Create Your Own Bachelorette 2016 Fantasy League

Now you and your friends can up the stakes on true love!

Welcome back to Lady Things, the column where we do our best to search for the rose of truth about the female experience, all for the Right Reasons™. This week, The Bachelorette returns, and with it, the possibility to beat your friends at the most important game in the world: the game of love.

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I've been watching The Bachelor franchise for a long time. Too long, some people (my dad) might say. This is, in fact, the second Lady Things on the topic of the show. I once recapped it for a feminist website. Back in 2012, I publicly stated I was going to stop watching the show. I did not stop watching.

Far from it. Now, I have a television of my own (something I didn't have when I started this journey down the path to true love) and every week, friends come over and we play Candy Crush and talk shit to the screen and each other, always remembering to point out what a racist misogynist Chris Harrison is.

This season, my friend Anastasia suggested we start a fantasy league, upping our engagement with the show and giving us a mild financial incentive to root for "true love."

She found a link to some rules, and I modified them for our purposes. Here is how it works:

1. Form Your League

Our league consists of seven people and each of us is our own team. While no one has submitted their team names to me yet, I'm working on some ideas, including "Final Fantasy" and "Jordan Failed at Football" (I'm low in the draft order and have no doubt I will not be able to draft already-favored winner Jordan Rodgers, who just so happens to be Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodger's little brother ).

2. Be Informed

We all watched the first episode of The Bachelorette and took notes. This makes the whole first episode, which is generally the worst, much more entertaining. Here are my notes and the dudes in the order I am planning to draft them. Yes, if you're in my league, now you know everything.

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3. Draft

I set up our draft order by randomly ordering a list.

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We will be doing a snake draft tomorrow. We are each drafting two bachelors. There are currently 20 left so that means there will be an un-drafted pool of six for us to pick from later.

I have made a list of the remaining bachelors that I will update, if you want to use it for your league. I created this list using The Hollywood Reporter's rankings.

If you need some help, here are my top five picks:

* Jordan: He's got a perfect bone structure, a brother who is the best quarterback in the NFL and he's already made out with JoJo.

* Grant: He might not make it further than week four due to the fact that he's not white, but during the "coming up this season on The Bachelor" there was a fair amount of him and specifically, him kissing JoJo.

* James Taylor: His name is annoying and questionable, but he's a dreamy singer and he's from the South, just like our heroine. Also, he's the only one without a Macklemore haircut.

* Chase: Yes, as I note above he's a bag of dicks. However, he's bound to rack up some points while he vills like a villain.

* Luke: He's a veteran. He's from Texas. He likes unicorns. How can this go wrong?

4. League Play

For the first four weeks, we will keep our teams as they are, unless one of our contestants is kicked out, in which case we will be able to pick from the un-drafted pool. There is also the one-time option to drop a contestant and pick up another from the pool.

Points are earned and lost through a system outline in that original Verge post. I suggest you copy the points somewhere and add some or subtract any you don't like. Our league added: "The drama is so real that Chris Harrison and the Bachelorette have any kind of side convo about one of your contestants: +5, "Mention 'God's plan': +3," and "Pray: +5."

Every week, each person tallies their points. They then send the points to me, the league commissioner, and I enter those points in a spreadsheet. Here's what mine looks like:

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After week four, league members are allowed to draft a contestant that another player has, but each contestant can only be shared by two players. The draft order at this point will stay the same as before.

When the bachelor pool drops down to only four dudes, every player has to drop down to one bachelor. Again, two players can share one bachelor. When you lose a player, you can pick from the unused pool until there are no more available bachelors. When you're out, you're out.

At the end of the season, all points are tallied and the person with the most points wins the final rose and $2 from every losing league member.

There you go. Have fun, tell me how it goes and most of all you guys, remember: YOU AREN'T HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS.

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