Roster Management in the Continental Football League: Building Teams the Right Way

CoFL Staff
Oct 15
4 min read

In the Continental Football League (CoFL), winning starts long before kickoff. It begins with how each franchise builds its roster—balancing youth, local talent, and regional recruiting rights to create teams that are competitive, sustainable, and connected to their communities.

The CoFL’s roster structure is designed to blend the ambition of professional football with the heart of local identity. Here’s how it works—and why it sets the CoFL apart from every other league in the game today.

The Training Camp Roster: 50 Men, One Dream

Each CoFL franchise can invite a maximum of 50 players to training camp. These are the athletes who will compete for a spot on the final roster when the season begins.

But it’s not just about finding the best 50 available players—it’s about building a balanced team for long-term success. Half of that training camp roster (25 players) must be between the ages of 18 and 25.

That rule does three things:

It keeps the league young, fast, and hungry.
It creates a real developmental bridge for players coming out of college or returning from other leagues.
It gives older and more established players an opportunity to build their brand in a local market.

The CoFL isn’t just a second chance, it’s a launchpad for the next generation of professional football talent.

The Final Roster: 36 Active + 4 Practice Players

Four days before the season’s first game, teams must cut down to their final 36-man roster, with an additional four practice players allowed.

That 40-player total mirrors the rugged, efficient rosters of the original 1960s Continental Football League—when grit and versatility mattered more than specialization. Every player has to contribute. Every spot counts.

The Local Player Requirement: Rooted in Community

Every team must have five local players on its final roster—athletes who played high school or small college football within a Commissioner-approved radius of the team’s home stadium.

That local radius isn’t random—it’s based on population, density of football programs, and regional player availability.

The intent is simple:

Strengthen community ties.
Give local athletes a chance to play in front of their hometown fans.
Make every CoFL franchise a true reflection of its region’s football culture.

"When a local kid suits up for his hometown team, the whole town shows up." - Commissioner Mike Kelly

Regional Rights: Protecting Each Team’s Pipeline

Every CoFL franchise is granted exclusive regional rights to players from nearby FBS, FCS, and small college programs. That means if a player graduates or leaves one of those schools, the CoFL team with those rights gets the first opportunity to sign him.

This system ensures fair competition and reinforces each team’s regional identity. It also encourages coaches and scouts to build real relationships with college programs in their territory—just like the old days of territorial drafts in the NFL and CFL.

The result? Each CoFL team becomes a genuine extension of its region’s football heritage.

The Philosophy Behind the Rules

The CoFL’s roster model is more than administrative detail—it’s a philosophy.

By balancing youth, local roots, and regional ties, the league ensures that every roster spot serves both player development and community engagement. Players aren’t just numbers on a depth chart—they’re ambassadors of the towns and states that raised them.

This structure echoes the legacy of the original Continental Football League (1965–1969), which helped launch careers of legends like Otis Sistrunk, Coy Bacon, Bill Walsh, and Ken Stabler—players and coaches who used the league as a stepping stone to greatness.

Conclusion: Building the Continental Way

Roster management in the Continental Football League is an art form. It’s about discovering raw talent, honoring local pride, and fielding teams that truly represent the spirit of their communities.

From the 18-year-old rookie trying to make a name for himself to the hometown linebacker finally getting his shot at the pros, every roster tells a story.

And in the CoFL, those stories form the backbone of a league that’s redefining what professional football can be—authentic, regional, and built from the ground up.

A Final Word: Regional Ambitions, But Local Commitment

In recent months, Mike Repole—now one of the principal stewards of the UFL—has publicly endorsed more regionalization in the league’s structure. He’s floated ideas like regional player–rights systems, giving teams priority access to athletes from nearby colleges. (UFL News Hub)

This is a welcome and forward-looking shift—aligning incentives, building local fan affinity, and reducing the sense that a team is some generic “spring-football franchise.”

Yet, there is a key distinction. Under Repole’s vision, the UFL will still maintain a central hub model, with teams gathering and operating out of Arlington, Texas, and only sometimes deploying to their home markets for game weeks or brief stretches. (Wikipedia) That arrangement helps lower overhead and consolidate logistics—but it also struggles to fully embed franchises into the daily life of their cities.

By contrast, the CoFL’s model is emphatically full-time regional. Every franchise is born in, lives in, and breathes in its own market—training, practicing, hiring staff, engaging fans, and living in the community year-round. There is no “hub” lurking in the background. No team commutes in, stays a week, and retreats. In the CoFL, each city is its own football home.

We applaud Repole’s push toward regional rights—it’s a positive signal that even centralized leagues recognize the power of local identity. But we believe the CoFL’s model goes deeper. It doesn’t simply borrow the language of locality—it is locality. Every roster spot, every practice, every community event is rooted in that team’s region.

So, as the UFL pushes toward a more regional footprint, let it also underscore how the CoFL is living that philosophy in full. The CoFL isn’t exploring regionalization, it is regional football. And that, we believe, is the kind of model that will endure.