Juan L. · Boston. I've been playing fantasy football seriously for years — most recently across dozens of leagues in a single season. Ten Yards exists because I got tired of paying a lobby a cut of my own prize money for a league nobody was really running.
Why the fee is this low
Because I'd be doing most of this anyway. I want well-run leagues to play in, and running one properly costs me a draft night and a few minutes a week beyond what I'd already spend on my own team. Charging a percentage that scaled with your buy-in would be charging you for effort that doesn't scale with your buy-in.
It only adds up to something across a lot of leagues, over a lot of seasons. That's the plan, and it's also the reason to trust it: a host whose model depends on you coming back next August behaves differently from one who took a large cut in week zero and has no particular reason to answer your message in week nine.
What stops me from taking the pot
I never have it. Every pot sits in LeagueSafe on majority-approval payout — a setting that requires a majority of the league to approve any release of funds. I can't move the money by myself, and neither can any one manager. This isn't a promise I'm making; it's a setting you can verify inside LeagueSafe before you pay a cent.
What happens if I disappear
Fair question, and most league listings don't answer it. Before each draft the league elects a co-commissioner from its own managers. If I go silent for fourteen days in-season — no chat, no email, nothing — the co-commissioner runs the league for the rest of the season: lineups, waivers, disputes, all of it. If nobody took the job before the draft, the league picks someone by majority the moment it matters. The one thing that never transfers is the money — it's in escrow and releases on a league vote, not on mine, and not on theirs either.
What I'm not
- Not a betting site. These are private season-long fantasy leagues: you draft a team, you manage it for seventeen weeks, and the pot is the players' own contributions paid back to the players.
- Not an app. The league runs on Sleeper, which is free, and the money runs through LeagueSafe. This site exists to publish the rules and the prices, and that's all it does.
- Not anonymous. There's a real name on this page and a real city under it. That's deliberate — it's most of what you're actually buying when you hand a stranger a buy-in.
Before you join, check your state
Paid season-long fantasy is legal in most of the United States, but not all of it, and the rules do change. Whether you can join a paid contest is a question about where you live, and it's yours to check — I'm not able to give legal advice and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. If paid fantasy isn't permitted where you are, don't join; ask me and I'll point you at a free league instead.
How to reach me
Message me directly — I answer. If you're deciding whether to join and you want to ask something awkward about the money, that is exactly the kind of message I'd rather get before you pay than after.
- On Sleeper — search
jpzzlein the app. It's the account I actually play on — each league's page here says whether I'm in that one. - Email — tenyardleagues@gmail.com.