Technology Continues to Increase the Size, Scope and Scale of Fantasy Football

Fantasy Football.

Those two words have almost become synonymous with NFL Sunday. From now until the NFL’s opening kickoff, millions of people will be conducting research, ranking players, holding fantasy drafts and coming up with witty team names.

America, you’re officially obsessed with Fantasy Football.

But it wasn’t always like this.

As technology has evolved over the years, Fantasy Football has evolved with it.

At the beginning of Fantasy Football’s ascent to national popularity, many of the things that are handled electronically today – scorekeeping, trades, waiver wire pickups, etc. – were managed by pen and paper. On Sunday evening and Monday morning, the league commissioner would sit down with the day’s box scores and a calculator and tally up the scores the old-fashioned way.

Nowadays, technology has allowed for all of this to be done online. Sites like Yahoo! Sports, CBS Sports and ESPN can keep track of every aspect of the league. Most of these sites also offer live stat trackers, which automatically collect Fantasy data and calculate head-to-head scores on a real-time basis.

DIRECTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket, which has become increasingly popular among football fans, now includes features specifically catered to Fantasy Football. Player Tracker allows you to track the stats of up to 18 players throughout game day, and even gives you live “Big Play” alerts every time one of your players makes a game-changing play. The Game Mix channel even allows you to watch up to eight live games – complete with scores and game clock – on one screen.

On top of all that, the evolution of mobile technology has made it possible to follow your fantasy team from virtually anywhere. Thousands of fans at stadiums across the country are cheering just as hard for the Fantasy game on their Blackberry as the one that’s taking place right in front of them.

While we know how Fantasy Football started and how it got to where it is today, the bigger question still remains:

Where is it going?