If you are even the most casual of sports fans, work in an office or live somewhere in the United States, you know what March means on the sporting calendar.

It’s “madness” time in college basketball, when brackets abound and pools are plentiful. Xerox Monday — after Selection Sunday — takes many of us to the copy machine so that we can take way too many cracks at building that impossible perfect bracket.

RapidDraft.com, however, wants you to consider a different way to pick your teams: via fantasy draft.

“Innovation is the key to growth in the world of fantasy sports,” said Jeff Thomas, CEO of World Fantasy Games. “Most fantasy companies offer a bracket contest. Nobody has a draft. Applying our patent-pending social gaming model to the NCAA Tournament was a natural, with on-demand live drafts inside our virtual-world draft room. RapidDraft is true differentiation in the marketplace and can complement a bracket game on any fantasy site.”

RapidDraft Hoops Madness pits a consumer against three avatars backed by expert opinion and strategy. The four teams tip off with a 16-round draft in which every NCAA tournament team is selected. (The two play-in participants act as one team here. And yes, NCAA, that is a play-in game.) The “Fantasy Pros” draft according to specifications set forth by this site, SportsBuff.com and Sara Holladay — best known as the FF Librarian.

“I’ve never had the chance to combine fantasy sports with March Madness, so I’m excited to see that RapidDraft has stepped up to the plate and taken it to the next level,” Holladay told FSB.com. “Everything is better with a touch of fantasy.”

Once the four fantasy squads are drafted, you score points for every victory by one of your NCAA teams. Points are awarded in a seed-times-round format — meaning a second-round win by a No. 4 seed, for example, would garner 8 points. Another 1.5 bonus points are available each time your total score for a round beats that of a Fantasy Pro team in your league, up to 4.5 bonus points per round.

“I love the unique concept that RapidDraft has come up with,” said Jim Day, an avid fantasy gamer, founder of FantasyFootballWhiz.com and host of multiple shows on BlogTalkRadio’s The Fantasy Sports Channel. “The draft is something you just don’t see on any other March madness contest and will provide another exciting way to play one of the most enjoyable and exciting tournaments in sports.”

In the end, of course, you’re really competing against all of the other human players, with 50 guaranteed cash prizes and a $2,500 grand prize. That’s not a bad return on a free entry. Consumers can draft up to twelve times each, three times per draft position.

The different format might scare off a bracket traditionalist at the start, but the system still awards you for properly projecting which higher seeds will stick around longer and grabbing a Cinderella or two. Just imagine how many points George Mason would have gotten you back in 2006, or Davidson just two years ago.

It’s a new twist with different layers of strategy for experienced bracket fillers, yet Hoops Madness is still easy enough for the beginner or casual player. At its base, this is still just a game in which you pick the teams you think will win.

As more and more people grow familiar and comfortable with fantasy games, though, it might just prove a format that catches on big-time.

“Consumers will play both,” Thomas said. “If you follow college basketball and you love the excitement of a fantasy draft, RapidDraft Hoops Madness is for you.”

Should you decide to play along, here’s a bit of unsolicited advice: Don’t wait too long to take a shot on Xavier. A top-15 team in KenPom.com’s rankings for adjusted offensive efficiency, the Musketeers have a decent-looking draw. As a 6-seed, they could score 36 Hoops Madness points by winning just three games. A No. 1 seed, by comparison, would tally just 21 by winning the title.

(Note: FantasySportsBusiness.com is owned and operated by World Fantasy Games.)

Fantasy is really beginning to make its way into the college ranks, but football looks like the easier of the two key men’s sports to tackle with its once-a-week schedule and shorter season.

Basketball, with more than 300 teams to draw from and a season that tends to start quietly in the heat of NFL season and not long after fantasy baseball has wrapped up, could prove to be a tougher sell to the general audience … unless purveyors piggyback on the NCAA tournament.

For the first time this year, I took a crack at fantasy college basketball via a league started by fellow World Fantasy Games associate editor Perry Missner on FantasyPostseason.com, and what I found was a pared down version of the college season that could be more marketable to a broad audience.

Because Perry — who might be the Web’s leading fantasy writer on this currently niche sport via his Syren’s Call blog — is the only person I know who plays the regular-season edition, I decided to start an e-mail chat about his niche.

Here’s what came out of it …

FSB.com: Our Fantasy Postseason league is my first shot at fantasy college basketball (a shot that I’d like to think would have been stronger if I’d been able to make the live draft … but that probably wouldn’t have). What’s your experience with fantasy college hoops? Where does it rank among the fantasy sports you play?

Perry Missner: In some ways, fantasy college basketball is my favorite. Of course, I have the most invested in it because I have been writing about it. I am watching this year’s class like a proud papa because I wrote about them as freshmen four years ago. I like fantasy football, baseball and basketball (pro style a lot), but there is plenty of information about each of them on the Web. With college basketball — other than me — no one is writing about it, so the research is what you put into it, and the types of play haven’t been standardized and are more diverse. I play in three leagues each year (one I created), and I know of others that have been around for a while and are popping up. What did you think of your first experience with it? And what kind of potential do you think it has?

FSB.com: Well, I certainly would have preferred to draft the team myself, but I couldn’t have asked for much better than getting my boy Hansbrough in the first round. Of course, anyone reading here probably doesn’t care much about my particular team.

I certainly found the draft-and-play format more interesting than ESPN’s Hardcourt Challenge, where you simply select one player from each of a bunch of predetermined groups. Aside from drafting, my next favorite aspect of a fantasy league (other than winning) tends to be working the trade desk. That’s missing here — necessarily so, I think, but missing nonetheless.

I’ve never played the regular-season version, but my feeling is that the tournament-specific version will have much wider appeal by cutting down the player pool. I also think that incorporating a user’s bracket predictions — players on advancing teams obviously get more chances to score — and, of course, the shorter “season” should keep fantasy participants from losing interest. How active/engaged have the folks with whom you’ve played remained throughout the regular season?

PM: For the most part, people have stayed engaged throughout the season in my leagues for the past three years. I’ve been quite impressed. I have never been in a fantasy league in which all of the members stayed engaged for the whole year. Of course, I rarely play in money leagues, so that may have something to do with it. I do have a number of college basketball writers involved including many people from collegehoops.net and an editor from Athlon.

FSB.com: I think anyone can jump in and play fantasy football at least semi-decently (if they want to, of course), and the prevalence of advice for other major fantasy sports makes them more accessible. How realistic a chance does someone have in one of your leagues without being neck deep in research?

PM: More attention is needed than in fantasy football. For many people, that is the appeal of fantasy college basketball — that you have to do the research yourself, but you get to feel good about your decisions because they came from you and not some nutty “expert.”

And if you’re asking if a newbie has a chance to win: sure. As with any fantasy sport, there is plenty of luck involved. The first year of the Big Chief Challenge, I had 10 people and the one guy that had played fantasy college basketball before came in 10th. Like with any fantasy league, the more engaged you are, the better your chances, but my league is simple enough that experience is not required.

Back in the summer, a decent-sized controversy was sparked by CBS Sports’ decision to add player names to its existing fantasy college football contest. Less than a year later, the Knight Commission has another sport to worry about.

With its new offering, Hardcourt Challenge, ESPN has chosen to populate a fantasy game with the names of individual collegians who make up the teams in the men’s NCAA tournament.

Just like with CBS’ football action, this is not the first time that player names have been used a fantasy college basketball game. Just like in that situation, however, ESPN is far larger a presence than its predecessors in the space.

Will Hardcourt Challenge meet the kind of complaints that CBS’ fantasy college football did? Not likely. The shock felt by those on the other side of this debate figures to dissipate with each new mainstream game that identifies individual college athletes. On top of that, even the most well-meaning student advocate wouldn’t have much of an argument to make in March.

It was silly enough when opponents were lamenting the “awful” decision to name football players and charging fantasy with chipping away at the NCAA’s goal of “enhancing the educational experience.” Could anyone sit there with a straight face during the Pennzoil At The Half show while checking over his or her bracket and lob the same accusations at fantasy college basketball? It doesn’t look like anyone has yet, so maybe potential opponents will realize that fantasy isn’t evil.

As for the game itself, Hardcourt Challenge is clearly designed to appeal to the masses more than the serious fantasy player. There is no draft, just eight “buckets” (or groups) of players, and participants select one guy from each collection. The lineup can be changed after each weekend of games, and scoring combines points, rebounds and assists.

This kind of contest is interesting, because even with fantasy college football seeming to be on the verge of booming, college basketball can prove a bit more unwieldy. Anyone turned off by the 120 or so teams in the top football division will shiver at the more than 300 to track at the highest level of men’s hoops.

The 2008 tournament, however, has introduced us recently to this game from ESPN and a truer fantasy contest put on by Fantasy Postseason. The end-of-season tournament narrows the field down to a much more manageable 65 teams for game operators and presents a made for TV event that has a much easier time holding the attention of the consuming public.

Don’t be surprised if we soon see more NCAA tournament-centered fantasy games, even if full-season college basketball never really finds its footing.

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– A Kentucky man won the first prize of the year in the FLW Fantasy Fishing game, and another reporter is now aware of the contest.

– To some (or at least one), SportsJudge.com’s Marc Edelman is the “Solomon of fantasy sports.”

– Expert drafts abound in baseball and football, but how often can you find out who the experts of motorcycle racing would select? The writers at motorcyclenews.com like these folks.

– If you’re among the working stiffs who starts watching the NCAA men’s basketball tournament online via CBS Sports’ March Madness on Demand, you’ll now be able to get it in high definition.