Football's Fantasy

摘要

One p.m. eastern standard time on a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon in November. You plop down on your couch, boot up the family's 54-inch TV monitor and your iPad, log on to your NFL.com account and, pop, your New York Giants are playing the Los Angeles Jaguars. On the lower left friends rib you via video about the Giants' starting 39-year-old quarterback, Eli Manning. ESPN Chief Executive Bill Simmons jumps on the Eli-bashing bandwagon, tweeting "sportsguy33: What, was 51-year-old Favre not available?" Soon, quarterback Cam Newton's name starts glowing and pulsing on the right side of the monitor-he's the quarterback of your fantasy team and has driven his Carolina Panthers into scoring position. You tap his name and the screen shifts to that game. Tap his uniform and the camera shifts to the view from inside his helmet You hear him (via the microphone he's wearing) shout an audible at the line and listen as his breath swells. He takes the snap and jumps in for a touchdown. Replays-from any of a dozen angles-are a click away. So is a tool to edit your own highlight reel to rub in the rest of your league's face Monday morning. If this sounds like paradise, you're Brian Rolapp's kind of fan. He's chief operating officer of NFL Media and the league's resident futurist While other top NFL executives have spent the off-season tied up in the tedium of the labor lockout, Ro-lapp-a cherub-faced 38-year-old-spent it looking ahead to the NFL's next great frontier: the convergence of videogaming, mobile computing and social media "This is where you get growth," says Rolapp.