This is the 15th anniversary of the NFFC, which was started in 2004 and has gone from just over 300 teams in our debut season to almost 11,000 teams last year. We expect this season to be our biggest and best season to date, so let's get everyone on the same page.
One thing I did want to get out in front of you right now is the fees for competing this year. There was great consensus across the board on all of this and honestly the decisions were pretty easy.
First of all, we want to announce that we are eliminating all Events Fees and Co-Manager fees from the NFFC in 2018. While we felt it was needed in the past to offset our food & beverage expenses at all of the live events along with licensing fees and state taxes, at the end of the day those are revenues that became more troublesome than they were worth. Yes, we used them as incentives to buy multiple contests and events, but from an accounting standpoint it just makes sense to budget those expenses and budget set revenues. Those fees were impossible to guesstimate from one year to the next.
So we have eliminated all $75 Events Fees and all $50 co-manager fees. Everyone will be able to easily add a co-manager from your My Teams page after you sign up, so don't fret when you can't find the co-manager option on Registration. It will be an easy process to add a co-manager from your My Teams page at anytime after you sign up and even during the season. We will also set it up so that you can have multiple co-managers if needed, something Tom and I did manually in the past.
Now, hopefully that is good news.
We also know that you'll probably just use that savings to buy more teams, so it's all good!!
In doing that we are also making one change. We will have Special Packages on Registration for an Online Championship 3-Pack at $1,000 and the Cutline Championship Special Packages for 3 teams, 5 teams and 9 teams. This year we are ONLY honoring those if you buy multiple teams at once. In the past if you bought them separately, Tom or I would manually go into accounting for that 5th or 9th team and take off the discount. Well, we reached 10,700 teams in the NFFC this year and as we continue to grow this business that manually application just becomes too much. So now we ask everyone to sign up for the Special Packages at once if you want the discount and we can always change the dates of the contests later. Heck, we'll even pick Placeholder dates in November that will allow you to pick a date that can't happen and change it later. Pick much later dates if you're not sure when you will draft them and we can always switch you out. That's easy to do. But from an accounting standpoint and from our standpoint, this is the best way to handle these packages.
As for the entry points, nothing major is changing. The Main Event is still $1,600, the Auctions will move from $1,200 to $1,300, the high-stakes private leagues are still $20,000, $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 and the Online Championship is still $350. We will still offer $150 and $400 Draft Champions Leagues.
The only major change involves the Cutline Championship. We are still keeping it at $125 per team but we are announcing a slight change in the format and a bigger grand prize. Stay tuned for more details there very soon. The price will be $125 if you sign up for any contest by Aug. 1st and $150 after that. We are incentivizing people to draft early and to plan ahead earlier because last year there was a falloff for that contest in August and September. You don't have to draft before August 1st, but lock in your teams by then and you'll be rewarded. All Special Packages for the Cutline will continue to be honored through Sept. 8th.
As for the prizes, our national contest payouts will remain the same as in the past at 80 percent. We aren't lowering the payouts for these or the Super, Ultimate, Diamond or Platinum. Satellite Leagues remain the same as well. We are keeping these payouts even though we are now paying taxes on state resident fees in multiple states and even though we became licensed last year in Indiana and Virginia at $50,000 apiece. We thought about lowering prizes across the board or applying those state fees to state residents, but at this point the entire legislative world is so in flux and it could change dramatically with the New Jersey sports gambling bill in front of the Supreme Court. We felt it was just best during our first year with SportsHub running everything to keep everything consistent and to analyze this more closely in the future.
We are concentrating on growth and better technology this year. We want the playing experience to be the best it can be and I really think we have the programmers to make that happen. Everything is based on growth and ease of managing more teams this year, so the prizes need to remain strong and next year we can even bump up more of the national prizes.
Speaking of which, the NFFC Primetime top prize remains at $150,000, the Online Championship again is $100,000 and the NFFC Classic is again at $80,000. Each of those have room to increase in future years, maybe even as early as 2019. I already said that the Cutline Championship will be higher than last year's $60,000, while the Draft Champions National Championship remains at $22,000. I think that's all of it.
Sorry for the delayed announcements, but hopefully this first bit of news is good news. Thanks and look for more news shortly.
