The Fantasy Football Librarian has publicized the results of fantasy football rankings accuracy challenge she conducted in cooperation with the Fantasy Sports Trade Association for the season just completed. The surprise winner was Fantazzle.

Fantazzle is primarily a fantasy games site that just launched back in August, so to beat out a slew of more-established fantasy advice outlets is both impressive and interesting.

Is the outcome a signal that people would be best served going to that site for preseason rankings come the summer? Does it show that the ultimate accuracy of such rankings ultimately relies quite a bit on luck? Was this a strange year or a pretty average one? Do the various rankings really differ that much, or does it just take one particular differing pick to vault a site up or drop it down the list?

As the Librarian concedes in her posts, questions such as these can’t really be answered with just one year of tracking the rankings — or even two, for that matter. As the effort continues, though, we should start to see a better picture of who’s best at projecting each coming football season. Or we could find confirmation that its nothing but educated guessing.

I find it especially interesting that the fourth-place finisher here is actually a service that determines the average draft position of players from more than 1,000 online drafts by various people. Thus, the fourth-most accurate fantasy expert in 2008 was the fantasy football-playing public. In effect, this average fantasy player would have been better off following his own rankings list than that of ESPN (eighth) or Rotoworld (10th).

Whatever this exercise ends up showing us, it’s a cool undertaking that the Librarian seems serious about continuing. Congratulations to Fantazzle, and we’ll see what 2009 holds.

Top 10 overall
1. Fantazzle
2. Yahoo Sports
3. Fantasy Football Trader
4. ADP via Fantasy Football Calculator
5. FFToday
6. FantasyFootball.com
7. Fox Sports
8. ESPN
9. Ask the Commish
10. Rotoworld