RotoExperts is looking to bring personalized content each and every fantasy football league with a new service it calls the Fantasy Grinder. The Fantasy Grinder will bring personalized game write-ups to fantasy football leagues. Designed to immerse fantasy players in a much more realistic experience, it promises to offer a personal experience unlike any other in fantasy sports.

According to Scott Engel of RotoExperts:

“The Fantasy Grinder, initially designed for football, produces newspaper-style results for every fantasy football matchup in every league, in every week. All results and reports are customized to feature unique results and writeups for every individual matchup in your league every week. Skinned in an entertaining package that includes a fantasy “reporter” who spotlights actual key results and decisions, the game recaps include pointing out good decisions by fantasy owners, and take the losing owners to task for their questionable choices.”

In other words, instead of just looking at the results of your matchup, there would be a “recap” option, much like a real-life boxscore. Fantasy Grinder will also include the option for fantasy players to add their own comments (read: trash talk) into the article, to add an extra special touch to it. Here is some sample output below:

The Fantasy Grinder is the kind of product that works really well with a fantasy commissioner product; however, RotoExperts does not have one. Which makes you wonder if a commissioner offering is in the works for RotoExperts, or if the Fantasy Grinder is something that it plans to license out to other fantasy sites. Something to watch out for there.

Automated sports content is suddenly becoming a bit of a hot new trend as StatSheet announced last month that it plans to look to automate sports reporting. From a business perspective, the ability to automate content could be a gold mine for sports sites, since there is so much going on that can be reported, but it is so time intensive to do that. Creating written content is the single most labor intensive part of sports reporting out there, and the hope there is a way of automating it might change things. If you apply a product like the Fantasy Grinder to a site like Yahoo! Fantasy Sports’ fantasy leagues, it would lead to tens of millions of extra page views every week for Yahoo!, which would lead to a nice little chunk of change every week.

StatSheet’s founder Robbie Allen announced that he is working on the development of automated sports content at StatSheet. He plans to publish all of this information in the form of blogs.

This is definitely one of those ideas that is hard to swallow at first, but not completely crazy. Of course, if someone said that 20 years ago that hundreds of millions of people would engage in not stop writing online in the form of email, status updates, twittering, and blogging, most people would have laughed at you. But that is the world we live now. Are you going to get deep insightful witty prose that is going to make you tear up? Probably not. Could you possibly have an automated article that gives you a run down of the major events in a game, what the turning points were? Probably. How much would you actually care that a computer put that all together? Not much. Of course, if you look around at StatSheet’s network of sites and realize that was all built by one guy and a lot of automation, maybe this idea is not so pie in the sky.

The immediate response from the media is that he is trying replace sportswriters. I do not see it that way. What StatSheet is proposing is not going to replace the great sportswriters of our times. In fact, I think it will give those writers more time to write those creative and inspiring pieces that they for which they are so well revered. It will give them more time to spend talking to players and picking up rumors in the locker room. In other words, real sportswriters will be able to spend more of their time researching and creating the content that we really like. It can make sportswriting even better.

I think Allen’s goal that of 90% of the population thinking the version 1.0 content was written by a real live sports writer as a fairly high standard, but that is probably the standard that it needs to be at to succeed. I am very interested to read some of the content that comes off of StatSheet’s automated presses.