Company: Perimeter Consulting, parent of U-Sports
U-Sports launched: 1996

Last week’s open to college football season marked “the start of a new era of college football.” So said Knight Commission co-chairs William E. Kirwan and R. Gerald Turner in their Los Angeles Times op-ed piece decrying the fall of amateurism as brought on by college fantasy sports.

Actually, though, 2008 is the 13th year in which these poor athletes will be so horribly exploited by those who wish to track their stats for competition.

“Most of the people I knew had a passion for college sports that pro sports couldn’t come close to equaling,” says Nathan Karp, director of U-Sports, referring to the site’s genesis in the mid-1990s. “We had a few MLB and NFL fantasy leagues going, but the only reason we followed those sports was because of our fantasy teams. We decided to start our own spreadsheet-based college fantasy football league and we soon realized there was a lot of demand for people to join our league or start their own similar one.”

In 1996, that spreadsheet birthed an online college football fantasy league that supported a modest 50 players and gave the developers of Perimeter Consulting something to do for fun when they weren’t building websites or online applications for clients.

“We started demoing some of the technical features to prospective clients and found that it was actually a distracting demo because the clients had more questions and enthusiasm about college fantasy football than for what we were trying to highlight,” Karp says. “We eventually cleaned it up and opened it up to the public to join. It had some mild success that first year but has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since, both in terms of the quality of the application and the user base.”

From the initial group of 50 players, Karp says that U-Sports has grown to a base of 10,000 users, which means an average of 50 percent more business a year. That’s a rate well ahead of even the tremendous growth of the fantasy industry as a whole, which has added about 23 percent to its user base a year over the past five.

Because it began as a side project of an already established business, U-Sports never required any startup capital, and Karp says the site has never required any outside funding. He says that U-Sports will generate roughly the same amount of revenue this year as the rest of Perimeter Consulting’s business and that they expect the league-hosting site to soon pass its parent company.

“Except for the first few years of breaking even, we have been profitable ever since,” Karp says.

Users can create a private league and then enter teams for $14.95 apiece, or individual players can throw down $16.95 and join a public league. Teams are scored against each other, and teams ranked in the top 25 at the end of the season.

The draw - other than the sheer ability to play fantasy college sports (the site also offers basketball) -seems to be the design of the site and all the customizable settings.

“It is very easy to find the features, set your lineup and get the latest stats and fantasy points for all of the players,” says Steven Lassan, an editor with Athlon who has been covering fantasy college football for eight years (previously for our sister site ProFantasySports.com) and playing on U-Sports for six. “I think U-Sports is easily the best college fantasy site on the market. With the ability to customize the lineup positions, scoring and overall league setup, it is clearly head and shoulders above the rest. Not to mention, U-Sports has partnered with Mock Draft Central to provide an excellent live draft interface, and every season, they listen to the participants on how they can improve.”

And, of course, U-Sports has given its players names from the very beginning. That’s part of what makes the whole controversy over CBS Sports adding names to its games this year so amusing (and, at times, frustrating). At the same time, all the attention paid to CBS Sports’ announcement has drawn great publicity for that site’s free game and led to situations such as the incorrect assumption that this is the first season people can play such a game.

That kind of attention for such a large competitor could mean trouble for smaller companies. However, despite attributing some of U-Sports’ success to the fact that the Perimeter Consulting folks “worry about everything,” Karp says the CBS hubbub has actually helped in a way.

“In the past we have had to market to both the merits of college fantasy sports and the merits of U-Sports,” Karp says. “One of the benefits of increased competition is that we can focus more on what makes U-Sports unique. U-Sports offers more customization options and features than any fantasy service, of any sport, and we have long ago tackled the issues that trip up most college fantasy providers in their first few years.”

Who: Brett Baker
What: President and co-founder, FantasyCoverage.com; member of FSTA board of directors

“I’ve concluded that I’m not all that interesting.”

That self assessment came from Brett Baker after reviewing his biographical information in the answers to my questions for this profile. Well, if a guy who has been a chemical engineer, spent eight months of a year working in China, the Philippines and Venezuela, worked in the burgeoning field of wind-energy harvesting and launched a fantasy-sports startup isn’t interesting, I don’t know what that says for most of the rest of us.

The chemical engineering came with a company called APV, which works in industrial manufacturing and engineering, where Baker landed after graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in process engineering. As an engineer and then project manager with APV, Baker helped design and implement beverage plants for drinks that included Sunny Delight and Gatorade. It was this job that took him to China for five months in his final year with the company, as well as the Philippines for two months and Venezuela for one more.

Upon leaving APV in 1997, Baker says he followed his boss to NEG Micon, which manufactures wind turbines — “like the huge ones you see in Palm Springs.” (I have to say that the closest I’ve come to seeing Palm Springs is watching the early scenes of “Rainman,” but at least the turbines are visible there.)

“I quickly found that the wind energy industry is very similar to the fantasy sports industry in that most people in it are very passionate about their work,” Baker says. “If you were traveling and eating dinner with people after already having worked with them for 12 hours, they still only wanted to talk about windmills. After two years and countless failed attempts to change conversations to sports, I figured I was in the wrong line of business.”

So after a couple of years there, Baker joined Apropos Technology as a senior director of professional services. His group designed and built software for customers, and Baker spent his time managing revenue and interfacing with the sales and engineering groups, experience that would help him once he entered the next phase.

In 2005, Baker and an associate launched Receller Inc., which acts as an intermediary for people who want to sell items on eBay. It was also that year that they got FantasyCoverage.com off the ground, while Receller was somewhat idle, waiting on movement by a large customer.

“We originally intended to license software for wagering on fantasy sports performances,” Baker says. “My background was consulting and we saw that there was a need for specialized software development services within the industry, so we shifted our focus to that. It started to take on a life of its own fairly soon afterwards and I began to spend most if not all of my time on that side of the fence.”

Among the companies that Fantasy Coverage has worked with already since its public launch in 2006 are ESPN, Fanball and Ditka Fantasy Sports. Whereas he didn’t find the same passion as those around him in the wind-energy industry, Baker doesn’t find the same problem working in fantasy.

Baker says he has played fantasy football in a league with friends from college since 1993 and also counts fantasy baseball and basketball among his annual pursuits. Forays into NASCAR, golf and “some of the more obscure sports” haven’t taken hold, but the eight or so leagues among the three sports he does keep up with — along with raising three kids — is enough to keep him busy.

Last year, his fantasy involvement included Fantasy Coverage joining the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, when they realized the winter conference in Chicago would be local for the company based in La Grange, Ill.

“We didn’t know what to expect, but it seemed like a no-brainer,” Baker says of joining.

Now, he sits on the board of directors and played an integral role in the planning for the most recent summer conference back in Chicago. Of course, maybe someday he’ll actually do something interesting.