If you are even the most casual of sports fans, work in an office or live somewhere in the United States, you know what March means on the sporting calendar.

It’s “madness” time in college basketball, when brackets abound and pools are plentiful. Xerox Monday — after Selection Sunday — takes many of us to the copy machine so that we can take way too many cracks at building that impossible perfect bracket.

RapidDraft.com, however, wants you to consider a different way to pick your teams: via fantasy draft.

“Innovation is the key to growth in the world of fantasy sports,” said Jeff Thomas, CEO of World Fantasy Games. “Most fantasy companies offer a bracket contest. Nobody has a draft. Applying our patent-pending social gaming model to the NCAA Tournament was a natural, with on-demand live drafts inside our virtual-world draft room. RapidDraft is true differentiation in the marketplace and can complement a bracket game on any fantasy site.”

RapidDraft Hoops Madness pits a consumer against three avatars backed by expert opinion and strategy. The four teams tip off with a 16-round draft in which every NCAA tournament team is selected. (The two play-in participants act as one team here. And yes, NCAA, that is a play-in game.) The “Fantasy Pros” draft according to specifications set forth by this site, SportsBuff.com and Sara Holladay — best known as the FF Librarian.

“I’ve never had the chance to combine fantasy sports with March Madness, so I’m excited to see that RapidDraft has stepped up to the plate and taken it to the next level,” Holladay told FSB.com. “Everything is better with a touch of fantasy.”

Once the four fantasy squads are drafted, you score points for every victory by one of your NCAA teams. Points are awarded in a seed-times-round format — meaning a second-round win by a No. 4 seed, for example, would garner 8 points. Another 1.5 bonus points are available each time your total score for a round beats that of a Fantasy Pro team in your league, up to 4.5 bonus points per round.

“I love the unique concept that RapidDraft has come up with,” said Jim Day, an avid fantasy gamer, founder of FantasyFootballWhiz.com and host of multiple shows on BlogTalkRadio’s The Fantasy Sports Channel. “The draft is something you just don’t see on any other March madness contest and will provide another exciting way to play one of the most enjoyable and exciting tournaments in sports.”

In the end, of course, you’re really competing against all of the other human players, with 50 guaranteed cash prizes and a $2,500 grand prize. That’s not a bad return on a free entry. Consumers can draft up to twelve times each, three times per draft position.

The different format might scare off a bracket traditionalist at the start, but the system still awards you for properly projecting which higher seeds will stick around longer and grabbing a Cinderella or two. Just imagine how many points George Mason would have gotten you back in 2006, or Davidson just two years ago.

It’s a new twist with different layers of strategy for experienced bracket fillers, yet Hoops Madness is still easy enough for the beginner or casual player. At its base, this is still just a game in which you pick the teams you think will win.

As more and more people grow familiar and comfortable with fantasy games, though, it might just prove a format that catches on big-time.

“Consumers will play both,” Thomas said. “If you follow college basketball and you love the excitement of a fantasy draft, RapidDraft Hoops Madness is for you.”

Should you decide to play along, here’s a bit of unsolicited advice: Don’t wait too long to take a shot on Xavier. A top-15 team in KenPom.com’s rankings for adjusted offensive efficiency, the Musketeers have a decent-looking draw. As a 6-seed, they could score 36 Hoops Madness points by winning just three games. A No. 1 seed, by comparison, would tally just 21 by winning the title.

(Note: FantasySportsBusiness.com is owned and operated by World Fantasy Games.)

SportingNews.com sent out an e-mail to its users Friday evening to announce that the site will no longer offer fantasy games.

Per the message, which was signed by president/publisher Jeff Price:

“Due to a shift in our core business strategy, SportingNews.com will no longer offer new fantasy games going forward (excluding Strat-O-Matic). The fantasy industry is changing, and we feel it’s best to devote our resources to providing the best fantasy content and advice on the internet, and beyond. We believe SportingNews.com’s fantasy content, tools and advice are already best in class, and over the next few months, we will completely redesign the Fantasy Source section of our site to deliver a new and improved user experience. With this shift in strategy, we will dedicate our entire fantasy staff to building Fantasy Source into the number one destination for fantasy information, accessible via internet, mobile devices, and other new technologies.”

This shift in strategy, of course, comes less than a year after Sporting News announced a multi-sport deal with RotoHog to run its fantasy games. That relationship opened with the 2009 fantasy football season, in which the primary Draft and Trade game struggled mightily.

This decision to change direction in advance of even the first baseball season after the announced deal makes it seem as though any issues in the SN-RotoHog relationship and/or the games platform could not be worked out.

For it’s part, SN.com has partnered with CBS Sports to offer half-priced baseball commissioner leagues on CBS’ site to SN.com users who have been awaiting 2010 launch.

Sporting News has long been a particularly trustworthy source of content both in print and online, and it’s innovation with the e-mailed Sporting News Today newsletter showed that the company is constantly looking for ways to adapt to a changing media climate. We’ll see what impact the absence of fantasy games (and their stream of revenue) will have.

FSB.com will pass along any more pieces of this story as we’re made aware.

A lot of sites give away prizes here and there to the audience, plenty ask you to do something to earn it and pretty much any content outlet is always on the lookout for quality writing.

With its Fight for Your Write competition, RotoExperts.com is combining all of that while also encouraging folks to get as familiar as possible with its content.

Here’s the deal, RotoExperts.com is accepting article submissions up through April 2 in which contestants are asked to describe how the sites baseball draft kit helped them. One winner will get a copy of 2K Sports’ Major League Baseball 2K10, an Evan Longoria Fathead Jr. and a Buffalo Wild Wings sweatshirt. That person will also get his or her article published on RotoExperts.com.

“It certainly is a talent search,” RotoExperts’ Scott Engel told FSB.com. “One of our editors has already asked to play the role of Simon Cowell.”

Aside from providing some positive PR for the site and drawing any readers encouraged by the prizes, such a challenge can work like the old Open Pen competitions that Matthew Berry’s TalentedMrRoto.com used to host. There’s certainly no guarantee that the winner (or any entrant) turns into a regular contributor, but it’s worth a shot.

And even if that end of it doesn’t work out, it’s still fun to win some prizes, the first two of which are being provided by 2K Sports.

“Personally, I’m an avid sports gamer and wing eater, so I’m glad we’re doing this,” Engel said.

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– Verizon Wireless and the NFL announced a deal Tuesday that will present live football coverage to the handsets of Verizon customers for at least the next four years — including fantasy panacea the Red Zone Channel.

– Switched.com rates the MyFantasyTeams application among the best sports apps available for the Blackberry. Just what Blackberry owners need, another reason to keep staring at the thing.

– A writer for the Hollywood Reporter applied the letter of the well-known (at least around these parts) federal UIGEA law to the common practice of holding Academy Awards pools. His assessment: As long as you stick to the same types of money rules that govern fantasy-games providers, there’s enough skill involved to keep things legit.

– RotoHog has signed on to build a celebrity-based fantasy game for US Weekly magazine.

– Dave Richard of CBSSports.com uses the site’s Tableau-produced analytics to compare value across positions for the past football season.

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