From here:

While some states have used the development of racinos and the introduction of slots at tracks as a method to subsidize and save the horse racing industry, Montana has come up with an intriguing alternative. The state legislature has passed a plan to create a statewide fantasy football league, which would pay funds to horse tracks.

So let me make sure I have this straight. Horce racing isn't doing so well in Minnesota, due, according to this article, to "rising costs and diminishing returns." In order to save it, the state will operate its own fantasy football league, with payouts of "74% for participants." The leftover cash will be "divided 15 % to the fantasy operator, 24% to the facility, and 61% into a reserve fund." I assume the "reserve fund" part goes to the horse racing industry. Who knows what the "facility" is.

In essence, Minnesota will be creating a new state lottery, with fantasy football in the place of scratch-off tickets and Scan-Tron sheets. While I'm happy to see that there are apparently at least a few influential fantasy football fans in the Minnesota state government, this plan seems downright silly to me. Using a government-run version of a popular form of gambling to bail out a struggling one has "epic fail" written all over it. Why not put the same amount of effort and expense into a strategy that might actually revive the sport of horse racing itself, rather than propping up a sinking ship with some bizarre corporate welfare scheme? Improve the marketing. Renovate the facilities. Come up with innovative and fun betting options. Hell, why not create a fantasy horse racing league and generate some actual interest in the sport itself?

Now this sounds pretty cool. Check out the promo video after the jump. A few of the spiffier features I learned about from Pasta Padre's interview with the producers:

• If you're doing a live in-the-flesh draft with your buddies, you can use your HDTV as a virtual draft board via your XBox. After some players are drafted, a video will play with commentary about the pick from EA fantasy "experts." Given the pit-in-your-stomach insecurity some people (OK, like me) get after making a big pick, I bet this will be a very popular feature - as long as it doesn't cut into the next person's time allowance.
• If you've got picture-in-picture on your TV, you can have a little screen updating you on your team while you watch the games.
• It's a fully-featured web-based fantasy football system. No idea yet how good it is, but I've got a 360 so I'll be trying it out and posting about it in addition to my other regularly-posted reviews of fantasy football services.
• Your fantasy team can be imported into Madden. Awesome.

The make-or-break factor here will be the quality of the web-based team interface. If it's a pain to manage your team, figure out waivers, or sift through free agents, no amount of Xbox spiffiness will make this a system worth using. I should also mention that it will cost a total of 1600 Xbox points for the system and the on-screen updates (which cost 1200 and 400 separately) - which translates to $20.

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I'm intrigued by something I just read in this post on Rotowire's fantasy football blog. Blogger Peter Schoenke believes there's pretty solid consensus for the top five picks in '08 ("Tomlinson, A. Peterson, Westbrook, Addai, S. Jackson") and weighs who he'd take with the 6th spot (I'd go with Lynch, but that might be the Bills bias talking).

So given all my negativity, who would I take? My first advice would be to trade down. I'd rather get any of these guys six picks later.

I've never seen someone decide to trade a pick like the 6th for a lower pick. Ever. I get why someone might think it's a good idea, but I strongly disagree in most cases. A little Googling just dug up some similar advice in this list of rules for "How to Win Your Fantasy Football League":

6. Trade down. If you have pick 3-5, trade down. You'll feel much better about taking two players back to back than you will seeing your favorites fly off the board every other pick.

Wait, what? There's only one good reason I can think of to trade down to a bottom-of-the-order pick, and that's if you're targeting a specific player you expect to be available near the beginning of the second round - but not the end - and you aren't willing to spend a first-round pick on him. In that case, by all means, see if you can trade down. But you better feel good about that gamble, because if it doesn't work out, then you just screwed yourself out of an earlier pick in the third round for no good reason, and that's pretty significant despite the fact that you'll get an earlier pick in the fourth. If you go RB RB in the first two, you can kiss any hope of a decent WR1 goodbye if you aren't picking until the end of the third.

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I was just perusing the Yahoo Roto Arcade fantasy football mock draft, minding my own business, when I stumbled across this flabberghastination (that's a word now because of this pick): Jamal Lewis with the 10th pick. Despite Lewis' very nice season last year, I'd never, ever take him that high, and here's why.

Lewis will be 29 when the season begins. He's got a history of troublesome foot/ankle problems. The Browns have "one-season wonder" written all over them. Derek Anderson's got about as much chance of repeating his 2007 season as Tom Brady does.

That's not to say I don't think of Jamal Lewis as an extremely solid RB2. I'm just saying I wouldn't take him over any of the following players who went after him in the Yahoo draft: Marshawn Lynch, Brandon Jacobs, MJD (Fred Taylor's overdue for something unfortunate to happen to one of his tendons), Reggie Wayne, TO, Willis McGahee, or even his teammate Braylon. I'm thinking end of the second round, he's a nice pick. Anywhere in the first? Insanity.

• The Bucs must be feeling better about Carnell Williams' surgically-repaired knee - the only RB they took in the draft was Cory Boyd in the 7th round. Cadillac, for his part, says it's "definitely a possibility" that he'll play in week one.
• If going to Atlanta wasn't the worst-case scenario for Matt Ryan, I don't know what was.
• Say what you want about Oakland, they stay true to form year after year. They take the most talented player available, regardless of how horrible a fit he is for their organization. That's the McFadden pick in a nutshell - they're more than set at RB already. Still... it might be fun to watch McFadden and JaMarcus Russell working together. Four guys you don't want to run into at a night club this week: LaMont Jordan, Justin Fargas, Dominic Rhodes, and Michael Bush. You might also want to avoid any burly keeper-league owners who had high hopes for Bush in 2008.
• The Jets did what we said they'd do.
• Cedric Benson had to be happy when the Bears made the "no duh" move of taking an OL with their first pick. Then they wiped that smile right off his face with their 2nd-round pick, RB Matt Forte, who will undoubtedly steal at least a few carries and could challenge Benson outright for the starting job. Bears GM Jerry Angelo isn't mincing words about it, either: "Maybe (Benson's) not the featured back we thought he'd be." Ouch.

Lots more to talk about here but I'm out of time.

Not that I watched it. Anyone who actually watches the NFL draft coverage should realize that they are on equal footing with the people who sit through an entire American Idol results show. Sure, I'm interested in the outcome (of the former, that is), but I don't have such a burning desire to know who goes where that I need to find out right at the instant it happens.

I'm pretty pleased with my Bills, who more than adequately addressed their needs at cornerback (Leodis McKelvin, 11th pick) and wide receiver (James Hardy, 41st pick). It's exciting to have McKelvin, whom I'm optimistically going to dub Devin Hester 2.0 - Now Including Coverage Skills! Hardy was potentially the steal of the draft; perhaps he fell so far because he's considered to be something of a character risk, but I'm not all that worried:

Hardy certainly sounds like the sort who deserves everything he is getting, in a good sense. He grew up in desperate straits, with a father who spent nine years in prison for dealing drugs, and a mother who turned him over to relatives at age 13. He found himself living in a one-bedroom apartment with an uncle freshly released from prison.

"I would just stay at school," Hardy told the Buffalo News, "in the gym or on the field so I wouldn't have to go home. That's what got me here and I'll be able to go home to my house and eat right and just be able to focus on being a professional. I take this very seriously."

He could be full of shit, sure, but at least he's saying the right things for the moment.

As much as I hate to get excited about the Bills offense from a fantasy perspective after getting burned by Lee Evans repeatedly and painfully last season, I'm at least cautiously optimistic at this point. Trent Edwards showed a ton of poise for a rookie and I fully expect him to take the next step this season now that he has two quality targets. Marshawn Lynch is one of the most exciting tailbacks in the game and is ready to be dominant behind the Bills' above-average (albeit overpaid) offensive line. It's a well-rounded offense with lots of fantasy potential between these four players. Lynch is a solid #1 RB, and Evans could credibly be used as a #1 WR (for the non-risk-averse). Hardy will absolutely start right away and could be an interesting, high-upside #3 WR. All of this, of course, depends upon the play of Edwards. Would I take him as my #1 QB? Nah... but you could do far worse for your #2.

The Bills schedule, by the way, is a thing of beauty for the most part. I count at least ten (!!) games against teams that had crappy defenses in '07. Am much as I hate sharing a division with the Pats, getting to play the Fins and Jets four times a season almost makes it all worth it.

Couldn't say I saw this one coming. AOL already runs its own fantasy sports leagues (which I've never tried), but they must not be attracting many users, or they must prefer Fleaflicker's technology over their own. I can't imagine Fleaflicker holding out for too much money, so it may have been a pretty painless way for AOL to reign in a competitor before they got too big. Now they've just got to worry about Yahoo, CBS Sportsline, Fox Sports, ESPN, NFL.com, FantasyPlayers.com, and about 100 other smaller sites. No biggie.

Brandon and I tried Fleaflicker in 2006, its inaugural season, and were generally unimpressed. We liked the deeply customizable scoring system, but the interface left much to be desired. We moved the league to Yahoo last season, but I kept the old one active just so I could keep an eye on Fleaflicker to see if they improved their interface, but aside from making a few of the buttons bigger, it didn't appear to me that they had changed much. I frankly don't know what Fleaflicker has to offer AOL in terms of technology. Maybe they're still convinced that Techcrunch was right when they called Fleaflicker "the best fantasy football site out there."

I didn't notice this article when it came out earlier this month. Here, someone named Michael Rowe explains why he thinks fantasy football is partly to blame for what he claims is the demise of sportswriting in recent years:

This internet-facilitated imaginary game, in which you “draft” players whose statistical achievements become points for your team, has become so popular that TV sports analysts and sportswriters routinely advise viewers and readers on which players they should or should not stock on their fake roster. In one particularly entertaining instance, an NFL Network analyst queried ex-coach Jim Mora—who piloted the Saints and Colts before retirement—about his fantasy football squad. Mora dismissed the whole caboodle with mumbles and an eye roll.

Of course Mora doesn't get it: He used to coach in the NFL. Football coaches rely on probabilities generated by statistical analysis to inform their play-calling. And that's the central appeal of fantasy football: It mimics the act of coaching by passing off numbers—who gains more yardage against whom, who tends to choke when, and how one defense fares against a certain offense—as insight into the game. Thus we play at possessing professional knowledge, and, in the absence of the required muscles, numbers transport us inside the game as virtual shot-callers. Mora has no more interest in fantasy coaching than I have in playing a game of “fantasy infant”—been there, done that. It's the fantasizing spectator who wants to be caught up in what he imagines are the details.

Rowe's argument boils down to this: Fantasy sports are worthless because they're all about numbers, rather than stories and personalities. Rowe imagines fantasy managers the way most people imagine stock brokers - poring over statistical trends, buying and selling assets when the conventional wisdom dictates that they must, drearily blinded to everything but the data flickering on the screen. It's the oldest joke in the book about fantasy sports, repackaged as a cause for, and reflection of, the decline of sportswriting.

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As I mentioned previously, we're participating in the Hazean's 2008 NFL mock draft. We're representing the Jets and their #6 pick. We went with Vernon Gholston, whose name has been associated with the Jets for a good month now. He's a perfect fit for them, but I have a feeling that they'll be very, very lucky if he falls to #6 (the Dolphins are even rumored to be considering taking Gholston with the top overall pick). Our (well, my) justification for the pick is after the jump.

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Here's an interesting stat:

...while Rotisserie baseball is recognized as the granddaddy of all fantasy sports, football has emerged as the most popular fantasy sport among the 15 million Americans who spend hours massaging statistical data and picking teams. There are now 17 million unique users of fantasy football sites, compared with 3 million fantasy baseball players.

17:3 sounds about right to me, but it's the first time I've ever seen it tallied up.

Also, fantasyplayers.com apparently has a bigger chunk of the fantasy sports market than I would have thought:

Mr. Russo scored a coup of sorts in the world of online fantasy games when Nielsen Online reported last November that fantasyplayers.com was the No. 4 site among fantasy football destinations, behind Yahoo, ESPN and CBS SportsLine, but ahead of NFL.com, FoxSports.com and SI.com. His company was No. 2 in fantasy baseball.

Never used them before. Was frankly pretty much unaware of them until today.