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Fantasy Sports Scoring Big Time! Now Your Team Can Too.

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Fantasy sports is, for the uninitiated, a game where players pretend (that’s the fantasy part) to be “owners” of a sports team. Then they hire and fire players and manage their teams to compete against other teams. How well they do is based on the statistics of real professional players or teams and a whole lot of schadenfreude. If you’re thinking this isn’t a big deal or it sounds kind of geeky, you might be surprised to discover there are about 36 million people managing “teams” in North America alone!

OK, it wasn’t always that big. The game has been around since the 1980s when editor Daniel Okrent essentially invented, what was then called “Rotisserie League Baseball,” coming from the name of the restaurant, La Rotisserie, where he and his friends played. Even after rulebooks and statistical tools started to appear a decade later, there were only about a half-million player but the growth came after the arrival of the Internet, making it easier for team owners to access stats and team and player information.

There are fantasy sports teams for all kinds of sports, but participation, not surprisingly, matches up precisely with real-world Sports League loyalty levels. According to this year’s Customer Loyalty Engagement Index the current real-league rankings look like this with fantasy football leading in fantasy league play too:

  1. NFL
  2. MLB
  3. NBA
  4. NHL

As you might think, with these levels of engagement, loyalty, and schadenfreude, fantasy team owners spend at lot of time and attention to what’s going on and how players are performing. You know, the statistical details. If you want to win in your league and beat the hell out of other teams you really need to pay attention to the stats. So team owners are always looking for an edge in their leagues – to the tune of $800 million a year spent on fantasy sports products and services.

As a public service for those fantasy players out there, I’d like to call attention to a new “edge” I just ran across the video on YouTube from a group called numberFire: http://youtu.be/bsasG2geOU4 . They provide FREE daily advice emails about waivers, trades, players, and other recommendations using advanced data analytics and modeling, all based on real world statistics to help your team win. Maybe the Super Bowl. Or maybe the World Series. Or just mange your “team” so you beat the hell out your annoying co-worker competitor.

Anyway, it’s been said that talent wins games but intelligence wins championships. And with a gangbuster growth of fantasy sports of 12% annually, apparently more sophisticated, inside information about teams and players is always welcome.

Go stats, I mean, team!