Introducing The TeamRankings One-Day NFL Football Challenge

We’re excited to introduce a new initiative this football season. The TeamRankings Nerds are going to be playing in weekly football contests on FanDuel. These contests are reserved exclusively for TeamRankings users, and we want YOU to play along with us.

To get invited to our private tournaments, the first step is to sign up for FanDuel at the link below, using Promo code TEAMRANKINGS.

Sign Up Now & Get Your Tournament Invite!

(If you already have a FanDuel account, please just email support@teamrankings.com and ask to get on the tournament invite list.)

Here’s the full story:

What is FanDuel?

FanDuel is a site that runs one day long football contests for real money prizes. Like traditional fantasy football, you first draft a team of NFL players. The twist is that this the “season” only lasts one day, and you can draft your team whenever you want to.

You then enter your team in a tournament, and within hours you’ve got a chance to win cash — deposited in your account right after the contest ends. Then the fun starts all over again the next Sunday.

FanDuel Contest

We are total newbies at this daily fantasy sports thing, but here’s what we do know:

  • It’s easy to play
  • You win real money
  • It’s legal in the USA
  • It’s getting huge (you may have seen or heard ads lately)

That all sounds pretty awesome to us. So this year we decided to partner with FanDuel to bring the action to TeamRankings.

We picked FanDuel because they are the biggest site in the industry (currently paying out over $10 million in prizes per week), they have years of operating experience, and a reputation for good customer service.

$10 million a week is a huge market, so we’re going to dive in and figure out if we can win a little money at this. Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t. Either way, it’s going to be both fun and challenging to learn a brand new game and see if we can get an edge over the course of the season.

To chronicle our adventures as daily fantasy rookies, we’ve just launched a new blog section. We invite you to follow it over the course of the 2014 season, as we share our experiences and learnings playing on FanDuel.

But that’s not all. We want you to play too.

We thought learning the ins and outs of one-day fantasy football would also be a great opportunity to interact with our beloved TeamRankings user community. Many of you have been with us for years, and we’ve often talked about setting up some fun sports contests just for TR users to play in. Well, here we go.

We may be experts at office pool strategy, but this is brand new territory for us. Plus, most of you reading this post probably have more traditional fantasy football experience than we do. So let’s see if we can help each other out here, as we try to crack the code of this new game.

We want you to play on FanDuel with us!
(Or, technically, against us, but still…all in good fun)

Weekly Private Tournaments, Just For Us

Starting with NFL Week 1, we’re going to set up private tournaments on FanDuel for TR users who sign up for FanDuel using our special link. We’ll be playing in each of these tournaments.

Since we want all of our users to have a chance to join in on these contests, we’re going to keep them at relatively low stakes with very flat prize structures, especially early on.

Our Week 1 private tournament, for example, will be a $10 buy-in contest known as a “double up,” where you win if your team’s final score is in the top 50% of the contest. In other words, as long as you’re better than the average entrant, you’ll double your money.

FanDuel has even agreed to waive their “rake” for this first tournament (i.e. they’re not charging their typical small fee for hosting the contest), so a full 100% of entry fees in our Week 1 private contest will go straight back into the pockets of the winners.

In addition, we’re going to give out additional prizes, like free premium TeamRankings subscriptions, to the users who win our private FanDuel tournaments — and maybe also to the users who beat our sorry asses the most often! We’ll also give them props on the blog. This is your chance to beat the TR nerds, folks, and remind us of that for years to come…

So come out and play with us this week. “I’ve never done this before” is no excuse — neither have we. It’s easy to play, and putting 10 bucks on this Sunday’s action gives you the perfect excuse to watch even more games!

This Could Get Really Big

That’s the fun part, but the more serious part, for those interested, is that learning daily fantasy could turn into a highly profitable skill in the long run. Unlike sports betting, daily fantasy is legal across the USA, and the top players in the country are currently making six figures a year (and growing). One guy on FanDuel has raked in over $650,000 in prize money so far.

If this season’s experiment works out well, we’re going to seriously consider adding daily fantasy analysis and features to TeamRankings.com on a permanent basis. But just like we did with our advice for NFL pick’em and Survivor pools, we’re going to start out with blog posts where we share our strategy thoughts and research, and answer user questions.

Ready To Play?

Want to get in on the action this Sunday? Get a move on then! Our private tournament is capped at 100 entrants, with a $10 buy-in and a $1,000 guaranteed total prize pot.

Sign Up Now & Get Your Tournament Invite!

Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Sign up for Fanduel using Promo code TEAMRANKINGS. Just use the link above, which will auto-load the Promo code.
  2. Deposit at least $10 in your new FanDuel account using credit card or PayPal.
    BONUS! FanDuel has agreed to give our users a 100% deposit bonus on all initial deposits up to $200.
  3. Email support@teamrankings.com and tell us you signed up for FanDuel. Include the email address you used for your FanDuel account.

As soon as we verify your new FanDuel account, we’ll send you a link to this week’s TeamRankings private tournament. And then it’s game on! We hope to see you in there, and best of luck. We know we’re going to need it. 🙂

If you’re interested, we’re also developing a quick tutorial for how to play in our private FanDuel tournament that we’ll be posting soon.