\\\\ \\\*\

\\

N

\\\

4-tio

Detroit entrepreneurs
,
tap into "rotisserie"
sports — an estimated
$800-million-year
Dungeon-and-Dragons-
for-jocks industry.

By Beth Robinson

\
\\
\
\\\\

0

n any given Sunday in the
United States, millions of
fantasy football players
fade out of their everyday
reality and into a Walter
Mitty-esque landscape of top
echelon professional sports

heroics.
Like musket-toting civil war re-
enactors and mead-drinking renais-
sance festival lords, players in fantasy
sports leagues forsake the drudgery
of accounting offices, assembly lines,
honey-do lists, laundry and lawn work
— spending an estimated $800 mil-
lion annually to play "let's pretend."
The costume is no more than a fa-
vorite jersey or cap. The stage is set in
the comfort of the living room, local
pub or best buddy's basement.
And, unlike real sports where even
the gifted and powerful generally
assume only a single role, the arm-
chair sports titan gets to be Jerry
Jones (Dallas Cowboys owner), Tom
Lewand (Lions team president) and
Bill Belichick (New England Patriots
coach) all rolled into one.
In fantasy sports, players join
a league, "draft" a team of actual
athletes, pick a lineup for each game
and receive points based on the
performance of their players in actual
competition. Fantasy football leagues
consist of 10 12 teams, and each has
a commissioner who organizes the
draft, coordinates rule changes (each
league sets its own rules), collects and
distributes funds, and monitors the
league's trading activity.
"It makes you feel like you're the
coach of a team," says fantasy football

-

20 November 2011 I

Ittp 'MAD

player Dave Dossick, whose day job is
assistant director of the JCC Maccabi
Games in Philadelphia. "It's all strat-
egy. You have to know who's good. You
have to know the NFL players. It's
strategy. It's knowledge."
Modern fantasy sports have evolved
dramatically over the last 30 years
from the first "rotisserie" baseball
league, named for La Rotisserie
Francaise, the New York restaurant
where writer/editor Daniel Okrent is
credited with holding the first fantasy
baseball league in 1980.
A regular baseball season consists of
162 games, while football a mere 16.
Baseball's status as both the national
pastime and fantasy sports patriarch
notwithstanding, football aficionados
now constitute at least 75 percent of
fantasy participants.
But for fans of both games, there's
a universal game-changer — the
Internet. Fantasy sports was once a
baseball-centric hobby that involved
laboriously tracking newspaper box
scores and combing magazines such
as Baseball Weekly, Street and Smith
and Sporting News for statistics. Now,
it has grown into a multi-billion dollar
industry where information is avail-
able and managed online in real time.
Stuart Carlin, founder of the online
news and event site Local Stew, start-
ed playing rotisserie baseball as an
eighth-grader in Chicago. 'We would
wait for the fantasy magazine to come
out — you needed those magazines
and that's all changed now — it's all
on the Internet," says Carlin.
The Minneapolis-based Fantasy
Sports Trade Association (FSTA),

\\\\ \\N\ \\\\

established in 1999, provides orga-
nization and support to 120 member
businesses, 90 percent of which, says
President Paul Charchian, now have
an online presence. That doesn't even
include bloggers and what Charchian
calls "mom-and-pop shops," small
online services offering, and often
profiting from, projections, predic-
tions, advice and analysis.
FSTA members include CBSsports.
corn, ESPN and Yahoo — all of which
offer sponsor- and advertiser-funded
free online fantasy sports services,
including league administration, con-
tests and games, analytics and tools,
and mobile versions.
"This is the first year I didn't buy a
magazine because I'm finding every-
thing online," says West Bloomfield

You have
to know
who's
good.
You have to
know the NFL
players. It's
strategy.

- Dave Dossick,
fantasy football participant

fantasy footballer Rob Pesick. "It's
totally transformed:'
Fantasy Football Starters.com is
one of many sites capitalizing on
fantasy sports' insatiable appetite for
predictions and projections. A $24.95
annual fee pays for its premier Cham-
pionship package, which includes the
"Draft Analyzer, Line-up Analyzer,
Trade Analyzer, Team, Mobile Tools,
Smart Alerts, Russ Bliss ebook and
more!"
If the Internet is virtually glutted
with sites servicing fantasy football
(as well as basketball, hockey, soccer,
cricket, NASCAR, golf and just about
every other sport, up to and includ-
ing mixed American martial arts), the
airwaves are equally abuzz.
Russ Bliss, Fantasy Football Start-
ers.com's resident expert, has hosted
fantasy football show The Red Zone
at KDUS in Phoenix for 15 years.
(The term "red zone" refers to the
area on a football field between
the 20-yard line and the defen-
sive team's goal.) "It used to be real
unique," says Bliss. "Now everybody
has a fantasy sports podcast."
Cable television also offers a
plethora of premium fare for fantasy
enthusiasts. The creme de la crème
of fantasy sports broadcasting is the
NFL Red Zone channel. On NFL Red
Zone, the fantasy football fanatic can
sit in front of a single screen and see
every play that happens in the red
zone in every NFL game in real time.
Carlin describes it thus: "The great-
est channel of all time, the greatest
channel ever invented, the greatest
invention since the iPhone. It's that

www.redthreadmagazine.com