Football playoffs are coming up. Are you ready? Whether you are or you aren’t, there are a number of developers that are hoping you’ll turn to Facebook for some fun games and applications to track live scores, stats on players, and even the games themselves. Over the past couple of years, developers have managed to find more ways in which to leverage online communities for their sports-related applications.

Fantasy Football is on the verge of becoming the only topic of discussion in offices across the country, and such avid momentum is carrying over into the Facebook application realm. Even stand alone applications like Citizen Sports have turned to Facebook to find fans, send updates, and redirect traffic back to their main site, which receives a reported 2.5 million unique hits on Sundays during football season. Watercooler is yet another Facebook app that lets you view games online, though you cannot view them directly in the Facebook app. Having expanded its TVLoop service to include a standalone site, thanks to its success on Facebook, Watercooler has become a favorite for sports fans of all sorts.

The most significant aspect of these applications, however, is the way in which they’ve begun to use the Facebook application platform for their own businesses, similar to the way in which gaming developers have used Facebook’s platform.

From a business standpoint, a huge potential for such Football playoff applications is for advertising purposes, which is parallel to how the sports industry is already used in other mediums such as television. The popularity of such sports-related applications is significant during a time like the playoffs and could even help other marketers find ways to take advantage of event-specific traffic spikes (i.e. the holidays) in the future.