I don’t know if you heard, but Fantasy Football is a really big deal and not just to the sports geeks who play it. According to a CNN article from last summer, “there are currently between 15 million and 18 million fantasy sports players in the U.S,” most of whom play online. That’s big business for media companies like Disney (who owns ESPN), Fox and CBS, and the advertisers salivating over the fantasy football demographic – “male, married, in a high income bracket and more likely to do research or make purchases online.”

My latest issue of ESPN the Magazine dedicated 32 pages to the subject, and ESPN has a new “Fantasy Hall of Fame” broadcast and interactive campaign to support their free online Fantasy Football service. The NFL is in the mix too with their “Fantasy Rules” (this commercial is funny because it’s true) to support their League Manager provided by CBS Sportsline.

Fantasy Football is appealing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it enhances a football fan’s experience by giving meaning to every play in every game on every Sunday. It’s too bad that the user user experience offered by most online Fantasy Football sites is convoluted (and not particularly attractive graphically). Rules vary by league, so most systems allow for nearly endless customization of scoring and other rules – unfortunately, these customization features result in user interface complexity.

I’d love to see a new kind of online Fantasy Football service – one that discards the typical scoring systems and other complexities to make it more accessible to casual fans and those who are too busy for a conventional Fantasy league. We’ve developed several very simple sports pick’em games for our client, PicksPal, that are at the other end of the spectrum, but what I want is something in the middle – a game that gives me enough control over a team and league to fee like it’s “mine” but doesn’t demand the obsessive tweaking and stats crunching needed to succeed in most leagues.