The preseason is starting in three days, and that means you’ve got three days left to put together your entry for the Fantasy Index Open. This is free contest that gives you the chance to claw your way to the top of the fantasy mountain.

In this competition, you compile a top 20 at each position, using standard scoring. At the end of the season, we grade all of the selections and crown a champion.

The contest is open to everyone (hence the name, “Open”). Most entries will be Fantasy Index readers. Some will be professionals from other fantasy sites. It’s open to anybody willing to put in the time to put an entry together to play.

The winner takes home a really huge and really cool trophy from the team at Affordable Trophies. They’ve been partnering with us on this contest for years.

The winner and the runner-up also earn berths into the Experts Poll in next year’s magazine, where they’ll compete against industry experts in a similar style of competition.

Will a reader someday win the Fantasy Index Open and then come out on top in the 20-man field of the Experts Poll? In theory, that should happen. It’s harder to win the Open than the regular Experts Poll, so we’re getting two quality entries each year. But it hasn’t happened yet. In the 2015 Experts Poll, the two at-large qualifiers finished 15th and 19th – Pete Owers (West Palm Beach, Fla.) and Todd Voorhees (Chula Vista, Calif.). The previous season, Tom Deskovitz (South Lyon, Mich.) and Michael Livengood (Ward, Ark.) finished in 5th and 6th.

In the Fantasy Index Open, you list your top 20 at each position – QB, RB, WR, TE, K and Def. We score those picks, using a complex scoring matrix. Basically, the higher you rank a player, the more his production is counted in your score. The exact scoring is spelled out in the official rules. There are no lineups, games or waiver moves in this contest. You simply list your top 20 at each position at the start of the preseason, then we check back in January and crown the champion.

Entries are due before the kickoff of the first game of the first full week of the preseason. That’s Thursday, Aug. 11, at 7 p.m. eastern time. There’s also a Hall of Fame game on the Sunday prior, but we’re going to let that one slide by.

If you’d like to participate, send an email to FantasyIndexOpen@gmail.com. Within a few hours, you should get the complete rules and the entry form. Only requirement is a computer the ability to operate the Microsoft Excel program.

—Ian Allan