Fantasy Knuckleheads has built a neat little widget that brings fantasy headlines across the fantasy sports world to any website (displayed below). The widget mixes in headlines from Fantasy Knuckleheads and from a number of smaller fantasy sports sites. Any fantasy site is able to get its RSS feed mixed into the widget if it desires. The widget is targeted mainly at sports bloggers and is easily installed via WordPress plugin or some simple HTML.

What is interesting about this is that it is a very non-traditional marketing move by a small fantasy company. Fantasy Knuckleheads realizes that getting people to read its content is its biggest struggle, so it has created a tool that will bring additional people to its site. By making inclusion within the widget available to any fantasy site, asKurt Turner of Fantasy Knuckleheads put it, “This is a win-win situation for everyone involved and will help promote each others’ content and help us all achieve our goals, more readers and page views.” Well said.

In move that will provide great promotion for the National Fantasy Football Championship (and other Fanball products), Fanball announced that it will host a daily three hour fantasy sports radio show on Sirius 125. Slotted for prime drive time coverage from 5 to 8pm EDT, Fanball’s Fantasy Drive will feature expert fantasy commentary along with interviews of past grand prize winners and others that the fantasy players would be interested in hearing from.

The show will be hosted by Fanball experts Kyle Elfrink, Ray Flowers, and Charlie Wiegert, but I would not be surprised if other Fanball writers and editors managed to get some air time. While the show will not limited to just fantasy baseball and fantasy football talk, expect those two to seasonally dominate.

This is a great move by Fanball as the radio show becomes a great vehicle for it to talk about the National Fantasy Football Championship and continue to position that game as the premiere high stakes fantasy football game. The World Championship of Fantasy Football (WCOFF) is generally recognized as the biggest competition, but ultimately, fantasy players will flock to the game that offers the biggest prize and the best competition. Fanball has already expanded the NFFC to eight cities, which is bound to help the size of its player pool.

What high stakes fantasy football league are you going to play in this year?

We go back to our bookshelves for this week’s Fantasy Book Review here on Fantasy Ethos. I am happy to announce that today’s review is the second edition of the Your Comprehensive Guide to Playing Fantasy Football by Sam Hendricks.

There is something intriguing about getting fantasy football advice from a guy who flew and trained other pilots on flying the F-15. In the Fantasy Football Guidebook, Sam Hendricks opens his vast knowledge of playing fantasy football to the masses. Hendrick’s tome on fantasy football is a massive 375 pages that takes players from high-level topics to nitty-gritty details.

Knowing Hendricks’ background as a pilot helps put the massiveness of this book into perspective–Hendricks prepares the fantasy player for every conceivable and inconceivable case a fantasy player may encounter. Treating the reader as if he is responsbile for guaranteeing the well being of a $30 million fighter jet, Hendricks gets fantasy football players accustomed to the numerous scenarios that may play out in a league and advises him on how to navigate through them to their league titles.

In the Fantasy Football Guidebook, Hendricks spends countless pages discussing various draft strategies, auction strategies, position-by-position strategies, and league set-ups. However, the real gold in this book is the cerebral aspect of the book. Hendricks gets into the mind of fantasy players and discusses on how you can use one drafter’s tendencies to your advantage and how to handle the psychological game that fantasy football is. The Fantasy Football Guidebook is a great book to learn to take a much more strategic and disciplined approached to fantasy football.

The Fantasy Football Guidebook is a must read for any fantasy player looking to compete in the World Championship of Fantasy Football (WCOFF) as Hendricks has dedicated ten pages on preparing for this one particular high stakes league. He goes into special strategies for this draft on what to expect and how to vary your play accordingly.

Overall, if you read this book and do not consider yourself a better fantasy football player after reading it, read it again, you clearly were not paying attention.

You may purchase Fantasy Football Guidebook: Your Comprehensive Guide to Playing Fantasy Football (2nd Edition) at Amazon. , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).

What are your thoughts about the Fantasy Football Guidebook?

Pickemfirst is a browser plugin that allows you to instantly know if a player mentioned in an article is available in any of your fantasy leagues. A simple color-coded icon will display next to that player’s name indicating that player’s availability. Mouse over that icon and you find out which league plus player news. Currently, Pickemfirst can check on a player’s availability on Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS Sports, My Fantasy League, and a perhaps a few others. In other words, Pickemfirst is scouting out players for you even when you are not thinking about fantasy sports.

I love things that are passive and can be value-added without me having to do anything extra. Pickemfirst fits that description perfectly. Pickemfirst works as a plug-in to your browser (Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer are all supported). So once, you install it, you do not have to do anything else to use it. It becomes really hard to lose a customer.

Asking fantasy players to change their habits is nearly impossible. Asking them to do something just once is about the limit of what you can expect from fantasy players. There inlies the beauty of Pickemfirst, since other than installing the application, nothing else has to be done. In fact, it takes less effort to keep using it than to uninstall and stop using it. Pickemfirst could have created a website that culled all of this information together for fantasy players, but that would have required you to check the site on a daily basis. That would never work. This model works perfectly. Pickemfirst has hit it on the head for something that I didn’t even think needed to exist until I saw it

The downside of Pickemfirst is that you may realize that you do not want to know the status of every single player in your fantasy league, and may get tired of those little icons next to each player’s name. I suspect that most people will probably get used to just like we have gotten used to those little talk bubbles indicating a link next a site’s name.

Below is an embed of Pickemfirst’s demonstration video, which does a very good job of summarizing the product:

Sometime in the last day (or potentially longer), Fantasy Players went offline and redirected its traffic to KFFL. Fantasy Players is supposed to be the flagship site for Fantasy Sports Ventures (FSV) and its advertising network of affiliates (See disclosure below). KFFL was one of the first sites purchased by Fantasy Sports Ventures, and it appears to be the future of Fantasy Sports Ventures.

Update, 20 April 2010: It now appears that visitors to FantasyPlayers.com are now directed to Fantasy Sports Ventures homepage, which is probably more appropriate. However, the old Fantasy Players interior pages are not redirecting.

Although, the redirect of traffic does not seem to be complete. Currently, old landing pages such as Fantasy Player’s NFL page (the top story was last updated around September 3, 2009) are still fully visible on the website. In fact, that page update predates Fantasy Players’ most recent shift when it became an aggregated Twitter stream. Also, any content that appears to automatically feed into the old website is still being imported, as seen by this Bruno Boys article on the AFC West that was published just last night. Perhaps those pages are meant to be there just to garner extra search traffic.

The biggest winner of this is the fact that the Fantasy Players Network toolbar, which is littered around the web on hundreds of Fantasy Sports Ventures’ network sites, links to Fantasy Players, which means that it is now linking to KFFL. That is sure to boost KFFL’s traffic numbers.

There is the potential this change has been made because there is a new Fantasy Players site coming out soon. Or, maybe it is exactly what it looks like.

Note: I previously worked at Fantasy Sports Ventures from 2007 – 2008

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.

We are one week into Fantasy Ethos’ March Madness and promise of 65 posts this month. This marks the twelth post of the month and puts us right around schedule. With that in mind, here are some links to get your brain going this Monday:

• Inaugural FantasyFootball.com Roundtable Discussion (FantasyFootball.com) It is March, and these guys are discussing what the fantasy foootball season will bring. Questions that will not be fully answered until December. Hey, someone has to get the ball rolling on these discussions.
• Do’s and don’ts of fantasy (SI.com) David Sabino provides fantasy baseball drafting tips that are likely to keep you from making any serious mistakes. If still have not hit your stride in fantasy baseball (or even if you have), you might want to check it out. Always good to get back to basics.
• KFFL Reaches Multisport Deal with RotoExperts (Fantasy Sports Business) Matt Schauf has picked up a tip that KFFL will now syndicate RotoExperts’ NASCAR, golf, and soccer content. Since KFFL does not currently have golf or soccer, nor a very robust NASCAR site, this deal allows it to add additional content to its site without too much additional hassle and cost, since syndication is generally a cheaper alternative than producing the content yourself.

Keep on coming back here, because there are always more treats for you on Fantasy Ethos

Note: I previously worked for Fantasy Sports Ventures, the owner of KFFL.com

There are hundreds of places that fantasy football players can get their information from. Sara Holladay has made a name for herself as the Fantasy Football Librarian by helping fantasy players dig out what are the most interesting and relevant articles. With an almost encyclopedic knowledge of everything that is written, Holladay has proven that she is quite the fantasy football player herself when she won the Buffalo Wild Wings Fantasy Football All-Star Bloggers league and a trip to the Super Bowl. I recently got to ask Holladay a few questions:

How did you get involved in fantasy football?
Back in 2004 my husband was looking for an extra person to play in one of his leagues and since I loved college football, I figured it was worth a try. Didn’t take long before I got addicted and suddenly knew a ton about both the NFL and fantasy football.

What is the worst move you ever made as a fantasy football owner?
Worst move I’ve ever made…man, that’s a tough one. I’ve made my fair share of bad moves but I think one that comes to mind, in part thanks to how recent it was, was grabbing LaDainian Tomlinson with the 7th overall pick in a draft this past year. I just wasn’t ready to believe that he was on his way out, and yet I should have paid attention to historical clues about how quickly older RBs can drop off. So right now, LT is feeling kind of raw.

Best piece of advice you ever received about fantasy football?
Best piece of advice has probably been to avoid grabbing players from your real life favorite team. I’m a Broncos fan so the ups and downs are harsh enough – no need to get too wrapped up in the Broncos from a fantasy perspective, too. That said, I still take Broncos if they’re the best value at that point of the draft. I just try to separate my fandom from my fantasy world.

So, who is the better fantasy player, you or your husband?
That all depends on who you ask – I’d say me, I did win us a trip to the Super Bowl in the Buffalo Wild Wings All-Star Blogger League. Meanwhile he would argue that he won 2 of the 3 leagues that we played in together…but then I’d just remind him of all the draft help and weekly advice I gave him. I don’t think either one of us will concede any time soon. Fortunately it’s clearly a friendly household battle.

What’s been your favorite part about becoming a fantasy football expert?
Maybe just getting to own that phrase? I think it’s a combo of having people trust me with their big weekly decisions, but also having the opportunity to network with other FF writers. Both of those are pretty good highs.

Do you ever feel like everyone is gunning for you in your leagues now that you own it?
Yes, there are a few friends that are gunning for me a bit more in leagues, but I love a good competition so I welcome it. Plus they’re the same guys that will happily enjoy a beer with me and talk draft prep for hours – that’s a welcome trade-off.

What do you think is the next big thing in fantasy football?
I think more and more leagues will include individual defensive players, which adds an added layer of complexity. But based on the number of sites that are coming out with daily games and games based on historical players, I think the field is really wide open for fantasy sports. Mainstream players will probably stick with traditional leagues, but there’s a good chance that those new to fantasy sports or just who haven’t played say fantasy baseball or hockey before will turn to some of the daily games first.

Thanks again, Sara, for your time, and good luck defending your title in 2010!

In honor of the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament, Fantasy Ethos will publish 65 posts in the month of March, one for every team in the tournament. This is part of a greater effort to bring you (our beloved reader) much more regular content, because I know you want it. To get to the 65 posts, I will be throwing out a few new features, some interviews, maybe a contest or two, and few more tricks that I have up my sleeve.

This post is officially the first post of the 65. While some may consider this cheating to get, I ask how many of us consider the NCAA tournament to truly consist of 65 teams. Other than the two teams involved, no one cares about the play-in game. Therefore, just as March Madness starts with a teaser of the whole tournament, as will I.

Just in case, I do not want to leave you without something to challenge your mind, so here is a nugget of interest for you–the National Football League is looking at changing its overtime format. The new format would create a higher level of fairness of the current system, and would result in more scoring for overtime games. For fantasy football, this means more points from players in overtime!

What are your thoughts on the proposed format?

For the longest time, Yahoo! Fantasy Sports charged for its Stat Tracker. This little feature sucked you in during Week 1 of your fantasy football season. Week 1 was free, but if you wanted that hit for the rest of the season, you would have to pay Yahoo! a measly $10. While Yahoo! Fantasy Football was “free,” I knew very few players that actually paid nothing to the site. Alternatively, leagues could sign up for a Fantasy Football Plus account for $125, which gave every team member Stat Tracker, plus a few other minor bells and whistles. But, things are different now, and as a result of its actions, it is possible that Yahoo! may have destroyed the paid fantasy commissioner market.

For the 2009 fantasy football season, Yahoo! made Stat Tracker available for free. In addition, Free Agent Acquisition Budgets became available for use on the waiver wire. Both of these features were previously premium options. The biggest change was that Fantasy Football Plus was now only $30, which mainly covered the costs of the championship trophy and the draft guides that it provided its players. For the 2010 fantasy baseball season, Yahoo! has gone one step further and got rid of the Plus package all together, made Stat Tracker free, and added auction drafts to the site. It is a much better product than the previous version.

In other words, the reasons that would often cause fantasy leagues to want to move to a “better” paid fantasy commissioner site are quickly going away. Why would you pay $75 to $175 (or more) for a commissioner service when your league can get almost all of the features you need out of Yahoo?

In the past, with its clean interfaces, Yahoo! was great for new leagues or leagues looking to keep it simple and casual. Leagues would normally graduate from Yahoo! to a much more premium service. But now, with these premium features, Yahoo! is speaking to the experienced leagues that want a little more intense fantasy experience.

ESPN Fantasy helped put fantasy down this very free path over the last few years as it made has made a big push, leading by making fantasy football and fantasy baseball free and adding premium options for free. Now, it appears Yahoo! is slowly, but surely, following suit. Yahoo! is the clear leader in the fantasy sports market, so when it shifts strategy, everyone should take note. The emphasis on a free, ad-supported revenue model by the Top two fantasy sites is not a good sign for the paid guys.

Does this mean paid commissioner products are going to completely disappear and suffer? No, I don’t believe that for a second. According to Kevin Austin of MyFantasyLeague, “We still grew at a very good clip this year over last, in spite of Yahoo and ESPN both having increasingly good, free products, and in spite of the country-wide economic situation.” Many of the leagues that the paid commissioner services cater to have special or unique rules that sites like MyFantasyLeague cater too. The ability for this to be a continuing trend is what worries me most.

What is your take? Do you think Yahoo!’s completely free move will hurt paid commissioner services?