It’s a little known fact that companies like ESPN.com, Yahoo.com, and Sportsline.com have to pay royalties to the various players association and/or the leagues in order to run their fantasy games for the public. The cost is often significant, amounting to significant portions of a game’s gross revenue. You can tell games that pay the fee because they’ll have the players association logos plus the league logos on some or all of the pages for the game.At ESPN.com, for example, you’ll find the NFLPA logo at the bottom of our fantasy football pages (example).

Anyway, apparently a company out there is taking one of the leagues to court to argue against the fees as they’re set up now. The company is taking MLB, which bought the exclusive rights to distribute player statistics from the MLBPA, to court to argue that the statistics, once the game is over, are historical fact and therefore shouldn’t require a license. It’s going to be an interesting case that will have some interesting repercussions regardless of who wins.

The leagues exercise pretty significant control over anything they can to make money. The trend over the last few years has been to partner exclusively with a partner to get the big check from one source. You can see it with the deals the NFL made with EA and MLB made with Take2. It hasn’t happened in the fantasy sports world yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone hasn’t thought of that idea.

David Pinto at Baseball Musings has it right, I think when he argues that MLB and the leagues are making a mistake if they limit the number of licenses. Fantasy sports are a feeder into other merchandising and ticket sales. I own one more jersey than I would’ve and I watch WAY more football and baseball than I otherwise would’ve if I didn’t play fantasy sports. We’ll see how it pans out, I guess.

(Usual disclaimer: I speak for myself here and not for ESPN.com or ESPN or Disney.)

I just wanted to point out that there is a dearth of good software or web site tools that work well for a live, in person, auction draft. I’m working on my cheat sheet tonight and am thinking about what an ideal software package would do for me. Ideally, it would contain a screen that could be projected onto a screen for the rest of my league members to see. Currently, I get the ESPN.com Draft Board and try to run it during the draft while managing my own draft, but I would LOVE it if there was a software package that would do this while letting me run my draft.

Here are some things it should probably do:

• Traditional live draft features - Pre-ranks, including dollar value, stats, any updated news, etc. should be a part of this application’s database.
• Projectable/Public Screen - A two screen application would be ideal where one screen could be projected onto a wall during the draft. It would function similar to the draft board we use now, but keep me from searching for the right sticker among all the sheets. It could also show the current player up for bidding. The second screen would be private, allowing me to manage my own draft, including budgeting, remaining cap space, and other features.
• Team Assistant - The planning tools for live, online drafts are pretty good at getting a sense of what your team is made of now. Auction drafts, on the other hand, have the whole cost and salary cap variable thrown in. So, it would be nice to know, based on your current cap limits, the best way to split up the remaining budget based on, say, your un-drafted positions and TD projections.

This is one of those, “when I have spare time projects,” but I already have three of those right now (and I’m planning for my fantasy draft instead, go figure). It would be nice to build this one. Of course, it would ideally hook into ESPN.com’s online game so that there wouldn’t be that post-draft roster entry pain, but I can help whoever add that functionality in later.

One of the bits of information that goes into drafting that perfect fantasy team is interest in players when they hit the free agent market. You look at the contracts of folks like Shaun Alexander and Edgerrin James and look at how teams are evaluating their talent and durability. Today, though, John Clayton writes about the difficulties that running backs are facing when looking for contracts after reaching 27 or 28 years old. The length of the deal, it seems, often reduces the yearly contract values even though the running back may be a great draft pick for the next year or two.

Looks like Javon Walker and Bubba Franks are joining the list of NFL holdouts this year. I think Shaun Alexander is also holding out while Terrell Owens looks likely to hold out for a while.

Anyone have any other significant holdouts that I didn’t mention?

According to the ESPN Fantasy Football Guide, the Vikings play all but just 3 games on artificial surfaces. 13 of their games are on turf: 8 at home, 5 on the road against Cincy, Atlanta, the Giants, Detroit, and Baltimore. In case you’re looking at the running backs or the wide receivers from this team (you are, aren’t you?)… Several other teams are close (basically any team that has turf at their home stadium), but I think the Vikings have the most extreme tilt.

This is going to seem like a shameless plug, but I assure you that it’s sincere. ESPN is coming out with the premiere issue of the ESPN Fantasy Football Guide. The fantasy team here gave out early copies in the office so I’ve been reading it over the past week or so. My feelings so far: It rocks!

Normally, even though I get the ESPN.com draft kits for free, I use The Sporting News Ultimate Draft Kit for one simple reason: it comes as PDFs that I can print out and take to my draft. The league I play in has an in person draft and ESPN.com’s Draft Kit offerings have traditionally been geared for viewing and using online. That doesn’t help me at the bar when the clock is ticking, so paper is the way to go. This year, I won’t be getting that but instead will be bring the magazine, tearing out the cheat sheet insert, and using that to organize my draft.

Can I also say that there’s nothing like reading about fantasy football to get you all excited for the start of fantasy football season. They should give these things out at pro sporting events to get more players to play and buy more teams. At this point of the year, all you want to do is draft… then draft again, then again… just to play out strategies. Maybe it’s time to organize a mock draft for NERFL? I can get a league setup online, I guess and we can just keep resetting it.

Anyway, I’m ready for football and because I’ve gotten the magazine so early, I’m already preparing (instead of my normal process of buying the draft kit the week before). I’ll probably still draft two kickers again or maybe two TE or something else equally silly, but at least I can feel like I tried.