It hasn’t garnered a whole lot of attention since the announcement that CBS would name its players this year, but a battle has been going on between the NCAA and fantasy sports since late summer. There hasn’t been much real action, but plenty of handwringing, harsh words, hyperbole and misinformation have been tossed around.

Finally, today via The Huffington Post, NCAA president Myles Brand decided to comment publicly on the issue.

In case you don’t feel like reading the entire thing, it’s actually relatively conciliatory. Brand certainly makes clear that he doesn’t agree with naming college players in fantasy games and heads down some of the bumpy roads that a number of his colleagues have driven in trying to make their points, but he stops short of predicting the end of “amateur” athletics.

A cynic might say that it’s not incredibly surprising to find a softer stance from the president of an organization in the middle of a $6 billion contract with the same company that sparked this whole controversy (a relationship Brand does fairly mention). Really, though, how many cynical journalists are out there …

Still, despite softer language and a few apparent attempts to defuse the controversy, Brand still took some missteps in arguing the NCAA’s case. For proper treatment, I figured I’d go through part of his op-ed piece Fire Joe Morgan style. (Bolded text below is copied directly from Brand’s writing.)

It’s been two weeks now since the kickoff of the college football season and the kickoff of the college football fantasy season that for the first time is using real names of student-athletes.

Sorry, sir, but player names have actually been used in online fantasy games for 13 years.

The acquisition and trading of student-athletes, the substitution of their university or college standing with fantasy team names and all for the sake only of virtual competition, runs counter to some of the most important characteristics that distinguish college from professional sports. Those who participate in college sports are students, and the first purpose of intercollegiate athletics is to enhance the educational experience of those students.

I haven’t taken the time at this point to review all the graduation rate data (or figure out how to read all of the NCAA’s charts), but I do know that the two most penalized sports under the NCAA’s new graduation-rate measuring system for the 2007-08 academic year were also the two most prominent — football and men’s basketball. Despite operating with rosters of only about 15 players, men’s basketball easily outpaced all other sports in instances of penalties.

Now, part of this is certainly the fact that more than 300 schools in Division I-A alone sport men’s basketball squads. However, if the “first purpose” is to enhance the academic experience of the players, then a whole lot of coaches and athletics directors either missed the memo or are really bad at their jobs, at least by this measure.

By the way, if you add baseball to the other two men’s sports, you get 124 penalty situations, compared with 94 among all other sports.

… college fantasy leagues pay no heed to the educational value of intercollegiate athletics as opposed to the entertainment value of professional sports.

I must say, I was quite impressed with all the heed paid to the educational value of the Tennessee-UCLA game a couple of Mondays ago. The educational value of those Tuesday and Thursday night football games is impressive as well, as is all the education provided during the Wednesday night ACC basketball games that make Dick Vitale cry all winter. The ultimate in educational value is probably that enormous group study session that pulls 65 “teams” together every March, beginning on a Tuesday night, continuing on consecutive Thursdays and Fridays and finally completing on a Monday night. How could you fantasy jerks invade this wholesome environment and wrap your entertainment-driven tentacles around everything?

College fantasy leagues conducted on a par with professional fantasy leagues supports in the minds of many that the differences between college sports and professional sports in the real world are disappearing.

You know what else is accomplishing this? A $6 billion contract to air the men’s basketball championship through 2013. A coach making $4 million a year to teach football to the “student-athletes” at Alabama. A fifth Bowl Championship Series football game that is now played a full week after the other four have completed so that it can sit alone on a Monday night. Wait, I feel like I’ve come across this idea of football on a Monday night somewhere before …

That’s the part I don’t like the most.

Give me a break, sir.

Now, Brand does seem to indicate that the NCAA has no intention of suing CBS — or any other fantasy provider — any time in the foreseeable future to remove athlete names, and he finally concedes that fantasy college football has yet to make any discernable impact on the real game. If only Brand could steer clear of the same insincere language spouted by his peers, maybe we’d be getting somewhere.

The Interactive arm of CBS has filed suit against the NFL Players Association, seeking to keep the group from collecting licensing fees from fantasy football hosts.

The suit, filed in federal court in Minneapolis, pursues a judgment that the NFLPA cannot “extract money from CBS Interactive for the use of publicly available football statistics” under federal antitrust guidelines, according to Bloomberg.com’s reading of the file.

“It’s encouraging to see CBS take this step,” says Jeff Thomas, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association and founder and CEO of World Sports Technology Inc., which owns this site.

The motion comes just three months after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Major League Baseball Advanced Media in a similar case resolved in favor of fantasy provider CBC, former parent company of CDM Sports.

“As an association, the FSTA worked hard and dedicated significant budget to support the CDM lawsuit,” Thomas says. “Now that the Supreme Court has supported the fact that licensing fees do not have to be paid, the largest fantasy companies are in a position to save seven figures annually. This is a great example of a leading-edge company showing confidence in the court decision and asking others to stop ignoring it.”

(Rick Wolf of Rotoworld/NBC Universal and chairman of the Fantasy Sports Association chose not to comment on the case, citing the NFLPA’s membership in the FSA.)

This latest suit has the potential to alter the apparent calm delivered by the MLBAM case or settle the notion once and for all that stats and player names exist in the public domain. Action between the NFL and fantasy providers has been expected even in light of the decision in the baseball case.

CBS’ move to sue the players association before the group might challenge fantasy hosts in court could be viewed as an attempt to keep any actions on the subject in more favorable judicial circumstances than if the league or NFLPA determined the jurisdiction. The Eighth Circuit, where the CBS suit has been filed, is the same federal district in which courts found in favor of CBC and one that is home to many fantasy sports businesses.

CBS already pays licensing fees to the NFLPA for things such player photos that display on the site, but the body is also still trying to collect for stats and use of names, which were ruled to exist in the public domain in the MLBAM case.

A ruling in favor of CBS here could clarify the rules on what information is freely available for all fantasy providers.

Visit FSB.com often for updates on the suit’s impact on fantasy sports and reaction from those within the industry.

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Thanks to a new deal with Major League Baseball, ESPN will offer even more channels for its coverage of the sport, at least through 2013.

– A Web-to-TV widget in development by Yahoo and Intel could be the best attempt to date of integrating internet browsing with television consumption.

– CBS recently hosted its first-ever expert mock for the college fantasy game.

– Bloggers of the Web unite and run your own fantasy football platform.

If you’re going to launch a website that seeks to compete with mainstream sports content providers as well as wildly popular social-networking sites such as Facebook, you had better know what you’re doing. There’s little worry about that when you’re a former Yahoo! executive who last headed sports, entertainment and studios before leaving the company in 2006.

That’s the background that David Katz brings to the new site SportsFanLive.com, which has launched its beta version for public use.

Katz sees shortcomings for sports fans in the currently mass-produced formats mentioned above. He told The New York Times that the major sports sites “are fundamentally all the same — imbued with traditional media DNA … and not built for the next generation and for the evolving needs of sports fans.”

As for existing social networks, Katz says that although there are sports presences, the sites don’t really reach out to fans in particular.

“Facebook and other social network sites do a good job of connecting you to people all over your life, but it’s not relevant to your sports interests,” he told the Times. “We’re isolating that subset of sports friends and giving you instant communication with them.”

Katz, who also formerly worked for CBS, touts the aggregation of information sources in his new venture. He says that Sports Fan Live will draw from about 4,500 providers, rather than the hundreds he says mainstream sports sites tap.

Although Katz decided not to run any fantasy games through the new site, the venture — if successful — could be another way for fantasy players to connect, as is the case with recent social offerings by The Fantasy Football Times and FanSoft Media. One particularly interesting tool is the FanFinder, which purports to allow users to locate other fans of specific teams so that folks might gather to watch games.

It would be easy for a startup site to get crushed in the rush to combine sports and social networking right now, but the experience, capital and positioning brought by Katz at least gives SportsFanLive.com strong initial standing.