Fantasy sports are good for your league.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree or in-depth research to determine that. It’s common sense. Look around.

The NFL has exploded over the past five years or so, at the same time as fantasy participation has been growing by about 25 percent a year. Every outlet for football content has begun to cater its coverage to fantasy players. The NFL itself was the first of the major sports leagues to host fantasy leagues on its website.

Or check out baseball highlights on ESPNews. The “Fantasy Impact” box might not always present a stat that is actually relevant to fantasy owners, but the box is always there when they display the final score. Meanwhile, baseball continues to set attendance records and make a ton of money from broadcast rights.

The NBA and NHL now run fantasy games through their official websites, too. It’s just a good idea. It engages your fans, gives them an increased stake in the results of your events, and offers a potential entry point for new followers. Fantasy not only appeals to fans of a sport, but it can welcome in new consumers who might have no rooting interest in a particular team or might not have paid much attention to a particular league in the past.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s why the NCAA’s objections to fantasy haven’t made their way to the level of legal action.

Major League Baseball and now the NFL have taken fantasy providers to court over access to their athletes, and those two entities exist for the sole purpose of profiting from athletic contests. The NCAA, meanwhile, has stuck to writing op-ed newspaper pieces and sending letters to about how it doesn’t like the use of athletes’ names or the attachment of prizes to the college fantasy contests.

As we’ve pointed out here before, U-Sports has been running college fantasy games with player names included for more than 10 years. Obviously, CBS’ decision to name the players in its college football game this season put the issue on a much larger scale, but are we really expected to believe that no one in the NCAA was aware of U-Sports or any of a few other providers before? The governing body of college sports is simply too large an organization with too much concern for player eligibility to have not come across the games until this year. It seems far more likely that the CBS hoopla finally generated the kind of publicity that required an official response.

It does make some sense for the NCAA to come out against fantasy games publicly. As the official website states: “The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a voluntary organization through which the nation’s colleges and universities govern their athletics programs. It is comprised of institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals committed to the best interests, education and athletics participation of student-athletes.” From an academic standpoint, fantasy games offer no redeeming value to student athletes.

Of course, as stated here in the past, neither do a three-week championship basketball tournament, bowl games over winter break, Thursday night games on ESPN or baseball championships that stretch well past the end of classes in the spring.

That’s why it also makes sense for the NCAA to mount no formal challenge to fantasy sports. Fantasy offers free-of-charge marketing exposure and consumer engagement for college sports — the same sports that generate millions from broadcasting rights for the “voluntary” governing body and many member institutions.

Will the public push between the NCAA and fantasy providers take on a more official capacity at some point? Maybe. It would be hard to make much sense of such action, though.

(For those of you you might have arrived late to the FSB party, here’s another chance to get acquainted with the first business we profiled.)

Company: Advanced Sports Media LLC
Sites: www.draftanalyzer.com and www.playersearch.com
Founder and CEO: Ted Kasten
Launched: 2004
Full time: 2004

Back in 2004, Ted Kasten believed the fantasy football marketplace needed a better draft companion than the “static and outdated rankings provided by magazines,” at least according to the company bio at draftanalyzer.com. To fill the void, he developed Draft Analyzer and launched Draft Dynamix, which now resides under the umbrella of Advanced Sports Media.

The plan that started the whole venture, though, began to form at least two years earlier.

“I began designing the Draft Analyzer prototype as a fun side project on nights and weekends in 2002, when I needed help as a commissioner tracking everyone’s draft picks,” Kasten says.

As those of us who play fantasy sports - or video games, for that matter - well know, it takes folks with such a geek streak to come up the innovations that enhance our games. Kasten’s fun, self-serving side project quickly started to grow.

After beginning with just the draft tracker, he says, he continued to add features that took the platform from merely keeping up with picks to helping him build a better team. Those features include the ability to draw in and combine rankings from various online fantasy-content providers into printable cheat sheets.

The Analyzer also carries a proprietary player-recommendation engine, for which Kasten submitted a federal patent application before launching his business. (Maybe I could explain the algorithmic workings of that tool if I hadn’t skipped out on math classes in college.) Once Kasten had Draft Analyzer build, he headed for the March 2004 Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference, a move he said was crucial to starting and growing his business.

I left the conference with three key partnerships, a better understanding of the fantasy sports market and the confidence that I could be a leader in this critical market niche,” Kasten says. “I became a staple at the FSTA conferences and had a booth showing my software every time. All of my partnerships have come from meeting people at the FSTA conference.

From there, Kasten has licensed his product to five of the top six fantasy football league-hosting sites - including ESPN and CBS Sports - and taken home two industry awards. Draft Analyzer claimed the FSTA’s Best Draft Assistance Tool prize in 2005 and 2007, and the player-recommendation engine was a finalist for best innovation in 2005.

With Draft Analyzer plugging along, Draft Dynamix became Advanced Sports Media in February of this year, the same time that it launched PlayerSearch.

“It took forever to dig through numerous websites to find the latest information on individual players,” Kasten says of his motivation to create a search tool. “There is an enormous amount of great sports content sites, and more and more of them are offering everything for free. We are simply trying to bring all of the great sports content to the surface of the Web, much like Google has for general search.”

PlayerSearch.com does just what it says, gathering news, video, blog posts and the like that relate to a particular athlete and grouping the links in categories national news sources, local video and podcasts.

“We are not trying to create another sports portal. That has been done,” Kasten says. “All of our links take users to the original article or video, so the publisher gets full credit for their work. The ultimate goal of PlayerSearch is to make it quick and easy to access the best sports content on the Web.”

In addition to its free-standing site, PlayerSearch offers a widget that can be picked up by other sites. SportsBuff.com, which is part of the same company that owns this site, is among those that carry the widget.

Who: Dr. Kim Beason

What: Associate professor, park and recreation management, Ole Miss

Founder, Fantasy Sport Research Specialists LLC

Back in 2001, Dr. Beason went searching for studies on fantasy sports consumers, curious to find out why people played and what impact these games had on professional sports. He found the area lacking. Seeing a need for better understanding of this growing phenomenon, he decided to collect the data on his own but was stonewalled in his attempts to connect with companies that could provide customer lists.

That led the Ole Miss professor to trudge out to Las Vegas (not a bad destination if you have to trudge) and pitched his idea to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (then known as the Fantasy Sports Players Association). He offered to match the group’s funding through the first three years of a research project in return for the FSTA encouraging its members to supply consumer targets for the research. A partnership was born.

From the first study in 2002 and 2003, Beason’s pursuit of learning more about those who play fantasy sports quickly grew into popular and valuable research on the fantasy market and the consumer-spending habits of participants. Businesses used the data to court advertisers and more effectively target consumers. Media outlets latched onto the numbers to reflect the growth in this particular entertainment industry. Perhaps most importantly, the study’s valuable findings have driven up inquiries from FSTA constituents, which has in turn enhanced the breadth and depth of the information collected.

“Dr. Beason is the godfather of fantasy sports market research,” says Jeff Thomas, president of the FSTA and CEO of SportsBuff.com, which owns this site. “He took a chance on our small association many years ago, funded many of his own expenses to help kick off our research efforts and is now recognized as the top fantasy sports consumer behavior expert in the world.”

The project grew to the point that in 2006, Beason founded Fantasy Sport Research Specialists LLC “to serve as a clearinghouse for research,” an enterprise he shares with three partners. Although the annual FSTA study - whose sixth set of annual results were presented at the FSTA conference in Chicago on July 8 and 9 - is the company’s primary focus, there are other considerations as well.

“We also explore fantasy sport as a medium to teach children, relationships and differences between the fantasy sports and gaming industries, and fantasy sport in the workplace,” Beason says. “FSRS also conduct specialty-market, branding and product-development research for individual fantasy sport companies.”

Not surprisingly, all of this work stemmed from a career as a fantasy-sports player that began in 1989 with a keeper football league at Ole Miss. Beason quickly learned in his second season not to mix business too closely with pleasure, however, when hosting the league’s draft in a campus classroom nearly got him fired.

“My butt was in a sling for about 2 weeks,” he says. “I had to convince them (they were still skeptical) that what we did wasn’t gambling but a game of skill, and the league fees - 30 bucks - was given to the winner.  I ended up hanging on to my job by promising to never, ever, conduct another fantasy sport event on campus.”

Then again, one might argue that the lesson didn’t really take root.

“Heck, I play and research fantasy sport as a (small) part of my job!” Beason says. “Talk about fortunate.”