A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Grain Belt Beer wants to know if you can Crush Charch in its fantasy football weekly contest.

– Open Sports’ “Tackle the Pros” also asks you to put your fantasy skills on the line, this time against former NFL players. The slate of weekly competitors includes Rodney Peete, Roger Craig, John Elway, O.J. McDuffie, Marshall Faulk, Todd Lyght and Ki-Jana Carter.

– FantasyPostseason.com targets the largely untapped market of fantasy competition during the playoffs.

– Are you ready yet for one guy’s top 100 baseball players for 2009 fantasy drafts?

– Not only do the Cubs head out of the regular season with the National League’s best record, but they’re also baseball’s best rotisserie team (at least heading into the final weekend).

– The hockey experts are gathering for their drafts.

Along with the approaching NHL season comes an overhaul of the league’s official website.

At the core of the updated site is a feature called “NHL Gamecenter,” which will provide video highlights, real-time stats and audio and social-networking capabilities. Gamecenter is free and designed to accompany game telecasts on television.

The league is also riding the wave of streaming live video online. “Gamecenter Live” will offer paid subscribers the chance to watch as many as four games at once and toggle between them to enlarge whichever one might be of particular interest.

It’s obvious — especially because the NHL says so in its press releases — that the fantasy crowd is a key focus of the changes. As part of that, the league has partnered with Yahoo! to offer a “co-branded fantasy game that is available through NHL.com. Clicking the registration button takes the user to Yahoo’s fantasy hosting site, so the feature seems to mostly be an extra portal by which fans can access the Yahoo game.

One positive that could come from the integration, though, between the league and the Yahoo platform. I don’t know if this is an issue that tends to pop up in hockey leagues, but I have certainly seen stats differ quite regularly between NFL.com and various fantasy football providers. They’re usually small things such as a few passing yards here and some extra tackles for individual defensive players there, but enhanced accuracy certainly won’t hurt anyone.

A roundup of posts from the FSB News page:

– Content from The Sports Network will now be available to mobile-phone users globally.

– Ashton Kutcher plans to extend his Web business pursuits into fantasy football.

– An AOL Fanhouse blogger takes issue with the notion that fantasy hockey has gotten too serious. (The response is to this column on About.com.)

– The Washington Times takes a look at the trend of mixing fantasy football with social networks.

– A Colorado Fox affiliate profiles Sara Holladay, an actual librarian whom you might know as the Fantasy Football Librarian.

– There’s at least some concern in England that big-money backers are changing the landscape of Premiership soccer.

– Welcome DraftMix.com to the genre of fantasy competition that renews on a daily or weekly basis.

With hockey’s two-week off-season just about finished, the big boys are rolling out their new seasons of fantasy league hosting.

CBS Sports, ESPN, Fanball and Yahoo! are all live with their 2008-2009 hockey commissioner applications, and Sporting News salary-cap teams are also available. Even the NHL itself promises “a whole new fantasy experience,” though it’s game is not yet available.

Those who sign up early for some of the pay options at the aforementioned sites can save a decent amount of money.

NHL exhibition games begin on September 20, and the regular season will get underway in the Czech Republic on Oct. 4.

Please let us know if your site’s commissioner application has also launched for the coming season.