Fantasy sports can rival the real thing

By Dina Gerdeman

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With football season upon us, sports fans are keeping close tabs on key players they drafted for their fantasy football teams.

Fantasy sports leagues have grown tremendously since their beginnings, and online participation has helped spur that growth. Today it is estimated that 29.9 million people in the United States and Canada play fantasy sports, said Jeff Thomas, CEO of SportsBuff.com and president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. If you're a sports fan yearning to be a general manager, here's your opportunity. And, if you haven't made the switch to broadband service yet, you should consider it to get the most out of these online sites.

Football is by far the most popular fantasy sport, attracting some 75 percent, or 21 million, of the fantasy players, Thomas said. One reason for that is many people find fantasy football easier to play than, say fantasy baseball, because in football they have fewer games to analyze and keep track of.

"With football, you have games every weekend, not several times a week. When the weekend is over, you've got talk radio alalyzing what they liked and didn't like, and by Tuesday or Wednesday they are analyzing next week’s games," Thomas said. "It gives you a little bit of down time to analyze the games yourselves and talk smack with the other people in your league."
  
Fantasy sports leagues can work in a variety of ways, but most let people act as armchair quarterbacks as they choose real-life professional sports players to build imaginary teams. Based on how the players perform on real fields, fantasy players make predictions about how well they will do in future games when deciding which players should take the field in their fantasy leagues.

In head-to-head competitions, it's the fantasy team that wins the most games -- including any playoff and championship games -- that is considered victorious at the end of the season. In other cases, teams score the leagues differently; for example, they may assign points to the players within the teams that perform the best throughout the season and use those points to decide which teams win in the end.

In some cases, such as the free leagues offered on CBSSports.com and Yahoo.com, fantasy players play for free -- and win only bragging rights. But in many leagues, fantasy players chip in money when the seasons start -- at times big money -- and the winners take the pot at the season’s end.

Most people play solely online, although some players kick off the season with an annual get-together. "Sometimes people will schedule a big trip to Vegas to do their draft picks," said Jeff Erickson, senior editor of RotoWire.com, which provides information about players for fantasy leagues.

Players study Web sites such as RotoWire.com and use online commissioner programs to run stats on athletes when deciding each week which of their team’s players to put into the game.

"They try to get information about who's hurt, who’s looking good in practice, who might not do well in the snow," Erickson said. "We try to give them all the information they need because they need to make decisions."

Most fantasy sports player are men, although women make up as many as 20 percent to 25 percent of players, according to a study released recently by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

"We have husband and wife leagues," Erickson said. "It’s a way to get our wives to watch football with us, and they’ll get just as hooked as anyone else."

People play fantasy sports not only because they love sports, but because playing fantasy games allows them to connect and with other people.

"It really is a social networking medium," Thomas said. "You see younger people leaving college and starting a league with college friends, and they will be in that same league for 10 years. It's fun to talk to friends and family about football, something you all enjoy."

In addition, many people enjoy fantasy sports because it provides a way to cheer on players from a variety of real-life teams who are on their fictitious teams. "I live in LA, and they don't even have a football team," Erickson said. "We're exposed to so many more teams this way."

Plus sports fans often have a natural love of competition, and fantasy sports can feed that need. "It’s a way to challenge who knows the game better than others," Erickson said.