Hall of Fame

Saturday, August 29 BlogTalkRadio.com will host a 12-hour fantasy football talkathon to help raise money for The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Cecil and Sigmund from footballguys.com will host the event beginning at noon EST and wrapping up at midnight on August 30.  There are several ways the fantasy sports industry can help promote this event.

For more information about the event contact Marc Ronick from BlogTalkRadio.

Click here for more information about the event.

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The Fantasy Sports Trade Association announces requests for submissions from all interested in participating in the 2009 Fantasy Football Projection Accuracy Challenge.  The FSTA (fsta.org), in conjunction with the Fantasy Football Librarian (fflibrarian.com) and Donnie Campbell (themostcredible.com), will be analyzing fantasy football projections and position rankings from participants. The projections and position rankings will be compared with actual player statistics at the end of the 2009 season, and awards will be presented based on the accuracy of those predictions.

Rules:

Submissions will be accepted immediately; however the rankings and projections (in any verifiable format) must be received prior to the first game of the season, September 10th, 2009 8:30 PM EST. Each entrant has two weeks after the Sep 10th Deadline (Sept 24th) to submit the projections in the FSTA Format (see FSTA Template). Please note that the projections in the Template much match the projections that were submitted prior to the initial deadline. Additionally late entrants will be considered if it is verifiable that their rankings or projections were published and publicly available prior to the deadline.

Player rankings and statistics will be judged for the following positions: Quarterback, Running Back, Wide Receiver, and Tight End. Team Defenses, Kickers, and Individual Defensive Players will not be used due to non-standard scoring.

The FSTA will present two Awards (Player Rankings and Player Projections) for the Fantasy Football 2009 Projection Accuracy Challenge. All entrants are welcome to participate in either challenge or both.

1. Projected Player Rankings Award

Accuracy of projected player rankings by position compared with year-end rankings (in order of projected vs. actual fantasy points). The Top 25 quarterbacks, 50 running backs, 50 wide receivers, and 20 tight ends will be evaluated.

Scoring/Ranking will be based on the following system:

Passing Yards (25 yards per point)
Passing Touchdowns (4 points)
Rushing Yards (10 yards per point)
Reception Yards (10 yards per point)
Rushing & Receiving Touchdowns (6 points)

Interceptions (-2)

Fumbles (-2)

It is encouraged that rankings be submitted based on this scoring system.

2. Projected Player Statistics Award

A spreadsheet template consisting of 102 Fantasy relevant Players has been provided to collect the following statistical categories.

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Submitters must fill in projected statistics for all players on this spreadsheet.  Download the template at http://www.fsta.org/awards/FSTA_Fantasy_Football_Projections_Template.xls

An award will be given for accuracy of projected player statistics compared with actual year-end player statistics. Accuracy will be judged based on a combination of relative scoring (entrant closest to actual statistic vs. other entrants) and range based scoring (variance between actual statistics vs. projections for each stat category) using the tables below.

PASSING

RUSHING

Receptions

Ranking Submissions and Projection Submissions should be sent, by September 10, to Sara Holladay at fflibrarian@gmail.com, with a copy to Donnie Campbell at dc@themostcredible.com.

Awards will be presented at the Winter 2010 FSTA Conference. In order to encourage participation, final results will NOT be published, except for the names of all entrants and the names of the highest ranking entrants (approximately the top third).

Judges: Donnie Campbell, www.themostcredible.com; Sara Holladay, www.fflibrarian.com.  For questions on the contest contact Megan Van Patten, megan@fsta.org.

All Submissions are welcome but your organization must be an FSTA member to be eligible to win. The organization with the highest score will be contacted prior to the Winter FSTA Conference.  The Fantasy Sports Trade Association has been the voice of the fantasy sports industry since 1999. Learn more about the organization and become a member at fsta.org.

John Dewan and Charlie Wiegert, two founding members of companies that paved the way in the fantasy sports industry, will be honored by the FSTA with inductions to the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame. The inductions will take place in Chicago on Thursday, Aug. 2 at the Fantasy Sports Choice Awards banquet, which is being sponsored by Players Inc.

Dewan was a founding member of STATS, Inc. in 1981 when the sports information company signed up the Oakland A’s as its first client. STATS, Inc. went on to become the leading sports information service for individual Major League Baseball teams before branching off into all the other major sports. Their annual books are as much a welcome sign of the start of a new season as the call of spring training is to baseball. Dewan worked at STATS, Inc. from 1981-2001 and is currently in the process of starting a new business. Dewan, his wife and two children live in the Chicago area and will be on hand for the presentation.

Wiegert is the founder of CDM Fantasy Sports out of St. Louis and is one of the pioneers of the booming national fantasy game industry. Wiegert turned a small company called Carol’s Fantasy Baseball into a large national service by aligning his company with national publication companies. He first produced fantasy games for The Sporting News and later branched out to include games for USA Today, Baseball Weekly, MSNBC and more. Wiegert is also a founding member of the FSTA and the winner of the 2000 FSTA Lifetime Achievement Award and will be in Chicago to accept his award.

It was only appropriate that the two people most responsible for the growth of fantasy baseball were the first ones inducted into the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame. Daniel Okrent and Glen Waggoner ­ Founding Fathers of Rotisserie Baseball ­ were officially inducted into the Hall of Fame at March’s Fantasy Sports Trade Conference in Orlando.

Okrent, who invented the rules of Rotisserie Baseball in 1979, is now editor-at-large for Time, Inc. He was in Asia on assignment and unable to attend the event. Waggoner, however, made the trip to Orlando and was humbled by the honor from the industry. The Hall of Fame is being sponsored by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

“On behalf of my fellow Founding Fathers ­ and Mother ­ of Rotisserie League Baseball, I want to thank the FSTA for the great honor being bestowed on us,” Waggoner told the crowd of 100 attendees. “Needless to say, we never had a clue that it would come to this. I distinctly remember the thrill of buying Neil Allen for two bucks at our first Auction Draft in 1980. I also remember buying Gene Richards for $9 and flipping through the Baseball Register to find out who he played for. When Okrent published his seminal article, ‘The Year George Foster Wasn’t Worth $35,’ in Inside Sports in 1981, we basked in our 15 minutes of celebrity. And we figured that was that. But of course it wasn’t.”

Waggoner was the editor of the Rotisserie League Baseball books which spawned the growth of this industry in the 1980s, even if it became more like work each year.

“We had a gang of fun introducing an unsuspecting world to our peculiar craziness in the inaugural edition of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1984,” said Waggoner. “Personally, I had a gang of fun editing the first nine editions, even after it became work. But most of all, we¹ve all had a gang of fun playing the game.”
(From Fantasy Sports Magazine)