Fantasy Football

It's the fashionistas' answer to fantasy football." - ERICA SALMON, a 32-year-old Pitman, N.J., resident who created the the Fantasy Fashion League, an Internet-based game that has 15,000 players worldwide. Players in the league choose their teams from a list of designers and celebrities and score points when their picks show up on a magazine cover or in other media, or when they win an award or attend a red carpet event. ASSOCIATED PRESS

It was William Hurt as a pretty-boy, ethically challenged anchorman in the brilliant film Broadcast News who lamented that it was tough to know where the line between legitimate news and entertainment was anymore because "they keep moving that little sucker." Mike Bass, senior editor/sports of the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, wonders, too, about how to strike a proper balance between giving the public comprehensive high school sports coverage and not making a mockery of the games. Bass thought the Pioneer Press had found an entertaining new way to showcase high school football through a fantasy football offering that did not involve the exchange of money.

Football: That's fantasy football. Sunday at noon, CBS (WJZ/Channel 13 and WUSA/Channel 9) offers advice on picking your fantasy team, featuring CBS SportsLine's Dave Richard. Nobody asked me, but I would suggest a soundtrack of Traffic's Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory. Auto racing: The Nextel Cup runs its second of two road course races on NBC Sunday (1:30 p.m., WBAL/Channel 11 and WRC/Channel 4) from Watkins Glen, N.Y. The drivers have to make left and right turns. And they never seem to signal.

The NFL players and owners are reportedly oh-so close to reaching a new collective bargaining agreement that will unlock the doors to stadiums and practice facilities so we can get back to football as we know it. I never expected the season to get delayed. I've said all along that this would be a deadline-driven deal, and that the conflict would get resolved once the season neared (I wasn't in the minority by saying that).   Still, I don't know about you, but the lack of offseason workouts and free agency this spring and knowing that I won't get to travel to Westminster for Ravens training camp has thrown off my biological clock.

With 0-2 starts staring at me in two football leagues (thanks so much, Donovan McNabb and Larry Johnson), I'm trying my best not to focus on the fantasy details. Sometimes, it's worth standing back from the hurly-burly of whom to start and sit in a given week. When I think about how far fantasy sports have come from the homespun baseball and football leagues I started with school friends in the early 1990s, I'm amazed and perhaps a little aghast. More than 19 million people participate in the United States and Canada, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

After catching 18 passes in his first three games of 2012, in the process endearing himself to fantasy football aficionados, Dennis Pitta was shut out by the Cleveland Browns last Thursday. He played 57 snaps as the Ravens continued to line up the tight end all over the field, but he had zero catches on a season-low two targets. As a result, those finicky fantasy football folks have been bailing on Pitta, but there is no reason to think he won't continue to be a big part of the Ravens offense.

Let's jump in the time machine and flash back in time to the early 2000s when Tom Cruise wasn't a known crazy person, "Freedom Fries" were an innovation in redneck culinary circles and men under the age of 40 wearing visors in public was considered to be socially acceptable. Thanks to Al Gore's Internet invention, fantasy football was starting to blow up -- and we were advised to select running backs with our first 13 or so picks. Back to the future, the NFL has become a passing league.

Football has never been the first love of the statistically minded. So many players have so many different jobs on any one play that it seems hard to measure who's contributing what. The easily recorded individual confrontations that form baseball's fabric are nowhere to be seen. It's hardly surprising, then, that fantasy football is a simple game. Touchdowns, turnovers and yards. Those are the things we know how to measure in real football, so they're the meat of fantasy football. But how do we know which players are going to get those yards and touchdowns in a given season?

You remember when playing fantasy sports was a little embarrassing? You'd talk about it with others who played at work or school but you didn't exactly fly a flag saying, "I spend five hours a week obsessing over make-believe games." And you waited maybe a month or two before explaining the whole thing to a new girlfriend. My wife accepted it pretty much in stride, one of many signs that she was a keeper and a queen of tolerating the inexplicable. But 10 years down the line, that all has changed.