talent.

Interesting. So you can create a custom league with all 130 teams and conferences AND add one or two more conferences with the extremely low prestige?

Would be interesting to be able to implement a “secondary” universe like a full FCS system and be able to have them as schedule fillers for the FBS but then also schedule amongst themselves with their end of year playoff system too

Doubt something like this could happen so quickly in this release but would be interesting for the future possibly

Creating actual custom FCS teams to fill out the FBS schedules just shifts the original scheduling nightmare from one place to another.

Looking at the 2019 college football schedule, in Week 1 there were 40 games with FBS-FCS matchups. In the following weeks, there weren't as many of these matchups, but they were spread out over 10 weeks.

So at the minimum, this would require the creation of at least 40 separate FCS teams to fill in the FBS-FCS matchups, and then the user would have to create custom schedules for all of these "filler" FCS teams to ensure they all play 12 games. So you're back to square one trying to shift games back and forth over the season to meet all of the scheduling criteria. This would also have to start over from scratch every new season.

The reason I suggested the option of having a generic "phantom" FCS team is that it would alleviate all of the scheduling headaches, plus enable the user to take the actual FBS schedule and enter it as played. The only stats that would need to be generated would be the final score and the stats for the FBS team.

I thought I'd throw it out there for consideration in a future version; otherwise I don't see any practical method to mimic the real-life schedules.

Does the game require 12 game schedules? I don't think it does. In theory you could just fill up the FCS with the 40 teams or whatever you want to schedule and if they only have 4 games apiece so be it. I'm not going to rewrite the code to include shadow teams, etc. It's a lot more work than just tweaking a few things in the game that already supports what you're looking to do.

Brooks_Piggott wrote:Does the game require 12 game schedules? I don't think it does. In theory you could just fill up the FCS with the 40 teams or whatever you want to schedule and if they only have 4 games apiece so be it. I'm not going to rewrite the code to include shadow teams, etc. It's a lot more work than just tweaking a few things in the game that already supports what you're looking to do.

Unless this is some change being implemented for cf21, this is not accurate. The game will not allow you to import a schedule without every team having 12 games. Is this going to change?

Also making a change like adding a 40 team FCS conference would not be possible in an existing league between seasons in cf20. It would require starting a whole new game from the beginning. So are these things going to be changing for cf21?

Sorry, I'm talking about custom leagues with custom schedules, not importing a schedule into a default league.

And no, there isn't a way currently to change from a default league to a custom league, or change custom leagues to different custom leagues. We're not at first access yet, so it's something I may be able to add... it all depends on what other requests we get.

Being able to make structural changes to leagues between seasons is pretty high on my list of things I would like to see changed in the game. But not if it is going to cause any kind of delay in the 21 release. Is rather wait until next version.

But getting back to the suggestion made by the op, besides the idea of a team getting an automatic win (remember 2007 um vs app state?) I like the idea. It will help to more accurately mimick the real ncaa schedule and it would make creating schedules from scratch easier.

I think I might give Brooks' idea a shot. If I understand correctly, I should be able to set up a faux conference with FCS teams for the sole purpose of serving as schedule fillers that are needed for the FBS teams. I'm not sure how many to add, but it would require at least 40 teams just to fill in the Week 1 matchups. I'm sure as hell not going to add all 127 FCS teams. My goal would be for these teams to remain in the background as much as possible, and not have any of their players show up on the leaderboards or have any of the teams get to six wins and get a bowl slot. So, each of these FCS teams would be scheduled for four games max (all against FBS teams) to accomplish that goal. This should work IF the game will allow it under a custom league file. If not, there's not much more to be said for this idea.