Name: Ngozika Nwaneri
Nickname: FWG Wani
Job title(s): founder and president of Amiri Business Solutions Ltd., the parent company to PASPN.net
Full-time in fantasy? Yes
Age: 29
Education: Electrical Engineering & Computer Science MIT Class of 2001
Family status: Single
Favorite fantasy sport to play and why: Fantasy football, because of the close friends and colleagues I play with each year.
Favorite sport to watch: NFL Football
Favorite team (any sport): Detroit Pistons & LIONS!
All-time favorite athlete: Isaiah Thomas
Years playing fantasy: 5 years

I got my start in the fantasy industry when: I got in contact with Jim Enright at Fanball.com when I was looking for a stats provider in order to experiment with the regular season concept of the Mock GM game. Fanball answered the call, and then later told me about the FSTA. From my first conference in February 2008 I knew there was no turning back.

Since then, my fantasy résumé includes: N/A

Three questions

1) You’re Mock GM fantasy basketball game is up for three FSTA awards this year. What makes the game new, different and intriguing when compared with what else is on the market?
What makes the Mock GM game new and intriguing is the feeling you get controlling an NBA team as if you are a real NBA GM using the rules of the collective bargaining agreement. There is a sense of ownership and accomplishment when you take over an existing NBA team and their current financial situation and turn that team into a contender. The game allows the user to live out their dreams of managing their favorite NBA team.

What changed from the 2004 origination to the 2008 relaunch?
Each year we add more pieces of the CBA to the game. The biggest change since 2004 was the addition of the regular season (real-time) portion of the game, where mock GMs play out their off-season moves in head-to-head competition with other mock GMs in an NBA-like, 18-week regular season during the NBA regular season.

2) You’ve been into programming and web design since before college. What first got you interested in that area and what were your earliest projects?
I was in a computer science program at the University of Maryland the summer before my senior year in high school, and for our final project we had to create a website. The website I created was the first version of what is today PASPN.net. You can say the project did not stop that summer of 1996 and has continued developing over the next 12 years.

3) Other than the Mock GM game, what other kinds of things fall under the PASPN.net umbrella? What, if anything, do you do on a professional level outside of running PASPN.net?
PASPN.net is an online community for all NBA fans and is a source for content and news for all things related to the NBA and fantasy basketball. Outside of running PASPN.net, I am an enterprise application architect providing consulting services to local businesses in the New York metropolitan area.

Washington cornerback Fred Smoot beat Chris Cooley to win the fantasy league Cooley put together for his teammates.

In true Smoot fashion, the corner thanked both himself and “Fred Smoot” for the title while hoisting the trophy donated to the league by Fantasy Trophies.

Anyone who has come up one game short in a fantasy league can sympathize with Cooley’s feelings in the video that accompanies the blog post on his website …

Fantasy Football Champ from Tanner Cooley on Vimeo.

Professional football wasn’t always an exciting, high-scoring, unpredictable game. (Somewhere, a Lions fan asks, “It is now?”)

Back in 1937, they didn’t even have quarterbacks. There were wings and backs and a bunch of guys who played on both sides of the ball, and a game that wouldn’t have been a whole lot of fun for statheads. Then there was Sammy Baugh.

Baugh — who died Wednesday at 94 — was the NFL’s first star passer. As a rookie “tailback” in 1937, he led the league in completions (81), attempts (171), completion percentage (47.4), passing yards (1,127) and interceptions (14).

He led the league in passing yards four times, was chosen a first-team All-Pro on four occasions and three times threw at least 22 touchdown passes. That would have ranked him among the top 13 as recently as last season.

Baugh ushered the league from a molasses-paced era of running and more running to a style that has brought about today’s pass-first game. Though none of us has probably ever taken the time to really think about it, that introduction to the effectiveness of passing probably allowed for our prosperous game of fantasy football.

In 1936, the year before Baugh entered the league, the NFL leader in touchdowns was Green Bay’s Don Hutson with nine. Over the course of the 12-game season, exactly 11 guys scored more than three touchdowns. How much fun would it have been to gather with your buddies in August and battle for one of the few offensive studs who would find the end zone once a month?

Now, if there had been no “Slingin’” Sammy Baugh, would someone else have come along and put the ball in the air? Of course. But they didn’t attach “Slingin’” to the beginning of his name because he liked to toilet paper houses.

Thanks, Sammy, for helping to turn pro football into a game we love to follow.

Additional coverage

• N.Y. Times obit — Sammy Baugh, N.F.L. Great, Dies at 94
• Washington Post chat with Baugh’s biographer — Remembering Sammy Baugh

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Anyone who’s not ready for fantasy football season to come to a close just yet can start a playoff league on MyFantasyLeague.com for free.

– The Fantasy Man wants his new site, FantasyPlayersExpress.com, to serve as a fantasy player social network and repository for fantasy-related information and analysis.

– kaChing seeks to use open-source principles and social networking to allow users to follow the investment practices of more accomplished users. It’s fantasy expertise for the stock-trading players.