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.

Who: Steven Lassan
What: College Football Writer, Athlon Sports

To most of the fantasy industry, fantasy college football is quite new. That is certainly not the case for Steven Lassan.

Lassan has played the fantasy college game for more than 10 years and has written about it for almost as long. He began writing about the college game for College Football Digest and Football.com, and then was offered a fantasy gig with FantasyGMs.com. (FantasyGMs.com later combined with ProFantasySports.com, which is now owned by SportsBuff.com. FSB.com falls under the same parent company.)

“The first writing job I had was actually with an NHL site, covering the Nashville Predators on a weekly basis,” Lassan tells FSB.com. “Although covering hockey was fun, college football has always been my favorite sport, and the opportunity to work with a couple of sites … as a college football writer was too good to pass up.”

In his time with Pro Fantasy Sports, Lassan dabbled in more than just the college game. He spent a year working as managing editor and leading the NFL fantasy coverage. The niche that fantasy college football has been, however, has always been his niche, and he covers it with impressive thoroughness.

Whereas writers on the pro beat only have to worry about 32 teams and potentially as few as six or eight players on a team, the top division of college quadruples the pool with 120 teams. It’s hard enough to keep tabs of enough players to successfully work the waiver wire throughout your league’s season, never mind knowing the country well enough to be able to dole out advice on Wyoming or Florida Atlantic.

“This is easily the biggest challenge,” Lassan says. “I read anything I can during the week involving college football. I also read all of the college box scores on Saturday night when the games are completing.

“Injuries are the most difficult aspect of college fantasy, as most teams to do not have to release them like it is done through the NFL. Unfortunately, some things will fall through the cracks if a coach holds it back, but for the most part, I can keep up with the injuries and any depth chart changes.”

Lassan has done it well enough to have worked his way into the hierarchy at Athlon, which is the top seller of sports preview magazines in the country, including one of the most respected college football guides.

Lassan says that there wasn’t much to his beginning with Athlon, that he merely took a chance and had it pay off.

“I really had no lead on a job at Athlon,” Lassan says. “However, I enjoyed reading the magazines every year and decided to e-mail one of the editors to see if they had any work. Although I wasn’t sure if there were any job openings, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I made.”

It’s the old lesson about putting yourself out there. Lassan knew what he liked to do, figured out a company for which he’d like to do it and took a chance. Now he enjoys a growing profile in an area of fantasy whose profile is quickly growing as well.

The fantasy college game is so new that the folks at Athlon didn’t even know about it when Lassan arrived. They quickly embraced the subject, though, and now feature it as part of their overall college football coverage.

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– The Fantasy Sports Trade Association is taking nominations for its industry awards through Nov. 10. Voting will take place in December, with the winners to be announced at the winter business conference in Florida on January 27-28. Nominees much be FSTA members.

– Forecasts for the online advertising marketplace seem to be bipolar, but eMarketer projects a continuation of double-digit growth through this year and next.

– Bryce McRae has joined the ranks of the managing editors at KFFL.

– The Knight Commission debated the impact of fantasy college football on Monday, particularly in relation to the broader question of whether to pay athletes. It still seems as though everyone involved in this area of the fantasy debate, though, is mistaken about the role and impact of fantasy.

– Real Time Sports is using performance and breadth of participation to rank all of its users in a single, 225-person fantasy football hierarchy. “Troy R.” leads with first-place standing in eight leagues and second in seven others at present.

Company: CBS Sports Fantasy
Site: CBSSports.com

When you’re undefeated in the Fantasy Sports Trade Association awards category of Best Commissioner Product, it’s fair to say you’re probably doing something right.

In 1997, CBS and SportsLine joined forces to offer fantasy games at CBS.Sportsline.com — an address that still takes you to the site today. A year later, the FSTA was formed and since 1999, the latter has awarded the former for those games.

“In the early days, we probably won by default, as our feature set was well above everyone else’s,” says Tony Fernandez, who takes the lead on the building and operation of fantasy games as vice president of sports technology for CBS Interactive. “As the competition catches up, we have realized that we must be better than the rest in performance, reliability, usability, content, support, etc. It’s about the overall experience, not just the product.”

That experience began with the products of SportsLine USA, created by Mike Levy in 1994 and launched on the Web in 1995, before many of us even knew that the Internet was about to change our lives.

In 1996, SportsLine began to offer fantasy games on the Web, and by the following March, the company reached a deal with CBS to deliver the games to a broader audience. Soon after, CBS.Sportsline.com also presented fantasy offerings in basketball, hockey, golf and auto racing, as well as international games for cricket and soccer.

Today, that lineup looks much the same on CBSSports.com, but it isn’t the breadth of sports coverage that those in charge like to focus on or even the number of amenities a particular game might present. Rather, it’s game play that appears to be the focus. That seems to be working, judging by the FSTA awards and reports such as that by The Wall Street Journal’s Nando Di Fino, which found a 100 percent approval rating within online mentions of CBS’ fantasy hockey product.

“I think that as the product matures, users have come to expect flawless performance,” Fernandez says. “In the early days, you would have expected serious issues during the first week or two of each season. Now users are not putting up with that. In fact, game play is fairly standardized right now. Users want things to work rather than more features. They want a better experience and ease of use.

“Fantasy sports appeals to a lot of users who are not very tech savvy and don’t have time or interest to figure things out.”

Fantasy sports also appeal to a very important section of American sports fans.

“Fantasy sports attract the cream of the crop,” says Jason Kint, general manager of CBSSports.com. “It’s the most engaged, the most loyal sports fan there is.”

CBS’ fantasy audience even trends toward the top of that class. In the earliest days, following the deal with SportsLine and then the purchase of commissioner.com, CBS offered its fantasy hosting services on a subscription basis. As online ad sales grew, the company decided to switch to free games in 2001. Within a year, however, the internet bubble was bursting, and the 2002 baseball season saw CBS head back to the world of subscription-only.

Although CBSSports.com does offer some free contests within its fantasy realm and could probably afford to go free with services such as its centerpiece fantasy football commissioner applications (in which a league costs $149 per season), there are no plans to return to that route. A big part of that decision is the caliber of fantasy player CBS draws as a result.

Kint says that the average player in CBS’ games is more involved, spends more time on the site and sticks around throughout the season. Fantasy owners will tend to have a little more incentive to keep up with their teams when money is involved. By the same token, it tends to be the more serious fantasy player — and more involved sports fan and more valuable consumer — who puts up money to play in the first place.

“Our users are more engaged, spend more time on the site per month, spend more on products. A lot of that comes from our pay service,” Kint says. “Advertisers know that is the core consumer.”

Of course, merely charging for your service isn’t necessarily going to keep users engaged. As part of enhancing the experience, CBS Sports has added significantly to its fantasy content this football season. This year kicked off a section of user-generated player updates, which Kint says has drawn a good response.

“It’s been very positive,” he says. “That’s a way to get the user more involved. We do that within the construct of having a more-engaged consumer.”

The site has also reached out to the involved fantasy football owner by adding a live Sunday morning Web show, Fantasy Football Today, which runs from 11 a.m. Eastern right up until the 1 p.m. kickoffs.

The biggest news this year, though, has been generated by CBS Sports’ decision to add player names to its fantasy college football game that is in its fourth season. The move has drawn a backlash from NCAA officials but has helped spur growth in the free CBS game, which Kint sees as an important fantasy player going forward.

“I believe it can compete with baseball one day,” he says of college football. “It has all of the elements to what makes pro fantasy football so engaging and fast-growing — once a week roster moves, almost all games on the same day, smaller roster — and it’s football. Why not give up your Saturday, too?”