Presidents’ Day Weekend is coming, which can mean only one thing, the running of the Daytona 500 and the start of the 2010 NASCAR season. This also means the start of the fantasy NASCAR racing season as well. You probably have not thought too much about fantasy racing, so there is a lot of information to learn in a very short period of time.

First, you will need to catch up and read some fantasy racing draft kits, such as NASCAR’s official fantasy draft kit or OneBadWheel‘s Fantasy Racing Cheatsheet. Then, once you are ready to play but are still looking for a fantasy NASCAR racing league for the upcoming season, there are plenty of options. Here are just a few that you may want to consider:

• Yahoo! Auto Racing Yahoo!’s fantasy leagues are great for beginners and/or leagues looking for simplicity. As the market-leader, Yahoo’s game is a one-size fits most approach. It is free to join a public league and free private leagues are available.
• NASCAR Fantasy Cap Challenge NASCAR’s official fantasy racing game is back. It is a free weekly salary cap game. NASCAR has a top prize of $5,000, with segment winners pulling in $500 and weekly winners fetching $200. Further, NASCAR claims it is the only fantasy racing game that will have live in-game stats.
• Fox Auto Racing Challenge Another free weekly fantasy racing salary cap game, but this one has a couple of twists. Score extra points with your the driver you designated as your captain, plus score bonus points for drivers who substantially improve from their starting positions.
• Fantazzle Fantasy Racing Offering free and paid fantasy games, Fantazzle offers weekly salary cap games where you compete against one to four players in the paid games and fourteen others in the free game. The free game even has a $5 prize.
• Fantasy Cup Auto Racing Fanball’s fantasy racing game gives you the opportunity to win a $25,000 top prize. Fantasy Cup is a salary cap game where you maintain a stable of drivers, and you are allowed to switch some of your drivers out each week. This game does cost $39.95 to play, but it does allow you to compete for the largest prize in fantasy racing.
• Running 3 Wide Fantasy NASCAR Racing This site has a number of fantasy racing games for your entertainment pleasure. From weekly to full season games that come in various formats, you are sure to find one that gets your interest.
• SPEED Fantasy Racing SPEED TV is getting itself into the fantasy racing mix with its own fantasy racing game. Each week fantasy players select three drivers and score points accordingly. This free fantasy racing game breaks the season into three session, with each season having a top prize of $1500.
• RotoPlay Fantasy NASCAR RotoPlay’s fantasy racing game breaks the NASCAR season into 12 sessions. Fantasy players select 12 drivers and a lucky 13th driver and score points based on how well its drivers finish. The top prize is $600 per session. RotoPlay is a paid game, with teams starting at $24.95, but get cheaper as you purchase additional teams.

If you do not like any of these fantasy racing games, there are a number of other fantasy racing sites that you may want to check out, just search fantasy racing.

Do you know of any other fantasy racing games that should be included in this list?

I am happy to announce the launch of our Fantasy Book Review series here on Fantasy Ethos. The series with cover new and classic fantasy sports books. Some we will love, some we will not. To kick off the series, I am going to start with the classic Fantasyland by Sam Walker.

Sam Walker did everything that a fantasy player could only dream about doing to win. He hired not one, but two scouts to help him draft his team. He got the chance to go toe-to-toe with the biggest names in fantasy sports. He spoke to actual players about their fantasy value. He traveled around the country trying to make deals happen. All the while, he got paid to do it. Fantasyland: A Sportswriter’s Obsessive Bid to Win the World’s Most Ruthless Fantasy Baseball chronicles Sam Walker’s journey during the 2004 fantasy baseball as he attempted to win the 2004 American League Tout Wars title. While doing so, he penned the quintessential book on being a fantasy player.

As a reader, you realize how ridiculous Walker’s season is going to be when he hires two scouts, Nando Di Fino and Sig Mejdal to help him. Nando helps him scout players the traditional way, by gut and feel, while Sig, a NASA engineer, helps him crunch the numbers to find out on whom, from a purely statistical perspective, Walker should focus. These were not glorified co-owners. These were guys that Walker actually paid to do fantasy baseball research for him.

Walker splices in experiences of other fantasy players throughout the book, but it is his profound insight about (and resulting frustrations with) fantasy baseball that really resonate with the reader. A pre-judge punching Sidney Ponson was Walker’s biggest mistake on Draft Day and continued to be a royal pain. No matter how good your fantasy season is going, there is always that one player that makes you say, what was I thinking?

The most interesting part of the book is when Walker captures what has become a lost art–pressuring someone into a trade. With fantasy leagues interacting almost completely online and making it easy to say no to a deal, that art has been lost. Walker traveled around the country during the season to get some face time with his fellow fantasy owners making deals that his co-owners would have surely rejected had the offer appeared via email only.

Fantasyland is, without a doubt, the best fantasy sports book on the market, and definitely deserves a place of prominence on your bookshelf. It is a great read and you can cannot call yourself a true fantasy player until you read it.

Since and as a likely result of the publication of Fantasyland, Nando Di Fino went on to be a fantasy writer at ESPN and now the Wall Street Journal. Sig Mejdal is now a Senior Quantitative Analyst for the St. Louis Cardinals where he brings statistical analysis to the Cardinals’ scouting department.

You may purchase Fantasyland at Amazon , via our affiliate link (which helps fund this site).

The best advertistments ever! More like the most expensive advertisements ever, but, hey that is close enough. While today’s Super Bowl. While the Colts vs. Saints is surely to be a shootout and a fun game to watch, ultimately, it the commercials will be the most memorable. In fact, CBSSports.com has a site ready to play all of the 2010 Super Bowl Commercials once the commercials have aired.

Just to whet your appetite before the game, here is a clip of the outtakes from the E*Trade Babies.

As an aside, are you one of the people that loves the E*Trade Babies or is freaked out by the E*Trade babies? Me, I love them.

According to Eric Fisher of Sports Business Journal, he just tweeted that “Stats LLC signs deal with MLB Advanced Media to become baseball’s official real-time data licensor. Story coming today in SBD.” Uh-oh.

Two years ago, MLB Advanced Media lost a court case against CDM Sports (Fanball), which essentially stated that statistics are public domain, and that a license from MLB was not required to host fantasy sports games.

Unfortunately, this new arrangement might be a great work-around for MLB, since Stats is able to choose to whom it sells its statistical data. By creating this exclusive relationship for data, MLB has gotten what it always wanted–only one source of data.

Note, the wording of Fisher’s tweet implies this relationship applies only to real-time data, which means that full post-game data may still be available from other sources.

I will update this story as the details of the relationship become clearer.

This much is clear though, having only one source of statistical data is not good for the fantasy sports industry. It limits innovation and small business development, and makes statistics something that only a few select companies can afford.

If you like watching, you may be interested in the surf, skate, and moto fantasy leagues that Fantasy Action Sports League hosts. It is currently accepting sign-ups for its fantasy surf season. Fantasy players compete for prices of $2,000 in cash per event or over $10,000 in prizes for the season competition, including a $5,000 top prize. While these are not the largest fantasy prize pools ever, they are respectable enough that fantasy players should take note of them. Fantasy Action Sports has a free and paid version for the single event and the season game with the prizes above for the paid game. Each entry (event or season) is $9.95 to play.

Fantasy Action Sports League is definitely catering to a niche fantasy game. Its prizes and entry fees are definitely on par for the likely audience of the game. Since Fantasy Action Sports League centers around each event, I like how it allows you to compete in the individual events. This allows the site to generate revenue all-season long and to allow new players to try the game if they discover it mid-season. This continuous stream of revenue is something that cripples many fantasy sports leagues.

For a smaller fantasy site, this is definitely one of the slickest and professional looking websites out there. If you are a small fantasy game, investing in your look is definitely worthwhile as it does help with credibility.

If you are interested in playing, check out Fantasy Action Sports League’s surf registration page.