Football season is almost here, which means millions of Americans are preparing for their annual transformation from perfectly reasonable adults into people who scream, “HOW DO YOU NOT COVER THAT?” at a television.
Welcome back.
The good news for 2026 is that you don’t necessarily have to risk your own bankroll to prove that you know more football than your friends, your coworkers, random people on the internet or that one guy in your group chat who has somehow predicted Dallas to win the Super Bowl every year since 1998.
Free football contests are everywhere this season, and several of them have real money or sportsbook cash attached.
Here are three places worth knowing.
BMR Is Throwing $18,500 Into the Football Fight
The biggest surprise of the summer may be what Bookmakers Review has assembled.
The current BMR football contest hub advertises four contests carrying a combined $18,500 in total prize value, with NFL and college football both represented.
And this isn’t one contest dressed up four different ways.
The centerpiece is the $12,500 BMR Combo Football Confidence Pool. Players can choose as many as seven NFL and eligible major-college spreads each week, then assign confidence points from one through seven.
Translation: picking winners is only half the job. You also have to decide which opinion you are least likely to regret by Sunday night.
First place in the overall standings is listed at $3,500, and weekly awards add another layer of chaos. You can go entirely NFL, entirely college football, or mix the two.
Then BMR piles on three NFL-only competitions.
There’s a $3,000 Pick’em Pool, where seven weekly spreads receive confidence rankings.
There’s a $1,500 ATS Survivor Contest, where one failed cover can send you directly to football purgatory. And there’s a $1,500 NFL Props Contest, where players make five prop selections per week and accumulate wins across the season.
Entry is free, although an important piece of fine print deserves daylight rather than microscopic gray lettering: BMR says the prizes are paid as sportsbook cash with a 5x rollover.
Still, $18,500 worth of football competition for zero entry fee is serious action.
The ATS Survivor contest might be the most entertaining of the four because it combines handicapping with resource management. Once you use a team, you can’t use it again.
That means blindly spending one of the league’s best teams because it is laying 3.5 points to Jacksonville in September may feel brilliant—until December arrives and your available-team list looks like the clearance rack at a gas station.
TheRX: Where Football Contest Degenerates Have Been Arguing for Decades
Then there is TheRX, which brings something different to the table: history.
TheRX has been running community football competitions for years, and its Community Contests section remains one of the places serious contest players should monitor heading toward Week 1.
Last season alone, TheRX’s NFL Pick’em contest thread generated roughly 23,000 views, while its NFL ATS Survivor thread topped 34,000. That’s not three cousins making picks in Uncle Larry’s garage. It’s an established handicapping community with plenty of participants who have been doing this since broadband internet was considered luxurious.
The fun part about TheRX is the public accountability.
Everybody is brilliant in August.
Then the actual games begin.
Suddenly the genius who had seven “locks” in his preseason notebook is 2-8 ATS and explaining that the market “just isn’t behaving rationally.”
Sure. It’s the market’s fault.
TheRX’s forum culture makes football contests feel less like entering a sterile corporate promotion and more like walking into a very loud handicapping bar where everybody has a spreadsheet.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Give Covers Its Flowers, Too
We promised a competitor a free plug, so here it is: Covers deserves one.
The 2026-27 Covers NFL World Sports Betting Championship is free to play, and its current prize structure lists $3,500 plus merchandise for first, $1,500 for second, $1,000 for third, additional merchandise and credits farther down the standings, and a weekly prize.
You can check out the Covers NFL contest here.
Why mention a competitor?
Because football fans like contests, and pretending good contests don’t exist because somebody else runs them is silly. Also, competition is healthy. It keeps everybody from launching the annual “Win a Coffee Mug After Making 327 Picks” spectacular.
Nobody asked for that.
The 2026 NFL Is Going to Be a Fantastic Contest Minefield
Here’s where things get really interesting.
The preseason Super Bowl market currently has the Los Angeles Rams as the clear favorite, followed by a group including Buffalo, defending champion Seattle and Baltimore. Kansas City, New England, Philadelphia and several others sit in the next tier.
That’s useful information—but contest players should be careful about confusing Super Bowl strength with weekly ATS value.
The best team isn’t automatically the best contest pick.
Sometimes it’s the worst one because everybody else loves it too.
Seattle is the perfect example. The Seahawks are defending champions, but their backfield looks different after Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III moved to Kansas City, while Zach Charbonnet has been rehabbing an ACL injury. Rookie Jadarian Price could have a major early role.
That matters enormously in props contests.
The casual contestant sees “Seattle: defending champs.”
The better contestant asks, “Who is actually getting 17 carries?”
Kansas City presents another fascinating problem. Patrick Mahomes has been working his way back from a significant knee injury and said in August that the knee feels great, but even his Week 1 status has remained something worth monitoring.
If Mahomes is healthy, the Chiefs could quickly become everybody’s favorite confidence-pool security blanket.
And that’s exactly when you should get nervous.
Contest pools are often won by understanding what the rest of the field is likely to do and finding the places where the crowd becomes overconfident.
Don’t Fall in Love With August
There is one final rule before anybody starts assigning seven confidence points to a team because its third-string quarterback looked awesome against fourth-string linebackers.
Calm down.
NFL teams do not even have to reach their final 53-man rosters until August 30.
Depth charts will change. Roles will change. Injuries will change.
Props players in particular should treat late August information like milk in the sun: check the date before consuming.
The contestants who win these season-long events probably won’t be the ones who make the boldest Week 1 prediction. They’ll be the people who keep records, understand each contest’s rules, manage Survivor inventory, rank confidence intelligently and actually remember to submit their picks every week.
That last one sounds embarrassingly obvious.
Come back in November and see how many people have eliminated themselves because they forgot.
Football is back.
The contests are free.
The excuses, unfortunately, remain unlimited.
Go make some picks.
