As any fantasy sports player would agree, seeing is believing. Although stats and box scores don’t often lie in fantasy sports, they can’t tell you if a player runs hard, plays with heart, makes a fantastic catch, gets hurt really bad, or shakes someone out of their shoes. Only when you see the person in action can you make those types of assessments. That is why NFL.com videos is so badass. I’m sure by now a lot of people are aware that NFL.com has a videos section, but I don’t think many know about how deep and rich the content is.

If you think Sportscenter highlights for NFL games are good, wait until you start digging around on NFL.com. They have a complete catalog of highlights for every game, team, and player, and the clips are much longer. Not only is everything aired on the NFL Network channel accessible online, it’s also released very, very fast. Usually within hours of a games end on Sunday or Monday, the highlights will be available online.

It’s a beautiful thing when you can watch all of Adrian Peterson’s highlights for the entire season on demand. Or how about all of Tom Brady’s touchdown passes? The emergence of Ryan Grant and Earnest Graham? You got it. Sleepers and busts are definitely a bit easier to detect with all this video footage. As more fantasy players realize how useful the NFL.com Videos section is, leagues are going to be a bit more competitive. Not everyone has the NFL Ticket on Direct TV or has time to watch entire games, but everyone can (and probably does) watch streaming videos at work and throughout the day.

While NFL.com’s video section is damn good, it’s missing one big feature: embeddable video content. Perhaps they’re waiting for the online video advertising to take form so that they can fully capitalize on the content. (If that’s the case, NFL, meet Videoegg. Videoegg, allow me to introduce NFL) Or maybe they want to channel all the traffic to their main site, which is absurd because more traffic will be driven with embeddable content.

Whatever their motives may be, one thing is for sure, the users want it. Fans would love to be able to embed a game or player highlight into their blogs, myspace, and websites. We’re tired of hunting down clips on Youtube, Metacafe, etc. only to find out later that the clip has been removed. Copyrighted content is constantly uploaded to these sites anyways, so it’s just another cat and mouse situation. Why not give the users control of your content and let them promote it for you?

What’s exciting is that this is only the first year that NFL.com has showcased their new site and video section. With each passing year, the online video library of the NFL will only grow bigger and more enhancements will be released. What I would like to see are videos from all the previous seasons of the NFL become available too. That would be a football fan’s dream come true, wouldn’t it? NBA, MLB, NHL, and the rest of the sports world should take notice of NFL.com’s online media strategy because they got people who know what they are doing.