Collegiate Gridiron: two college football seasons on two d10
25 August 2026
Week 0 opens in Dublin on Saturday, North Carolina against TCU. I played it on the tabletop first, and it did not go the way the ratings said it would.
North Carolina 38, Texas Christian 28.
The Tar Heels were 24-7 up at the interval. TCU came back with three touchdowns in the second half and got the margin down to single figures, but North Carolina added two more scores and saw it out.
TCU went 9-4 last season and North Carolina went 4-8. Run that fixture a few thousand times and TCU win it about five times in six. This was the sixth.
Collegiate Gridiron is a college football game that runs on two d10 and a page of ratings. Each team takes one roll per half. Add your rating to your opponent's, read the modifier off a thirteen-row table, roll, and look the total up. A game takes two or three minutes, which means a full Saturday slate fits in an evening rather than a fortnight.
Saturday's opener, worked out
The whole of the setup is one addition per side. Take the first game of the season:
North Carolina are OFF 32. TCU's defence is -10. That is 22, which reads off the table as -4.
TCU are OFF 39. North Carolina's defence is -8. That is 31, which reads as +0.
Dublin is a neutral site, so nobody adds the home advantage in the second half. Those two numbers hold for the whole game. Roll 2d10, add your modifier, look the total up on the Score Band Table, and do it once more after the interval.
That is the entire game.
The ratings had TCU well ahead, and for a half they were nowhere. That is the doubles rule doing its job: North Carolina's 24 in the first half could only have come from a double on the dice, a big play the modifier had no say in. An elite side can have a half wrecked by one, and a team nobody fancied can rip off the game of its life. That is college football, and it is why somebody loses to an FCS side every September.
Two seasons, not one
Most season packs give you a year. This one gives you two, and they do different jobs.
2025 is a replay. All 136 FBS teams rated on what actually happened, so a side is as good as its results say it was. Play it through and the records land near the real ones, with enough drift to make it worth doing.
2026 is a projection. All 138 teams, starting from final 2025 form, then regressed a quarter of the way toward the average, because a great season is part quality and part luck and the luck does not carry over. Then the preseason polls get blended in, since they are the only thing that knows who left in the transfer portal and who graduated. Bottom-of-conference teams roll for their improvement rather than getting it free, because small programmes do not always get the recruits.
Treat 2026 the way you would treat a preseason magazine. It is an informed starting position, not a prediction, and the point of playing it is to find out where it is wrong.
Every FCS team is rated
North Dakota State are not Stetson.
A lot of packs hand you one flat "FCS opponent" line and quietly delete the September upset from the calendar. Here every FCS side that appears on an FBS schedule is rated individually, on the same scale as the FBS teams, fitted against the 126 real crossover games of 2025. The average of those was a 33-point win for the FBS side, and about one in thirty went the other way. That is what these numbers produce.
The app works out championship week
The schedule files carry the title games, but the teams printed in them are the ones who made it in real life. In your season somebody else earned it.
So the app rebuilds them from your table: top two in each conference on conference record, ties broken head to head, the Sun Belt using its two division winners because it still runs divisions. The title game counts on the overall record and stays out of the conference standings, where it does not belong. The Pac-12's flex round is in there too as a non-conference game, which is how the conference actually has it.
You can also just roll it yourself. The rulebook carries the same rules the app runs, so anything it rolls, you can roll.
Print your own score sheets
Both schedules ship in Pro Football Reference's column order, so they drop straight into the TTX Schedule Printer and come back as printable sheets, week by week, with empty boxes for the scores. Every neutral site is flagged. The 2025 file carries the bowls and the full playoff as well.
What is in it
Six pages of rules, four ratings sheets, two printer-ready schedules, two import files and an offline browser app that keeps standings, a weekly Top 25 and your save file. Ten files, print and play, solo or two players.