When the NFL moved the Eagles and Vikings away from Sunday night, there’s no reason to doubt safety as the motive. The unintended consequence: fantasy aggravation.

You can call it ramping up the excitement if you want, but the point is that fantasy players around the country are waiting at least a day longer to find out who wins — a situation only magnified by the inclusion of the Eagles and their multitude of fantasy resources. In many cases, significant money hangs in the balance.

The World Championship of Fantasy Football, for instance, had six teams among the top 10 entering Week 16 that await Eagles-Vikings results. Leader Jeff Schinker may need some help from Philly receiver Jeremy Maclin to hold off a second-place squad relying on Vick and Adrian Peterson. Holding on will mean a difference of $250,000 in prize money.

At RapidDraft.com, Week 16 began with Michael Vick quarterbacking eight of the top 10 teams in the race for $100,000 and a few others such as Eagles kicker David Akers and the Philadelphia defense in position to come into play. With only the Tuesday night game to go, however, it appears that leader Jeff James — with Vick at quarterback — is safe.

The inaugural season of the Footballguys Players Championship also sports a $100K grand prize and plenty of Vick, as seven of the top 10 entering the final week employed the Philly passer. As it stands, Ryan Strickler’s second-place team can claim victory with just 13 points from Vick, well below the quarterback’s per-game average this season.

Similarly, the Fantasy Football Players Championship — the main event put on by the company that partners with Footballguys on their contest — has Tuesday night players breathing down the neck of the current leader. Richard Risinger clings to a mere 7-point lead, with the second-place HOGS sporting Maclin and the Philadelphia defense and the third-place Syracuse Slappers running out Vick and Peterson. The winner there takes $100,000 as well.

The National Fantasy Football Championship has to look a little further down the leaderboard but finds Tuesday-night intrigue nonetheless. As pointed out by founder Greg Ambrosius on the site’s message board (with help from some other members), the sixth-place team could overtake the current leader with a big combined performance from Vick and LeSean McCoy. On top of that, the ninth-place team remains alive despite a 75.38-point deficit because it has Vick, DeSean Jackson and Percy Harvin yet to go.

With another $100,000 targeted for the NFFC winner, that’s a total of $700,000 in fantasy winnings with at least some tie to tonight’s game … and that’s only a snapshot of first-place money for five national contests. Imagine the scenarios when you extend to all paying spots in these competitions and the rest of the leagues and contests out there.

Whether the NFL realized it or not, moving the Eagles-Vikings primetime game two days back promised to make the finish to this fantasy football season more interesting and memorable.

The NFL and the Elias Sports Bureau decided to slap on their Grinch masks this week and potentially take a gift away from some fantasy owners.

The league announced Thursday a stat change from Week 15 in which Pittsburgh running back Rashard Mendenhall lost a yard from his total. That might not seem like a big deal, but the alteration dropped his yardage from 100 to 99.

As NFL.com fantasy football guru Michael Fabiano pointed out, that still might not impact leagues such as those on his site that use fractional scoring. There probably weren’t too many fantasy teams that lost by 0.1 points last week.

However, if your league eschews decimal scoring, the 1-point difference could be a bit more significant. Also, as Fabiano points out, those leagues that award scoring bonuses to 100-yard rusher have seen more points disappear.

Whatever the case, the announcement basically means that anyone who owns Mendenhall or played against his owner last week should recheck Week 15 results just to make sure nothing changed. On the broader scale, I can’t help but see a bit of laziness from the league.

Putting on a Thursday game each week through roughly the second half of the NFL schedule already throws a wrench into the fantasy week. If the NFL is going to choose to proceed that way, though, then it’s incumbent upon the league to iron out any scoring, stat or player-discipline issues comfortably before the next week’s games begin. This only becomes more important as the end of the NFL season takes most fantasy players into their playoffs — many with significant amounts of money on the line.

Long ago, it wouldn’t have been a surprise for any major league to have no regard for fantasy players, but the NFL obviously realizes our impact with the way it has embraced this pastime/business. Now it needs to keep in mind the interests of those funding the Sunday Ticket and trafficking the league website so heavily.

Ask anyone in the fantasy sports industry if our games help the real sports on which they rely, and you’ll hear “Of course.”

It’s a no-brainer, really. The nature of fantasy inherently adds value to the actual sport, necessarily assigning more meaning to games and meaning to more games. It’s important to growing the overall status of fantasy sports and their marketing power, however, to make it a brainer as well, and this NFL season appears to be presenting the strongest evidence yet.

According to a weekend feature from the Los Angeles Times, 2010 is shaping up to deliver the best TV ratings in the league’s history, and the NFL can address thank-you cards to fantasy folks.

Nielsen ratings declare that 35 TV programs had garnered 20 million viewers or more in the fall season heading into the weekend. Twenty-six of those were NFL games. (And for those curmudgeons who still think fantasy a waste of time, seven of the other nine were episodes of Dancing with the Stars … which, by the way, makes sure to add an NFL player to the cast every season.)

The story features a women’s fantasy football league from California and offers some anecdotal evidence of fantasy’s impact, such as the previously casual NFL fan who estimates that her viewing has tripled since she started playing fantasy football.

Beyond that, though, there is harder evidence as well …

– According to CBS’ David Poltrack, ratings for non-home-team games in 2007 sat at 58 percent of those for home-team games. That climbed to 62 percent in 2008 and 63 percent in 2009.

– 70 percent of respondents to an ESPN survey of fantasy football players said that fantasy led them to watch NFL games they might not have otherwise.

– Viewership at the start of the third quarter of the Patriots’ recent Monday Night Football blowout of the Jets dipped just 2 percent from the game-opening audience, despite New England’s 24-3 halftime lead in a game it won 45-3.

The home team vs. non-home team data isn’t necessarily driven by fantasy players, but Poltrack’s hypothesis that fantasy play leads to more viewership of out-of-town games certainly makes sense, and the trend coincides with fantasy’s rise.

The past few years have seemed to produce more understanding of this nature, and we should expect to continue seeing studies and surveys such as those mentioned here that help to map the impact of fantasy games and the behavior of its players. Hey, maybe we’re not that far from seeing Dr. Kim Beason on Outside the Lines.

Name: John Tuvey

Nickname: 2V or just Tuv (pronounced Toov, hence the 2V); I had friends in college who didn’t even know my first name, and even my wife calls me Tuv

Job title(s): Senior NFL Analyst at The Huddle

Full-time in fantasy? Yes, since 1999-and I have no desire to go back

Age: John Smoltz and I will turn 42 on the same day this May

Education: Appropriately, I have a BS degree in Management with a minor in Communications from St. John’s University (the Division III football power located in central Minnesota, not the New York alma mater of Chris Mullin)

Family status: Married for almost 15 years to Mary, the most patient woman in the entire world. We have four wonderful kids: Mariah, 11; Elliott, 9; Amanda, 7; and Rebecca, 5.

Favorite fantasy sport to play: It’s still football, though I must admit the year I tried NASCAR was surprisingly enjoyable. I think I’ve played just about every fantasy sport out there; we even came up with Fantasy Nielsen Ratings to occupy our time during the baseball strike in the mid-’90s.

Favorite sport to watch: Football at any level. I’ve stopped at a junior high game while driving home and just watched, but Saturday afternoons at the Nature Bowl at St. John’s are the best — a little slice of heaven. Or a Sunday in the old office, with 10 flat-screen TVs all hooked up to the Sunday Ticket.

Favorite team (any sport): The Minnesota Vikings keep breaking my heart-not re-signing Matt Birk was just the latest kick to the store-but I keep coming back for more.

All-time favorite athlete: There are so many; Tony Oliva and Julius Erving were my childhood idols, Anthony Munoz was my favorite lineman, and Eddie George is my favorite football player

Years playing fantasy: The upcoming football season will be my 22nd of playing, and I have three leagues (two football, one baseball) that are at or beyond 20 years of existence.

I got my start in the fantasy industry when: I wrote a letter to Paul Charchian, who at that time was the publisher of Fantasy Football Weekly magazine. In that letter I compared my skills to Randy Moss and John Randle, and he was impressed enough that he brought me in on Sundays to help with the magazine. After about a month he hired me full-time.

Since then, my fantasy résumé includes: I worked my way up from associate editor to executive editor as Fantasy Football Weekly became Fanball. That gig included providing content for AOL and Yahoo as well as Fanball. In my final year there I was a finalist for the FSWA’s Fantasy Football Writer of the Year. I’ve also co-hosted (with Paul Charchian and Bo Mitchell) Fantasy Football Weekly on KFAN, the local sports talk radio station, for the past four years and make regular appearances on stations from Hawaii to Lawrence, Kan., to Tampa to St. Cloud, Minn. — and even an occasional appearance on Fox Sports Radio. Additionally, I’ve written stuff for Fantasy Football Champs, Fantasy Football Trader, Draft Stock, and the Minnesota Vikings’ website. Last spring I signed on with The Huddle as Senior NFL Analyst, and I’ve been with them ever since. Or was this the spot where I was supposed to list all the league titles I’ve won?

Three questions

1) What was your involvement/experience with fantasy writing before joining Fanball?

Before the turn of the century there wasn’t nearly as much fantasy coverage out there. My fantasy writing was pretty much limited to pithy weekly updates in the newsletters I did for the baseball and football leagues I was commissioner of. I had to quickly learn the difference between writing about a close-knit group who all knew each other and writing for a much larger audience who was more interested in finding out how to win their own leagues.

2) How did your association with The Huddle come about, and how does your role there differ from what you did in the past?

In 2007, I had invited David Dorey from The Huddle to participate in a mock auction we were publishing in our magazine, and at the FSTA convention in Las Vegas that August I made sure to introduce myself. I also met Whitney Walters out there; he was one of the FSTA folks making sure it all ran smoothly, and I was there to speak on a panel as well as mingle. So just a few months later, when Fanball moved its offices and revamped its staff (and I didn’t feel ready to return to the corporate world) I was able to draw on that networking and contacted Whitney and David about joining The Huddle team. As luck would have it, they were in the market for a writer and familiar with my stuff, so it turned out to be a great fit.

At the Huddle I get to focus exclusively on football, which I think is a real plus-both for me and for the readers. Whitney and David have me spearheading The Huddle’s draft coverage, something I had just started dabbling in toward the end of my Fanball tenure. With dynasty leagues becoming more prevalent, I feel that’s a real plus for The Huddle. I also have more of an opportunity to get into the forums and talk to people, which has been incredibly helpful because The Huddle has set the bar high with its longtime users and I need to make sure I’m meeting those expectations. And of course, Whitney and David are both great to work with; through the magic of e-mail and messenger, I have a couple great football minds to converse with — not that my wife isn’t a great football mind!

3) What do you absolutely have to have with you at any football draft?

I’ve just started bringing a MacBook to drafts and auctions the past couple years, but I still find myself falling back on a handmade (OK, Mac-made and printed) cheat sheet and an old-fashioned tabloid-size grid so I can track every team, every player. By the time my drafts and auctions roll around I know the players inside and out, but I still need to keep tabs on who’s going where and for what price; without that information, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Oh, and for the record: auctions blow drafts out of the water.

Bonus: You say that your favorite food is your own homemade potato sausage. What in the world goes into the casing for that (other than potatoes)? Doesn’t the lack of unidentified animal innards take some of the fun out of sausage?

My grandpa ran a butcher shop for many years, and my uncle worked with him and then took it over before retiring last year. Among their many award-winning homemade products was a potato sausage, the recipe of which is a family secret-though you’re absolutely correct, it does include real potatoes. Before I was tied up with watching and writing about football every weekend during the fall, I used to go out and help process deer during hunting season-and I can assure you that peeking behind the curtain has done nothing to diminish my enjoyment of any of those products. In fact, running the grinder was pretty fun!

OK, so it sounds like potato sausage does have meat then, right?

Beef and pork. And real potatoes and onions. And a combination of secret spices that maybe only one or two people on this planet know… and I’m not one of them.

Phew.