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 NFBC 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 that 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. 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 is changing. The Main Event is still $1,600, the Auctions are still $1,300, the high-stakes private leagues are still $15,000, $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 and the Online Championship is still $350. We will still offer $150, $400 and $1,000 Draft Champions Leagues.
The only change involves the Cutline Championship. We are still keeping it at $125 per team with a $50,000 grand prize and the same balanced overall prize pool. The regular season still ends at the All-Star break and we believe some new features with FAAB will make this contest more appealing. The price will be $125 if you sign up for any contest by Feb. 28th 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 March. You don't have to draft before March 1st, but lock in your teams by then and you'll be rewarded. There will be no roster expansion during the season and drafts will be 42 rounds.
The plan is also to return the NFBC Post-Season contest in 2018 with prizes based on only 300 teams. We want to build this product the same way we built the NFFC Post-Season Contest, which this year will have a $100,000 grand prize. It will be tough to ever get that big, but we believe a lot of people do want to compete in a playoff contest.
As for the prizes, our national contest payouts will remain between 78 and 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 earlier this 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 Main Event top prize remains at $125,000, the Online Championship again is $100,000 and the Auction Championship is $25,000. 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 $50,000 again, while the Draft Champions National Championship increases from $28,000 to $30,000. I think that's all of it.
We want to get you paid for 2017 before announcing everything for 2018, but I wanted to get all of this out there first. Hope this works for everyone. Thanks and enjoy the MLB playoffs.
. If there was a way to sign up for the drafts and fill the dates as desired that would be ideal. My 2 cents.
