We introduced you back in July to the joint efforts of FFSpin.com and FantasyFootballCrystalBall.com to gauge the accuracy of weekly fantasy rankings. Now that gauge has found an in-season home via USAToday.com.

On Wednesday, USA Today’s Fantasy Joe site carried the introductory post for this “Rank the Rankings” process.

“The difference between victory and defeat can be as slim as inserting an upstart tight end in place of an established veteran facing a difficult match up and the start/sit advice of a preferred site can catapult or cripple a team,” FF Spin co-founder Scott Pashley wrote. “Finally there is a way to know how your favorite fantasy football sites are performing relative to the rest of the experts promising winning prognostications.”

Each Wednesday throughout the season, the two sites will announce via this outlet which “experts” were most accurate with their rankings for the previous week, taking a look at each position and overall performance. This coming Wednesday — the day before the NFL opener — they promise to reveal the top-performing weekly rankers for all of 2009.

Despite small potential pitfalls such as accounting for different scoring formats and the effects of injuries, FSB.com encourages these kinds of efforts as a nice method for at least helping the consumer sort through the multitude of fantasy-content options existing today.

This weekly model probably provides even greater accuracy for a few reasons. Long-term injuries won’t impact the measures as much as they can with pre-season rankings, and week-to-week recommendations rely more heavily on actual performance and matchups. It also gets rid of the effect of draft strategy in initial rankings, whereby a backup behind an injury-prone starting running back might often sit higher than his actual expected points would otherwise dictate.

We’ll be checking Fantasy Joe on Wednesday to see the 2009 results and keeping an eye on the 2010 reports.

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– The crew at FantasyPros911.com has announced a free iPhone app that allows users to connect with each other via Opinionaided.com or Facebook to ask and answer fantasy sports questions.

– Fanball announced Tuesday a deal with DISH Network that will support Fanball games SnapDraft and Team Pick’Em on this DISH Network platform.

– We here at FSB.com know what you’re thinking: “I’m spending all this time figuring out how to build the best fantasy squad for this season, but how do can these fantasy football lessons help my dating life?” Of course, AskMen.com has the answers.

– Chris Richards of Canada.com points out some of his favorite fantasy sports apps for the iPhone.

– The folks behind FantasyFootballXtreme.com have launched FantasyBasketballXtreme.com to treat a different sport. We’ll leave it to you to guess which one.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

There are an ever-growing number of “experts” out here in fantasyland and a new segment of ranking-the-rankers type outlets cropping up. The FF Librarian, however, is heading into her fourth season of holding the pros’ opinions against them.

Sara Holladay, the aforementioned Fantasy Football Librarian — collaborating with Donnie Campbell of TheMostCredible.com and Bill Green of FantasyDispute.com — has announced the opening of Season 4 of her Accuracy Challenge and the third to be affiliated with the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

As part of this challenge, anyone with an online fantasy football outlet and published rankings and/or projections can submit for judgment, with the results announced at the FSTA’s winter conference as well as reported via FFLibrarian.com and The New York Times‘ Fifth Down blog.

Rankings and projections are due before 8:30 p.m. Eastern Sept. 9, which is the approximate time for kickoff of the season-opening Saints-Vikings game (as if you didn’t know). Late submissions will be accepted, as long as the organizers can verify that the lists were published before the first game.

Entrants must submit rankings for their top 25 quarterbacks, 50 running backs, 50 wide receivers and 20 tight ends in Excel format. The template for projections submissions can be downloaded via the FSTA website.

Past overall winners included CBSSports.com in 2009, Fantazzle.com in 2008 and Ask the Commish in 2007, (under what appeared to be a different scoring format).

Rankings entries should go to fflibrarian@gmail.com.

Projections entries should be sent to FSTA.Accuracy.Contest@gmail.com, dc@themostcredible.com, greenbill@fantasydispute.com and fflibrarian@gmail.com.

Eddie Royal isn’t the only NFL player using social media to gather a fantasy football league.

Eagles tight end Brent Celek — a rising fantasy commodity himself — has spent the summer recruiting 11 fans to compete against him in fantasy this season.

The initial post back on July 24 makes it appear the idea just kind of cropped up rather than being the product of any particular planning. It also, however, aimed to engage his followers on Facebook and Twitter right from the start.

“I’m thinking of having u all submit videos on here explaining why i should pick u to be in my league.. any other ideas?” Celek posted.

He did follow other ideas, adding his first leaguemate the same way Royal did — the simple method of “Who can respond to this message first?” Celek did start to have a bit more fun after that, though, offering the next spot to the first person to post a photo of the subject wearing Celek’s No. 87 jersey and standing by a stop sign. The winner managed to be selected just 8 minutes later … just in case we didn’t know that the public hangs on the words of athletes/celebrities (scoffs the guy writing an article about some football player filling a fantasy league).

Spot 3 was uninspiringly awarded to another fan who posted a photo of himself in an Eagles jersey (though he at least got a bit creative).

The next two apparently went to fans who successfully bored Celek to death with videos.

Position 6 called for commenters to describe why it will be the Eagles’ year, eliciting 336 comments. The winner (Rishi Sugla) posted three different times and appeared to finally win by presenting a quick Celek biography from Wikipedia info. (Tough to say he didn’t actually win for his name, though.)

Spot 7 went to a groom wearing an Eagles vest and singing the team’s fight song at his wedding.

The eighth guy somehow failed to annoy Celek enough with his fight-song rendition to be eliminated.

And that’s where Celek’s league stands, more than three weeks after his last selection. The tight end did promise Monday night, however, to fill the remaining three slots on Tuesday. Royal, of course, went to an eBay auction to raise $810 for charity in filling his final spot.

A similar method would seem an obvious choice for Celek, who already has his own foundation. Brent Celek’s Take Flight Foundation seeks to “provide seriously ill and physically challenged children throughout Greater Philadelphia with daily support and life changing experiences,” with an admirable goal of helping 2 million children by 2013.

Celek provides yet another example of the willingness of some athletes to engage fans directly via the still relatively new social-media channels now available. The fact that he chose fantasy also shows once again the prominence of our games at the highest level of the sports scene that drives them.

No matter how silly the resulting Facebook videos or how excruciatingly long the summarizing FSB.com posts, here’s hoping we see more examples of this kind of interaction. It can be fun and rewarding for all involved.