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

– Fantazzle is offering customizable high-stakes fantasy football leagues as part of the SUPERDRAFT event in Las Vegas. Buy-in levels range from $1,000 to $10,000, with customizable league rules and sizes (anywhere from eight to 14 teams). Each level includes at least an 85 percent payout rate to winners.

– We had former Chiefs and Jets kicker Nick Lowery on the RapidDraft.com Fantasy Lunch, our BlogTalkRadio show on Thursday. Although it was enough for us that Lowery — an obviously bright guy and now professional public speaker — was engaging and entertaining, the part that really made it worth a post here came deep into his interview. That was when the veteran of 18 NFL seasons said, “Fantasy football is the best thing that ever happened to football.”

– The Hazean is keeping polls open through Saturday to determine your favorite fantasy football team name for July. I voted for “Stafford Infection” among the 10 options, though I find the leader quite clever in its use of all four Steelers quarterbacks.

– Just like it did for baseball season, RotoWire is offering its fantasy football draft kit as an iPhone app. Among the features is a function that provides player recommendations when you check off the guys who have already been drafted by others.

– FFChamps.com has reached an agreement with Boston-based WEEI.com to offer the former’s fantasy football draft kit through the website for the popular sports talk station.

– Jene Bramel of Footballguys.com takes a turn in the NYTimes.com Fifth Down blog to tell fantasy football folks why they should be playing with individual defensive players and refutes the common arguments against doing so.

– I recently took part in one of eight “Pros vs. Joes” drafts put on by the folks at the Fantasy Football Players Championship, which pits six fantasy players against six fantasy site representatives in each league. Those who didn’t participate can pick the winners for a shot at free 2011 FFPC entries. (Find my squad here — League 5 — and keep in mind that tight ends get 1.5 points per reception and it’s an optimal-scoring format, where you don’t have to set your lineup.)

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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

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– The Fantasy Football Librarian is taking an early peek at the accuracy of fantasy football site player rankings as part of her accuracy award project (in conjunction with the FSTA). The Fifth Down blog post gets into the top early performers in the running back category, but she promises to go deeper in her regular blog.

– Esquire columnist Peter Schrager says to shut up about your fantasy teams (and other things) if you’re watching football in public. Lower in the column, Darren Rovell says the tough economy is rendering all football players virtually unmarketable and threatening to wipe out lavish Super Bowl-week parties. The horror.

Who: Sara Holladay
What: Fantasy Football Librarian

There are a ridiculous number of fantasy football sites out there, most of which claim to give you top-notch advice for winning each weekend. How do you sort through them all?

You don’t, and that’s part of why FFLibrarian.com has gained popularity.

Five years ago, Sara Holladay was just a football fan — a Colorado resident who rooted for the Broncos (and Redskins, from her native Washington, D.C.) and closely followed the squad from her alma mater, Northwestern.

“I certainly watched and enjoyed football before college, but it wasn’t until I got to Northwestern that I felt I had a real rooting interest,” she says. I like the pace of the game, love the athleticism of the sport … but I think it also takes some serious smarts to play the game well, and I appreciate that.”

With that fan base already built, her husband convinced her to give the fantasy thing a try back in 2004. The rest — as the cliché goes — is history … only in this case it’s chronicled, filed and available for easy referencing.

That’s because Holladay is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, carrying the title of electronic collections and assessment librarian. She sorts through and works with the library’s electronic resources to evaluate their worth as research tools and make it easier for users to find what they need. Knowing that, one shouldn’t be too surprised to see the niche she is carving out in the fantasy football world as the Fantasy Football Librarian.

The site launched in September 2006, simply as a blog where a librarian catered to the fantasy football audience by sharing the resources she had culled from her own research.

“My vision was for it to be a site that would help a few people here and there — and I never even intended to give lineup advice,” she says. “Yet here I am, spending probably way too long every day dispensing what fantasy wisdom I have.”

She has shown enough wisdom in her blog to have Bruno Boys Fantasy Football ask her to write a weekly column and for The New York Times to bring her into the fold at the Fifth Down blog. She says that relationship started when she e-mailed the Fifth Down editor in fall 2007 about joining the site’s blogroll, not really expecting to even hear back.

“And I didn’t hear back, at least not until February 2008, when I was contacted about being a guest blogger,” she says, adding that Fifth Down brought her in to supply posts for a week. “That was a lot of fun, and they asked me back as a Friday blogger during the football season.”

Holladay sites the Fifth Down exposure as the big break that really increased traffic to her site as well as her credibility. Of course, if quality and credibility weren’t on hand already, there would have been little reason for the Times to pay her any attention.

One particular topic that Holladay says grabbed attention was evaluating the accuracy of preseason predictions from industry experts. It was an area that interested her from the start, and in 2007, she took it upon herself to evaluate the experts. A year later, it has evolved into a competition that will deliver Fantasy Sports Trade Association awards to the sites found to be most accurate in their rankings and stat projections.

When she’s not focusing on such yearlong topics, though, Holladay spends time on the blog that got her started, delivering daily posts … well, at least almost daily.

“This year I’ve decided to take the weekends off for the most part so that I remember to live the rest of my life, too,” she says.

Although FFLibrarian.com remains a part-time gig for now, Holladay says she certainly doesn’t dismiss thoughts of making more out of it.

“When you have a chance to do something you truly love and are passionate about all day, every day and even bring home a paycheck from it, well of course you’d jump at that offer, right?” she says. “If the right opportunity presented itself to me, I’d think very seriously about it. I think that might ultimately mean I’d have to diversify and try fantasy basketball or baseball or hockey or golf or whatever else the fantasy nation wants.”

Those, of course, will be considerations for another time. At present, one just has to wonder if Mr. Holladay is now kicking himself for introducing his wife to this world that seems to have consumed her to some extent.

“He’s well aware that his invitation has more or less created a monster,” the Librarian says. “Fortunately he loves football so his eyes don’t glaze over when I’m debating the merits of starting Chansi Stuckey over Torry Holt, but he does hear a heavy dose of fantasy football on a daily basis. But he’s a great guy. I can’t imagine him regretting introducing me to something that brings me such happiness.”