When it comes to movies in the sports genre, there are films that have made an impact - "Field of Dreams," "Hoosiers," "Raging Bull," "Rocky," "Caddyshack" - and those that struck out almost from the first frame.

During the Aug. 3 broadcast of the pre-season opener game between the Buffalo Bills and New York Giants, players and coaching staff could be seen holding and using Microsoft Surface 2 tablets on the sidelines. But these players and coaches weren't merely futzing with tablets for fun or instagramming selfies during their downtime. Instead, the debut of Microsoft tablets in a real NFL game marked the kickoff of the reported $400 million, five-year partnership between the National Football League and Microsoft to help stadiums upgrade their on-field technologies and enhance fan experiences.

I've used this forum, in the past, to draw analogies between sports properties and exclusive and coveted communities that sponsors seek to become a part of. As one who runs a sports marketing research firm, my colleagues and I often play a key role in helping our property clients to better position that community as one that fits the marketing objectives for prospective partners. For the potential sponsors themselves, our work often centers around better understanding the behaviors, need states and interactions of consumers within those communities so as to guide brands towards better inserting their message into that space, …

While football, at all levels, is too far entrenched in the culture of American sports for anyone to reasonably isolate individual causes for the NFL's astronomical growth, it's no secret that fantasy football has been instrumental in turning casual fans into avid ones - and moreover, avid fans into rabid ones.