Top 10 National Fantasy Football Contests: NFFC, FFPC & Scott Fish Bowl Lead The Way!
As fantasy football has grown so have the fantasy leagues in both size and stakes. We are going to take a look at the top national contests in fantasy football. These leagues can feature huge prize pools, professional players, and interesting formats to keep their leagues fresh and exciting. Some of these leagues are very exclusive while others anyone can pay to play. If you are interested in testing yourself against the best of the best these are the top 10 leagues you should think about joining.
1. NFFC
The National Fantasy Football Championships are perhaps one of the most well-known and longest-running of all the national fantasy football contests. They started in 2004 and registration can now be found here. This is a high-stakes league in which hundreds of players gather in cities across the country to draft their teams. There are multiple contests to choose from which have different formats, sizes, and entry fees. There are a total of nine options to pick from. On top of live drafts that you can attend, online options allow you to draft from home.
These drafts are pretty standard. They feature 20-round snake draft formats with a one-minute time limit. After the 10th round, you will get a 15-minute break to regroup. The league sizes are 12 and 14 teams depending on your contest. Like most high-stakes leagues the NFFC does not allow teams to make trades. The registration fees can range from $125 to $10,000 with the largest prize being $250,000. The $250,000 pool comes with just a $7,000 buy-in. When you attend live drafts, Sports Hubs Games Network provides food and drink, and after your draft is complete buffets will open up. They are all about fun and this allows the owners to hang out, analyze their drafts, and have a good time.
“Greg and Tom have been running this great contest for years. The big differentiators are 6 points per TD pass, third-round reversal during the draft, and KDS style choosing of draft position.” - Dr. Roto, Senior Fantasy Football Expert & DrRoto.com Founder
2. FFPC
The Fantasy Football Players Championships gets back to a season-long format in which you manage your team for their biggest tournaments. They offer both live and slow drafts, featuring 20 rounds with two flex slots and a TE premium. There are many contests you can play and register for at myffpc.com. However, they have three contests we’d like to focus on. They are the FFPC Main Event, the Footballguys Players Championship, and the FFPC Best Ball Tournament.
The FFPC Main Event started in 2008 and is the largest high-stakes fantasy football contest in the world. The grand prize is $1,000,000 and an awesome trophy. The buy-in ranges from $1,600 to $2,025 depending on whether or not you have multiple teams, and whether you are drafting online or live in Vegas. You will get a discount if you register prior to May 31.
The Footballguys Players Championship is a $350 buy-in and features about $4,400,000 in prizes with a grand prize of $500,000. These leagues also offer discounts if you buy multiple entries, and you can start drafting as early as May 1 as soon as your league fills up.
The FFPC Best Ball Tournament is another set-it-and-forget-it league with a $125 buy-in. There are no head-to-head matchups, just over 9,000 teams battling it out for a prize pool of over $1,000,000 with a $200,000 grand prize. The best part about this league is no kickers and no defense!
“Alex and Dave do a great job running the league. Tight Ends are 1.5 points per reception which makes them a premium and virtually guarantees every draft board to look a bit different. The season is slightly shorter so there is little room for error.” - Dr. Roto, Senior Fantasy Football Expert & DrRoto.com Founder
Learn more about our fantasy football tools and products!
3. Scott Fish Bowl
The Scott Fish Bowl is easily the most beloved fantasy football tournament by the fantasy football community. This is the biggest and most interactive tournament of pros vs joes in the country. Fantasy football Twitter goes absolutely crazy for it and it all goes to a great cause and is run by a great guy. This league is a fundraiser for SFB Fantasy Cares and 100% of your $50 entry fee is donated. You can play small satellite tournaments on Underdog for a minimal fee to earn a spot in the league or you can apply to be one of the about 3,000 teams that make the cut. How popular is this league? There are 3,000 teams and only 10% of entries are chosen to play. Because all proceeds are donated there is no cash prize, but somehow being the winner of the Scott Fish Bowl feels much bigger than money. Many also make donations on top of their entry fee. One of the coolest features is that the league’s rules change every year to keep it fresh and feeling different. You can make a strong case that this is the coolest thing in the fantasy community.
“The big deal really is it’s the biggest industry collective ‘Feel Good’ tourney. It’s a celebration. Crazy scoring. Huge pool of players. Pros vs Joes. Fundraising, etc” -Dan Friedman, Former DrRoto.com Editor
“Give all the credit in the world to Scott Fish who created the league that basically kicks off the fantasy football draft season in July. Scott tweaks the league scoring often to bring new wrinkles to his contest.” - Dr. Roto, Senior Fantasy Football Expert & DrRoto.com Founder
"The Scott Fish Bowl stands out for two reasons pretty much everyone cites: 1) It promotes support and visibility of great causes. 2) The scoring system that emphasizes aspects like QB efficiency and TEs’ contributions. The SFB is awesome because it both encourages selflessness in an industry where people are often otherwise competing for attention and embraces experimentation — witness: the weekly game versus the median — in a space that’s always craving new ways to challenge players." - Nicholas Minnix, Former KFFL/USA Today/Rotographs/DrRoto.com Editor
4. Underdog Fantasy
What makes Underdog stand out from other high-stakes leagues is the fact that you can win so much money with such a low entry fee. They feature low-fee best ball tournaments with their greatest prize being $2,000,000! The buy-in for that tournament is just $25. However, the catch is you have to compete with about 451,000 other players to get your piece of the $10,000,000 prize pool. There are of course also smaller contests. Don’t worry, unless specified otherwise these are single-entry leagues so you don’t have to worry about a sharp with an algorithm putting in hundreds of entries.
These leagues feature snake drafts that you can do right from your phone. Because they are best ball leagues you can draft your team and forget about it. There are no waivers or trades. You draft your teams, both projected starters and bench options, and they will optimize your lineup every week. You can just sit back, let Underdog do all the work for you, and collect your money at the end of the season.
"Underdog isn't your typical high-stakes fantasy contest because the entry fee is so low but where else can you turn $25 into $2,000,000? Their Best Ball Mania contest is absolutely awesome! No need for in-season management, it's all about the draft baby! Underdog is the real deal!" - Matt Rumack, Fantasy Sports Expert
Sign up for Underdog Fantasy today and get your first $100 matched! Use Promo Code: fsp
5. RT Sports
RealTime Sports offers its Fantasy Championships and its Best Ball Championships. The contest consists of up to 6,600 teams with a $300 entry. There are discounts if you buy three teams. You can sign up at fantasychampionship.com. These leagues are your usual PPR league with two flex slots and a standard snake draft. You have a 20-man roster to work with and a standard waiver wire process that features protected free agents to prevent collusion. Finishing in the top three in your league will earn you a prize and the grand prize is $500,000.
The Best Ball Championships are of course standard best ball drafts. Everything is essentially the same other than the fact that there are no waivers and they optimize your lineup. Their biggest grand prize is $25,000, although, there are other tournaments in which you can win up to $10,000. The leagues are mostly 10-team leagues except one six-team league tournament.
6. Apex
The stakes aren’t as high at Apex, however, they do offer sizeable payouts and add interesting wrinkles to their leagues to separate them from the pack. They have six different tiers of leagues with the highest stakes league being their Hall of Fame Contest. The buy-in is $1,002.95 and the winners split an “industry-leading” 88% of the buy-in money. The grand prize is $7,550. Second place gets $2,320 and third gets $670.
Their most popular feature is the fact that they have two-game weeks to avoid fluke victories. This means each matchup lasts two weeks. This way you have to earn the victory and not just get lucky that the guy you played had one terrible week. This avoids a player from getting lucky with matchups. We’ve all had those weeks when we were the second-leading scorer and lost as we watch the 11th-leading scorer get a win against the lowest-scoring team. This helps relieve some of that frustration. They also offer a blind bidding format for free agents instead of waivers which gets more and more popular each year. This allows you to bid on players with allotted FAAB instead of your standard waivers. It’s more fun and fairer. When joining you have the option of playing in leagues with various roster formats including their most popular Deep and Superflex. Deep leagues allow an extra flex slot while Superflex allows you to flex a quarterback.
7. DataForce
DataForce offers 10 tiers of contests ranging from “Tin Baby” which has a $20 buy-in to “Diamond” with a $3,000 buy-in. These leagues range from six teams to 48 teams with the grand prize of the 48-team “Diamond” league being $42,192. They feature traditional season-long leagues, however, they are more customizable than most high-stakes leagues. They allow you to organize leagues according to your preference and give you various draft options. You can also pick your own game host, they offer DataForce and MyFantasyLeague as options. Your money will be kept safe in an attorney-audited trust fund that you can check in on whenever you want. Perhaps most importantly to many players who have been commissioners before, they will make decisions regarding fair practices and settle disputes between players. With the most significant dispute most often being about trades of course. You can also have them build your playoff bracket and release the money to the winners at the end of the season. They offer everything we just mentioned and more, and still offer 98% of the buy-in back to your league as payouts.
Check out the top legal online sportsbook offers and promotions in the United States!
8. Masters FFL
Masters FFL is another league with a metal-based tier system for their leagues ranging from “Tin” to “Titanium”. “Tin” leagues cost $31 ($62 for Dynasty) while “Titanium” leagues have a $2,719 fee ($5,310 for dynasty). The champion of a 12-team “Titanium” redraft league will win $19,000 with $7,250 going to the runner-up. They offer multiple options for their league formats with the most interesting being the Guillotine leagues. These are 18-team leagues that go as high as the “Silver” tier with a payout of $2,800. In these leagues, you draft 12 players and start just 1QB, 1RB, 1WR, 1TE, 1PK, 1DEF, and 2Flex. The only goal is to not be the worst team in the league each week. Each week the lowest-scoring team will be eliminated from the league and their players will be dropped into the free-agent pool. Free agency is a blind bidding system and you are allotted $1000. By Week 17 only two teams remain and one champion will emerge. These are very exciting leagues and we suggest you try them out at mastersfantasyfootballleagues.com.
9. Fuzzy’s Fantasy
The twist that Fuzzy’s offers is that they feature total points leagues and not a head-to-head format. You can play in 10,12, or 14-team leagues and the highest buy-in is $1,500. The payouts work a little bit differently here. If at the end of the regular season (Week 14) you lead your league in points you get a sizeable payout. Then if you go on to win your championship in the playoffs you get another cash prize. Their payouts for the 14-team, $1,500 leagues are $12,000 to the champion, $4,000 to the runner-up, and $3,550 to the regular season points leader.
They also offer a ton of different options including live drafts, slow drafts, and auction drafts. Beyond these leagues, you can also play in keeper and best ball leagues. They will also allow you to make private and custom leagues if you’d like. The rosters vary as well from No Flex to multiple Flex to SuperFlex, and the roster sizes are adjustable. It’s worth it to check out FuzzysFantasyFootball.com if you prefer points leagues to head-to-head.
10. FFWC
The Fantasy Football World Championships will be held at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas the Friday and Saturday prior to the first Sunday of football for the season. This may lead you to ask, what about the Thursday game? There is an interesting twist here. You get to draft knowing what happened on Thursday and can put those players in your lineup. However, you must set your lineup for Week 1 at the end of your draft. So, choose wisely and carefully because there are no adjustments for injuries. The FFWC is comprised of 42 12-team leagues with the winner of each league earning $12,000 with the grand prize winner getting $150,000. There are multiple other payouts along the way. You also have the option of drafting your team online. The buy-in is $1,795 with an additional $175 if you’re drafting live from Vegas. These leagues feature a standard snake draft with 20-man rosters and two flex slots. The waiver system is blind bidding.
They also have their Online Championships which are essentially the same thing but on a smaller scale and without the bells and whistles of Sin City. The buy-in price isn’t currently posted, but it’s significantly lower and there are up to 100 total 12-team leagues. The grand prize is $50,000 and your individual league splits $2,525 in prizes.
“Scott and Ian work tirelessly to make this league great. All leagues have two flex positions which allow teams to start 11 players which reward the smarter fantasy managers.” - Dr. Roto, Senior Fantasy Football Expert & DrRoto.com Founder
Fantasy SP has worked diligently to bring you next-level sports betting analytics, prop betting tools, public betting splits, and so much more! Become an Edge+ member today!
#fantasy101