It's First and 10 For Fantasy Football on Facebook

According to Nielsen Online, 11.7 million Web users visited one or more fantasy football sites last September, up from 10 million the year before. And those fans spend a lot of time managing their teams; the average user spent about an hour and 45 minutes at his or her league's host site each month. The two most popular fantasy football host sites, Yahoo Sports and ESPN.com, are also the two most popular sports news sites, coincidentally or not.

But the fantasy sports market might not be easy to crack, as it skews toward guys who aren't young and who may already have their habits locked down. The FSA says the average fantasy sports enthusiast is 39 years old and male. Other research indicates that the typical player has been in the same league with his buddies for seven years.

Sports Illustrated, the venerable sports magazine, has mostly stuck to the sidelines as the fantasy industry grew, but it's jumping in with Citizen Sports now in the hopes of reaching the Facebook crowd.

Until now, said Jeff Price, president of Sports Illustrated's digital operations, "the cost to get people to switch over was just too significant, and there wasn't anything new for us to bring to the game."

The magazine supplies stats and analysis for the application and landed major advertisers, such as AT&T for the free application's pages. Price said that all ads for the season have already been sold.

Some fantasy football fans say they are interested in taking their pastime to Facebook, though this might not be the year they do so.

Graham Marsden, a Reston resident who is the organizer of a three-year-old fantasy football league, recently checked out the Citizen Sports application, though he ultimately decided not to use it.

"My league was clamoring for me to find something on Facebook, because everyone uses it every day," he wrote via e-mail.

There's no reason fantasy football won't eventually be a huge success on Facebook, he said, but this season he and his group of college friends will stick to Yahoo.

While he said he likes the free live statistics in the Fantasy Football 2008 application, Marsden said he prefers the way Yahoo lets him more closely manage how the teams in his league score points. Marsden has set up a Facebook group for his group, called Megolithic, to facilitate trash talking and even used the social networking site to schedule the group's offline draft get-together, scheduled for today.

Ambrosius, the president of the fantasy sports industry trade group, said he's already in eight leagues and hasn't tried the two new services yet. He's not a Facebook guy.

"I'm 48," he said. "I'm too old for that stuff. I wouldn't have any idea how to get on there."