Move Over, Monday ... Wednesday Morning Quarterbacking Is a Lot More Fun

April 3, 2007 — -- Can you predict which Hollywood mom-to-be will hawk her baby pictures to the highest bidder?

Would you wager on which two celebrity wives would become BFFs next?

What about taking a stab at guessing the next "it" couple to be caught smooching by the paparazzi?

Fortune-telling has always been a risky business, but doing it in Hollywood -- a land that often seems populated by a different race of people living solely by the maxims of "in," "out," "hot" or "rehab" -- might strike some as a fool's errand.

For the women and men who play Tabloid Fantasy League, though, predicting who's making enough headlines in Hollywood to land them on the pages of the nation's largest tabloids has become a competitive sport.

It has long been the domain of sports fans to memorize box scores and batting averages, and to spend gorgeous Sunday afternoons glued to a TV and Monday mornings around the water cooler dissecting the athletes, games and statistics -- just to turn that knowledge into friendly (and sometimes not-so-friendly) competition through fantasy sports leagues.

Pop culture enthusiasts now have the same opportunity. Rather than Kobe Bryant or Peyton Manning, players in the Tabloid Fantasy League (www.tabfl.com) create teams out of Hollywood headliners like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, making a competitive game out of the soapy foibles that grace the tabloid covers.

Marie, 28, writes her own entertainment blog and spends every day trolling through gossip Web sites, checking TMZ, watching E!, Access Hollywood and ET, and reading Us Weekly and People religiously.

"Tori Spelling is broke, and she's definitely going to be selling those baby pictures," she said, adding that Spelling was on her list of stars who'd be in the tabloids this month.

"Victoria Beckham, she wants to make a splash in Hollywood, and she goes to all the fashion shows and is signing up with NBC to do a reality show. And she's become Katie Holmes' best friend. We're going to be seeing her picture everywhere," she said.

"Why do I know all this? Why do I care enough to figure out who's going to be in Star? I don't know," Marie said. "Why do Larry King and Nancy Grace talk about it every night?"

Now she hopes that knowledge will make her a fantasy winner. And why not? Football fans have been doing it for years.

The tabloid fantasy game mimics fantasy sports leagues. There is a forum for an online community of users to form a league of teams with rosters made up of celebrity "players." Team owners, like Marie, follow along as their teams win points based on their "performance."

But there is a major difference. While sports players are known to spout cliches about how "magazine covers don't win games," the exact opposite is true in TABFL.