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

– Verizon Wireless and the NFL announced a deal Tuesday that will present live football coverage to the handsets of Verizon customers for at least the next four years — including fantasy panacea the Red Zone Channel.

– Switched.com rates the MyFantasyTeams application among the best sports apps available for the Blackberry. Just what Blackberry owners need, another reason to keep staring at the thing.

– A writer for the Hollywood Reporter applied the letter of the well-known (at least around these parts) federal UIGEA law to the common practice of holding Academy Awards pools. His assessment: As long as you stick to the same types of money rules that govern fantasy-games providers, there’s enough skill involved to keep things legit.

– RotoHog has signed on to build a celebrity-based fantasy game for US Weekly magazine.

– Dave Richard of CBSSports.com uses the site’s Tableau-produced analytics to compare value across positions for the past football season.

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

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

– MLB Advanced Media announced this week a deal with STATS that makes the latter the “official real-time data licensor” for MLBAM statistics and information. It’s a multi-year deal that extends to baseball’s minor leagues. It can be tough to really understand just what this kind of deal means, but federal courts have told us in recent years that stats exist in the public domain. Ultimately, then, such a distribution agreement would seem to cover only the “official” MLB stats. Anyone attending or watching a game, though, can compile the same numbers.

– Recent FSB.com profile subject got a writeup from The Wall Street Journal’s Nando Di Fino this week, in which he suggested that American fantasy-game providers could learn from the site’s graphical model.

– As part of its in-season Weekly Lineup Challenge, FantasyFootballStarters.com has donated $1,000 to NFL-sposored charity Play It Smart on behalf of winner Alan LaFollette.

– Socaltech.com reports that NASCAR.com has contracted with Rotohog to produce a stock-market style game for this season.

– This AP story purports to be about rising female participation in fantasy, but it’s actually just a fun read about a few women who like to challenge the men in their leagues and their lives. (Let’s just hope that the Kansas University alum who fancies former Jayhawks for her fantasy hoops team has at least tended to get Paul Pierce.)

– If you can lead the field in “stable earnings” through April 17 in this new fantasy horse-racing game, you can win a trip to this year’s Kentucky Derby.

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

CBS Sports set forth the most accurate football player rankings in 2009, while Rotohog was tops in stat projections for both baseball and football.

Sara Holladay, the Fantasy Football Librarian, and Donnie Campbell of TheMostCredible.com handed out those awards Wednesday at the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference.

CBS topped a field of 48 participants — more than double the entries from 2008 — in the second season of the FSTA’s partnership on the Accuracy Challenge. Fantazzle took home last year’s award.

Rotohog’s wins each came in new categories.

Although the competition is obviously done at this point, Holladay and Campbell welcomed anyone who wasn’t included to submit their 2009 preseason rankings and/or projections now to see how they stacked up.

About a month ago or so, I did a football draft over at SportingNews.com with the fantasy staff there and had a pretty bad experience.

Multiple participants (including me, for most of the draft) couldn’t see by the draft window when it was their turn to pick, multiple service interruptions made the 12-team effort take somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone.

In the early morning hours Thursday, SN.com sent out a message to all fantasy users about the issues with its Draft & Trade Football commissioner game. Here’s the opening paragraph:

As many of you are aware, Sporting News embarked on a massive rebuild of its fantasy games platform a few months ago in an effort to add more features and offer an updated environment. Part of that strategy was to have Sporting News management and personnel work with RotoHog, one of the country’s leading games developers. Despite the best efforts of both parties, the Sporting News Fantasy Football games have been inaccessible or unstable for more days than we feel is acceptable. The latest problem followed what appeared to be a deliberate attempt by someone to undermine the game platform.

The message went on to say that new sign-ups have been frozen until further notice — which could all but seal the customer base for the season-long game now that we’re at the dawn of the NFL regular season — and that those who have paid for teams and leagues will be refunded. Players at the prize-eligible “platinum” level will remain eligible for those prizes.

Salary-cap games Ultimate Fantasy Football and Fantasy Football Challenge appear to be unaffected by the issues with Draft & Trade.

For what it’s worth, I was able to set my lineup Thursday morning without issues for that team from the aforementioned draft.