Play fantasy sports? Watch your games online

By Jessie Atkin

Print Story | Email Story
Add to My Digital Landing

Related Articles

• 2009 Holiday Gift Guide: For the Women
• 2009 Holiday Gift Guide: For the Men
• Introducing Twitter Lists
• Building a Website: Website Design 101
• Building a Website: Selecting a Domain Name and Host

The official NFL season began in September, starting another fan-frenzied year, and yet this season is like no other in the history of the sport -- online that is.

For the first time ever the National Football League is allowing complete games to be aired live on the internet in the United States.  Before this season, games were only streamed outside the United States in an attempt to popularize the sport abroad.  That has all changed.

NFL.com and NBCsports.com (the official broadcaster of Sunday Night Football) are now streaming all Sunday night games.  Features for viewing include an interactive broadcast with multiple camera angles, in game highlights, full screen capability, real time commentary, and the chance to ask live commentary questions during the game.  The viewing begins around 8:15 p.m. ET.

If the college game is more to your liking CBSSports.com is "The College Sports Network".  CBSSports.com features XXL which offers the most streaming multimedia coverage of college athletics. This coverage does come at a price though ($14.95 a month, or $19.95 for a year) to watch your favorite teams over the internet. CBS College Sports also has its own line of College Sports centered podcasts (available on iTunes) that include men's basketball, college football, and college sports in general.  Podcasts continue to grow in popularity on the internet due to their continued free availability.

Also gaining popularity are fantasy sports, fantasy football in particular.  Fantasy sports, in short, are games where players, or "owners", choose their own teams of real-world athletes to compete against the rosters held by other owners in their league.  Game scores are usually based on the statistics of individual players that are added together to create the complete score for your team.

Leagues can be created for almost any sized group.  From friendly family competitions, to intense online rivalries of random players, there are a million ways to compete.  There are free leagues and paid leagues, leagues with prizes, and leagues without.  Popular sites include and NFL.com, Yahoo, ESPN.com. Fantasyfootball.com, and CBSSports.com fantasy.  Many of the sites are free to join and play (though free leagues may still charge to collect for a winner's prize).

At the beginning of each football (or any sports season for that matter) a draft is held, set and organized by the league commissioner (or the one player in charger of your leagues particular account).  All members of a league meet live online to pick their roster for the coming year.  Order is random, and while someone gets to pick first, someone also has to pick last.

Though formats can vary, sites -- including CBS -- have live updates to your game score and projects your team's score for future games.  Fantasy football helps to broaden interests in the sport as a whole.  Though everyone has a favorite team it's much more pressing to flip channels on a Sunday afternoon when you are also the proud owner of players from across the NFL.