NBC Sports boosts fantasy sports coverage

The week the regular-season "Sunday Night Football" debuts, NBC Sports
will transform its Web site to include more fantasy sports and in-depth
football coverage with a new online editorial team.

The new http://www.NBCSports.com will feature not only football but
eventually will attempt to encompass major sports including Major League
Baseball, the NBA, college football and basketball, golf, tennis and the
Olympics. The content won't immediately include video highlights -- NBC
doesn't have the rights to that -- but the company means to make it a
fully featured sports data and content site.

"We'll in the coming months roll out a full sports offering," said Gary
Zenkel, executive vp strategic partnerships at NBC Sports.

For football, which will be the site's first major focus, NBCSports.com
will feature video and analysis from "Sunday Night Football's" John
Madden, Cris Collinsworth, Jerome Bettis and others. There also will be
blogs, e-mail questions and links to top NFL-related stories from around
the country. Former Providence Journal sportswriter Tom Curran will be
NBCSports.com's national NFL writer, with longtime Los Angeles Times
sports reporter Alan Abrahamson serving as columnist for the site.

Meanwhile, NBC Sports has acquired Allstar Stats Inc., a 17-year-old
Somers, N.Y., company that will become the basis of NBCSports.com's
fantasy group to be headed by Allstar Stats co-founder Richard Pike.
Allstar Stats had operated Rotoworld.com, an established player in the
fantasy-sports business. Last month, NBC Sports announced an alliance
with Rotoworld to create a fantasy football competition based on "Sunday
Night Football."

"Knowing that fantasy is such an enormous driver of traffic and revenue
in the online sports world, we wanted to get in aggressively in fantasy
sports," Zenkel said. "With Rotoworld, there's a lot of fantasy
competence that we can tap into immediately."

Another critical component is an alliance with 150-200 NBC affiliates,
which will share video and other sports information with NBCSports.com,
and the larger site's video and other content will be available on the
local sites, too.


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It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.