Between the surgery on his ankle and the loss of No. 1 receiver Sidney Rice for half the season, plenty of folks to pick up Brett Favre in fantasy drafts will be nervous about his 2010 outlook. Unfortunately for them, they won’t be able to buy insurance to help them rest easier.

According to this report from CNBC sports business guru Darren Rovell, FantasySportsInsurance.com is not including Favre among its list of insurable players in 2010.

“Favre is not going to be insurable this year,” said Henry Olszewski of Fantasy Sports Insurance, which is in its second year of operation. “Drafting him could be a good idea, but insuring him is not. He’s old, he’s got ailing injuries that constantly perk up, and even though he plays through them, there’s a big risk.”

Now, I’m no insurance salesman, so I’ll leave the official risk-assessment work to those folks and their actuaries (although my younger brother is one of those). From here, though, leaving Favre out of the available fantasy insurance packages seems to be a bigger risk for those trying to profit from sales.

Take a quick look at Favre’s NFL.com player profile, and you’ll see what we all already know: The guy has played a full schedule every year since 1993. He simply doesn’t miss games, despite the assorted ailments along the way that comes with being targeted for a living by angry, 290-pound dudes. (As Rovell points out, including playoffs, Favre has played in 309 consecutive games, an NFL record.)

This time last year, we all wondered whether Favre’s surgically repaired right (throwing) elbow would hold up. All he did was thrive his way through the full 16-game regular season and two playoff contests.

According to FSI policy, an insured football player must miss nine regular-season games (or combine for 14 with another covered player or 18 with two others) to draw an insurance payout. Doesn’t it make sense for the insurance seller to bet against the possibility of Favre missing nine games or more?

Obviously, the advancing age and collection of injuries along the way increased the potential risk, but it’s just that concern coupled with his transcendent prominence that would make Favre an ideal unofficial pitch man for selling fantasy insurance.

Alas, fantasy drafters will have to pick up the NFL iron man at their own risk. Frankly, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

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

– STATS has announced an extension of its major college football coverage for this season. Namely: The company will now offer play by play for all FBS games, X-info to reflect details that don’t appear in the typical box score and a mobile Web product, among other features.

– Anyone with an ESPN.com Insider subscription can read the upcoming ESPN the Magazine profile of the World Championship of Fantasy Football. (It’ll be in the July 26 issue.) Apparently competing in the WCOFF “takes a special kind of player.”

– Time.com counts fantasy sports among the nine strangest things that one can insure.

– We assumed that opening the Yahoo! Sports fantasy API meant opening up every sport that the company treats. Apparently it didn’t, though, as this quick blog post relays that basketball and hockey are now available.

– KeeperCommish.com is rolling out a new service to help keeper-league football manage the extended strategy that their format entails.

– This blogger says that his fantasy baseball league with 12 tracking categories fundamentally presents too much for the human brain to effectively process at a time — then tells business folks that they could use the example to improve how they instruct their sales reps.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

BlogTalkRadio’s Fantasy Sports Channel claimed the prize for Best New Site or Site Update on the second day of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference in Las Vegas.

The FSC took the FSTA industry award for Best Podcast on Tuesday, its first such honor.

New company Fantasy Sports Insurance was rewarded for Best Innovation on Wednesday, and RotoWorld/NBC Sports’ Season Pass was named Best Specialty Product or Service.

So, did you hand over your league-entry fee last year about this time, draft Tom Brady early and then promptly watch your season end along with his?

“The Tom Brady injury was the starting point for FSI,” Henry Olszewski, co-creator of Fantasy Sports Insurance, told FSB.com. “As a fantasy player and insurance agent, I did field a few questions in jest from friends asking if there was any coverage for a fantasy player getting hurt.”

Olszewski and his peers at Intermarket Insurance Agency took the questions a bit more seriously, though, and began developing the idea last September. Less than a year later, the venture has been launched for the start of football season.

The concept is just like that of other insurance setups: Clients pay a percentage of their league fees to insure their money-league teams against season-altering injuries. FSI offers three specific options …

Package 1 — One “key player” misses 10 of the first 15 games

Package 2 — One “key player” misses eight of the first 12 games

Package 3 — Three “key players” miss a total of 18 games in that 15-game window

Lest there be any confusion over who qualifies as a “key player,” the company has set up a list of 50 players from which to select for this season (a reasonable list, despite the inclusion of Cincinnati’s Cedric Benson).

“We did a lot of research about the business side of fantasy sports and realized there was a far greater dynamic here then we initially thought,” Olszewski said. “A few of the key steps we took were vetting the concept through legal channels, hiring a website and software developer, researching the insurance market to find an ‘A’ rated carrier to underwrite the program, and conduct some market research to find out if there was a genuine interest in this type of product/service.”

The timing for this launch probably couldn’t be any better. No fantasy owner went into last season planning on the real possibility of a Brady injury, and the quick demise of his 2008 season drove home the point that every player is one play away from being out of the lineup. As Olszewski pointed out, recent tough economic times have also made many of us tighter with our money. For some, the opportunity to insure their league-entry fee might assuage the worry that might otherwise keep them from playing.

In addition to its standalone business, Fantasy Sports Insurance is also seeking partnerships with fantasy-game providers, such as the deal it struck with Fanball just last month. That revenue-share agreement, Olszewski says, places banner ads for FSI on Fanball.com and allows Fanball customers to purchase insurance straight from the game pages.

Although football figures to sit at the center of any success the company might find — thanks to its popularity and penchant for injuries — Fantasy Sports Insurance plans to launch its service for the upcoming basketball and hockey seasons as well, and the 2010 baseball season. Olszewski says NASCAR and soccer versions are also in development, and the site carries a tab for golf at the top of the page.

Olszewski says the underwriting agency, Lloyd’s of London, has been a partner for a while and offers “a similar type of disability coverage to professional sports team owners.”