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NFL fever? Check out these sites

By GREG AUMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published September 1, 2000

For those that say there is no such thing as too much football, meet the Internet.

Few things -- sports or otherwise -- can boast the same comprehensive coverage online the NFL has. But for every useful site, there's another page that Joe Fan cobbled together years ago and forgot about. It looks sharp, sure, but the Bucs are still wearing orange, the Rams are still in Los Angeles and the lead story is about Christian Okoye.

The good news is there are plenty of fresh sites, updated not just every day but every hour, and then some. And if you're looking for football information online, you're hardly alone.

Lycos.com, one of the Internet's largest search engines, offers a weekly list of its most-searched topics, and football is making its annual rise up the list. It's already at No. 12, ahead of the World Wrestling Federation, the Olympics and even Harry Potter. Once the Firestone Tires craze wears down, it'll be a fixture in the top 10 until February.

So here's another top 10 -- the sites you can't survive the NFL season without. Clip this out, tape it to the side of your computer. Check these out before, during and after each week's games, and you'll be the envy of the water-cooler circuit.

nfl.com: Might as well start with the league's official home. Team pages have rosters, depth charts, schedules, stats, phone numbers for tickets -- everything but the $15 parking spots. This is a sister site to espn.com, so expect crossover promotions with the sports network's site as well as with abcsports.com, home of Monday Night Football.

nflpa.org: The players association's site is more useful than you'd think. The best resource is a search engine that lets you find what any player is making this year -- or in past or future years. Sick enough to wonder what Alvin Harper made in '96? Want to see the Bucs' payroll for 2004? Right now, only three guys (Chidi Ahanatu, Jeff Christy and Keyshawn Johnson) apply to that figure, but they will make a combined $13.3 million that year.

buccaneers.com: The Bucs' official site has seen major upgrades in the past year. You can put yourself on the season-ticket waiting list, download weekly video highlights and count down the seconds to the Bucs' next game. It's a good site for kids, too, with fun games and printable coloring books. Good luck finding that pewter crayon.

superbowl.com: This takes you to nfl.com's coverage of the Rams' win in January. Before long, the link will look forward to when the big game comes to town. Similar domain names likely will be gobbled up by the NFL, which can be pretty territorial when it comes to the Web. One that will stick around is superbowlxxxv.org, the official site for the Tampa Bay Super Bowl XXXV Task Force, where fans interested in volunteering can sign up.

kffl.com: Great site for round-the-clock NFL news. This canvases all the hometown newspapers, and if it's reported, it's here. No matter how inconsequential a nugget of info might seem, it's here. For you fantasy football fans looking for last-minute injury updates, this is a good place to check.

athletesdirect.com: Slow site to download, but this has pages for several Bucs, including Keyshawn Johnson, Warrick Dunn, Derrick Brooks and ex-Buc Doug Williams. Peyton Manning has a bilingual site here, where you learn that "my official Web site' translates to mi pagina de inicio.

imdb.com: The Internet Movie Database is the ultimate guide to find any film, football or otherwise. Look for links to official sites for movies like The Replacements or Any Given Sunday, and you can vote to give each film a rating from 1-10. This provides fair warning before you rent something you'll regret -- needless to say, there are no football movies among the site's top 100. Necessary Roughness miraculously salvages a 5.5, and Varsity Blues a 6.1.

rotonews.com: Another good fantasy site, Rotonews can take each day's news and tell you how it might affect your team. What's more, you can sign up for a free e-mail service that will send you daily updates to help you know who to start, who to bench, etc.

xfl.com: The sport's newest league begins play in February, and its official site already has a head start. Check out pictures of the league's black-and-red footballs and updates on new teams, coaches and players. There's an application for prospective players, which even asks them to "rate your true speed" as either great, good, average or slow.

20million.com: Unfortunately, to fully appreciate this, you have to leave the state. Florida residents are ineligible for the site's contest, which will award $20-million plus tickets to the next 20 Super Bowls to one person who can correctly predict how all 31 NFL teams will finish in their division and in the playoffs this fall. One statistician was quoted as identifying the odds of nailing this as 100,000 times less likely than a commercial airliner being struck by a meteor. Good luck.

If we've overlooked an NFL site you think is worth mentioning, send an e-mail to Times staff writer Greg Auman at aumanac1@aol.com. We'll offer more links throughout the season.

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