A Touchdown's Worth Of Gridiron Tips To Get You Started
The first Gridiron season on GameDay Squad is here. Packs are ready to opened, Week 1 kicks off Thursday morning and there's over $32,000 in prizes on the line. Here are six tips to get your season started.
Tip 1: Open all of your Starter Packs
Registering a Gridiron squad gives you 306 Bronze player cards across a set of Starter Packs, and the first thing to do is open every one of them. You get 36 quarterbacks, 90 running backs, 90 wide receivers, 54 tight ends and 36 kickers, drawn from every active player in the Gridiron player pool.
Those are the five positions in the game: Quarterback, Running Back, Wide Receiver, Tight End and Kicker. Every card carries one, shown on the front, and it stays fixed for the season. A full squad is 18 players: 1 quarterback, 3 running backs, 5 wide receivers, 2 tight ends, 1 kicker, a Superflex slot that takes any of the first four, and five Flex slots that take a running back, receiver or tight end.
Open everything and you have enough cards to field a squad in more than one competition on day one, which is exactly what the next tip is about.
Tip 2: Build a Starter, Contender and Classic squad
You can compete in up to three of our five standard competitions at the same time, and a brand new coach qualifies for three of them straight away. Starter is Bronze only with a 9mil cap, so eighteen Bronze cards land exactly on it. Contender is 10mil and allows Bronze, Silver and Gold. Classic is 12mil, allows Bronze through Platinum, and is open to everyone.
Enter all three. More competitions means more chances to earn packs every week, and you don't have to finish near the top to collect them. Starter pays packs down to 20th, Contender to 50th and Classic to 100th, so a middle of the table finish still puts new cards in your collection. That is how a Bronze squad turns into a Contender squad with Silvers and Golds in it.
Starter and Contender are also where you learn the game. Coaches playing Champion are locked out of both, and coaches playing Challenger are locked out of Starter, so you're up against coaches at a similar stage rather than the biggest collections on the platform.
Tip 3: Hunt the matchups that win you the week
GameDay Squad Gridiron is a weekly game. Prizes are paid every round and you can change every one of your 18 players between rounds with no trade limits, so the question each week is not who is the best player in the league but who has the best game in front of him this week.
Look at the fixture. A quarterback facing a defence that gives up points is worth more this week than a bigger name in a tough matchup, and a running back whose team is expected to lead will carry the ball more. Our projections and player statuses are in the app for exactly this reason. Check them before each of your games locks, and remember that Superflex takes a second quarterback, which in GameDay Squad scoring is usually the highest scoring option you have for that slot.
Build the 18 for this week, then do it again next week.
Tip 4: Trade your doubles on the Transfer Market
With 306 cards in your first packs you will have doubles, and doubles don't score twice. The Transfer Market is where you turn them into cards you need.
Say you've opened two Josh Allens and no Patrick Mahomes. List one of your Josh Allen cards and ask for a Mahomes in return. Someone else has the opposite problem, and a straight swap fixes both squads. It costs nothing, it's the quickest way to fill a hole at a thin position like tight end or quarterback, and every card you trade for stays at its rarity's salary all season no matter how well the player goes.
Tip 5: Explore the special competitions
Alongside the standard competitions there are two special competitions. Both are free to enter, both run every week, and both play differently to anything else on the platform.
Rookie & Sophomore is for first and second year players only. That's the player cards, not the coaches. Only players from the 2025 and 2026 draft classes are eligible, the cap is 13mil, and the round winner takes $75 and a Unique pack. Everyone has the cards for it from day one.
Primetime counts only the standalone games, which means the Monday AEST games are excluded. Thursday Night Football (Friday morning here) and Monday Night Football (Tuesday morning here) are in, along with the odd Thursday and Saturday AEST game through the season. There's no salary cap, so it's a chance to field your best cards from a handful of teams, and the round winner takes $250 and a Unique pack.
Tip 6: Get involved in the community and our content
The fastest way to get better at this game is to be around people playing it. Watch our partners the Fantasy Bros each week for Gridiron fantasy talk, join the GameDay Squad Discord to ask questions and compare squads with other coaches, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and X (@gameday_squad, GamedaySquad and @GamedaySquad) for round previews, player news and giveaways. The Discord invite is in the app and on every one of our socials.
There's a couple of All Star cards up for grabs across our channels right now, so being involved pays as well as teaches.
Now go build your squad
Open your packs, enter Starter, Contender and Classic, and get your 18 in before Thursday morning. Trade the doubles, have a go at Rookie & Sophomore and Primetime, and jump into the Discord to tell us how your first week went. Season one of Gridiron on GameDay Squad starts now.
