Fantasy Nfl Media Watch

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

Within minutes of writing that Matthew Berry is the next star at ESPN, I was besieged with e-mails. Maybe Berry already is a star: People certainly have strong opinions about him.

The most interesting thing I heard in those e-mails is that Berry used to be a writer on Married ... with Children. And since I saw Berry moments after learning that fact, I decided to ask him about it. Berry tells me that Married ... with Children is the reason he's now the face of fantasy sports at the Worldwide Leader.

Berry says he's been playing fantasy games since he was 15 years old, but that it only occurred to him that he could make money off his hobby when he saw a notice that a fantasy sports site was looking for a writer. (He didn't want to name the site, although it's not exactly rocket science to do a Google search and find out where he started.) He e-mailed the editor of the fantasy site, explained that he worked on Married ... with Children (a fact confirmed on his IMDB page) and was told that it was the favorite show of the people who ran the site. He got the job.

But it really wasn't a job, and as recently as 2004, Berry was doing it mostly as a hobby, making $100 a week writing fantasy columns online. Hooking up with ESPN and actually getting to the point where fantasy sports was a better gig than writing the screenplay for Crocodile Dundee in L.A. was a recent development. And a development that never would have happened if he hadn't once written about a high school football star turned women's shoe salesman.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

I've been in Bristol talking to ESPN folks for the last two days, and one name has surfaced more than any other: Matthew Berry.

That probably isn't the first name you would have guessed. Heck, it probably isn't the 50th name you would have guessed. But there's no doubt in my mind that people at ESPN think Berry can become for fantasy sports what Mel Kiper is for the NFL draft: The generally recognized leading expert and go-to guy for sound bites about every single player you can think of.

Berry, who first made a name for himself with the web site The Talented Mr. Roto, might be especially well-suited to becoming a star at ESPN because he provides two things that ESPN craves: He attracts fantasy players, and he has the ability to work on multiple ESPN platforms (TV, radio, the web, etc.) Be ready to see a lot of Berry this football season.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

Yesterday I spoke with some of the bigwigs at the biggest player in the sports web world, ESPN.com. And from talking to Rob King, the editor in chief of ESPN.com, and John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager of digital media at ESPN, it's clear that the blogosphere is not a particularly high priority for ESPN.

The decision-makers at ESPN.com see three things as the top priorities for the site: Video, fantasy games and using the web to integrate all of ESPN's different platforms (TV, radio, magazine, etc.). Blogs are way down on the list of what ESPN.com cares about. It's not that they're anti-blog, it's just that they don't have all that much interest in blogs.

King (whose background is in newspapers) said that journalism is central to what ESPN.com does, and although he mentioned that he thinks highly of the work done by Henry Abbott, my general sense is that ESPN is a lot more likely to hire more beat writers like Mike Sando than it is to hire more bloggers like Abbott.

When NBC took over the Sunday Night package away from ESPN, they wanted some flexibility in the schedule so they could have a meaningful matchup as the season waned on [something that killed of ABC's version of Monday Night football was bad games late in the year].

The NFL obliged and opened up the final 8 weeks of the season for those flexed games. However, in doing so, they shaved off a week of byes. Now, we will pay for that. In Weeks 6 and 7, the NFL will have SIX teams on a bye each week. This really cuts into a fantasy team at a crucial time.

This weeks byes: Browns, Packers, Colts, Vikings, Patriots and Jaguars.

That means no Peyton Manning, Brett Favre or Tom Brady. It means no Reuben Droughns, Chester Taylor, Corey Dillon, Laurence Maroney or Fred Taylor. No Donald Driver, Greg Jennings, Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, Troy Williamson or Matt Jones [who? Matt Jones]. And some of the top defenses on the board are gone.

Of course, after last week where the Falcons, Bengals, Seahawks and Texans were off and took away some of the biggest fantasy players with them, many fantasy owners won't see an unforgivably huge hit. A few waiver wire moves....and they're fine.

Good fantasy owners forsaw this coming and were prepared prior to this week. Hopefully, you were one of them.