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.

All this week, CNBC sports business maven Darren Rovell is focusing a series of reports on the emerging fantasy sports industry.

Although the first few videos aren’t likely to present much new information to anyone who has been tracking this industry closely, it is still interesting at least to get the more mainstream business perspective of fantasy sports. The quick take: We still have some work to do to be broadly accepted as a serious business segment.

TV talking heads will often provide less-than-ideal examples, but if you watch the video below beyond the soundbyte from FSTA president Paul Charchian, you’ll hear Power Lunch co-host Tyler Mathisen say, “Shakegian? Was that his name? … They have a trade association now?”

Yup, “they” have a trade association now … and have for more than 10 years, actually.

Video No. 2 repeats some of the industry dollar figures laid out the first time around, but it also presents some interesting information. For one thing, 20 percent of fantasy content sites reportedly follow subscription models at this point (though I’m not sure if that number includes those with free and pay levels).

Perhaps more interestingly (depending on your priorities), Hooters says it expects to host more than 25,000 fantasy football drafts this year. According to the company’s website — which I swear I only visited for work purposes — the chain has 455 restaurants in 44 states, which averages out to nearly 55 drafts per location. With that kind of projection (no matter how truthful it might be), it’s no wonder Hooters offers a dedicated URL for draft-party reservations, as well as a free draft kit (with draftboard, cheat sheets, etc.) and a fantasy-centric game-piece gimmick that includes a Super Bowl trip.

Hooters is merely another example of sports-bar type settings realizing the power of the fantasy sports consumer and pursuing us players. Even if Tyler Mathisen doesn’t get it, those paying a bit more attention do.

We’ll have more as we see further Rovell fantasy videos (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Here’s the aforementioned second one …

Veterans of the fantasy sports industry — and especially regular attendees of the FSTA conferences — have long been familiar with Glenn Colton. Now, The Wall Street Journal is spreading the word about his fantasy exploits.

The former federal prosecutor — and current partner at New York City’s Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP firm — was featured over the weekend by the Journal for his history in fantasy baseball.

“Colton is on a short list of the country’s best fantasy baseball players,” the story attributes to Rick Wolf, a college friend of Colton’s and director of business development for NBC Sports Digital. Wolf, of course, came over to NBC with the acquisition of Rotoworld.

In reference to their teaming up on teams in the LABR and Tout Wars “expert” leagues since 2002, Wolf said: “He would be a champion without me. It’s a simple as that.”

Colton has been playing fantasy since starting a league in 1988 with law school friends at NYU, skipping the NL- and AL-only formats to go the route of East divisions alone. (Back in those pre-Internet days, the group found it easier to focus on teams whose box scores would be more easily accessible on the East Coast.) Colton is the lone remainder of the founding class in a league that now includes his 17-year-old son.

“Now that the game has become a little bit more mature, people are playing with their kids,” Colton told the Journal. “It’s a serious way to connect with your kids.”

Outside of playing the games, Colton’s contributions to fantasy include a weekly column for Rotoworld — The Week that Was — and regular presentations to attendees of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conferences. The lawyer is a staple there, providing updates to the legal issues facing the industry.

At the most recent gathering, his talk included further treatment of the state-specific payout restrictions, as well as insight into some other potentially impactful bills making the rounds at the state and federal levels.

This week’s FSTA summer conference presented a stronger set of elevator pitches than we saw at the winter conference in Vegas, but the winner wasn’t a surprise.

FightMetric hit the stage with a well-planned, simple-to-follow presentation and a comfortable, confident presenter in Alon Cohen.

The company focuses on the collection and dispersal of statistics for mixed martial arts and related to the crowd that it had recently signed on as the official stat provider for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

There’s no denying the explosion in popularity over the past few years for MMA, so it’s no stretch to think of fantasy MMA as an area with enticing growth potential. That, no doubt, is the key reason that FightMetric pitched to fantasy folks on Wednesday afternoon, and the company seemed to draw the desired result.

The other participants, who still were able to get their word out to the crowd:

FantasyPro.com — This new site that doesn’t appear to be live yet on the Web will allow fantasy teams to compete against those outside its league. The creators are seeking deals with existing league-hosting sites to enable integration and will not host its own leagues. Users will be able to challenge others via the Fantasy Pro platform in free or pay games and take part in games put on by the site itself.

Fantasy Sports 4 Kids — As a slightly emotional Brian Riggs told the group, this is not a new site seeking to host kids fantasy games; it’s a much more worthy outlet. FS4Kids, which currently lives online only as a blog, will seek to connect fantasy leagues with charities, while also spotlighting the good works of children’s charities and NFL players who have helped children. Participants will enter their league fees like in your normal pay league, but the winners will be able to put their prizes toward charities that will be easier to locate via this community. Riggs told us that the idea was borne from his own daughter’s fight with cancer (it’s in remission) and that he already had 126 leagues interested. Here’s hoping the concept comes together well.

Pickemfirst — Alain de Raynal had presented to the FSTA crowd previously (and won the pitch session), but this time he came with his company’s newer concept: the blog aggregator. Whereas the initial application enabled fantasy players to quickly check on a player’s availability in multiple leagues while reading online content, the new aggregator pulls in articles via RSS feeds and presents them via popup window when you encounter particular player names in Web content. For example, de Raynal showed us an article in which he came across Diamondbacks pitcher Edwin Jackson. The Pickemfirst blog aggregator showed the three most recent article mentioning Jackson from three differen online outlets. Anyone interested in being included needs only to give Pickemfirst the OK to pull material.

RosterSlots.com — FSB.com previously presented a full writeup on RosterSlots, so here’s just a quick summary. It’s a fantasy baseball game (which also treated the Olympics in February) that plays like a slot machine, incorporating enough trades and player decisions (plus no cash involved) to steer clear of gambling.

WaiverWire.com — Another veteran of the elevator-pitch session, WaiverWire.com’s primary pursuit is a tool built on Wall Street analytics that serves as a virtual assistant coach throughout the season, crunching all the pertinent numbers to help you make lineup and player-movement decisions. New for this year was a revenue-sharing model for fantasy sites interested in a partnership.

Fantazzle — Ryan Parr’s site does its primary business in short-window fantasy games, but his pitch focused more on his white-label offerings. Fantazzle presents various options for games that can carry the hosts brand as well interesting in-game advertising potential, such as positioning logos on virtual race cars for a NASCAR game.

PASPN.net – Probably the most serious of fantasy platforms that we’ve yet come across, the NBA GM game at the center of Ngozika Nwaneri’s online community involves year-round attention to your basketball franchise. It allows consumers to play as either general manager or player agent, each side having to deal with the other in various personnel situations.

TodayInFantasy.com – The latest Footballguys online entry wants to be Google for fantasy football (and eventually other sports as well). For more information, reach the recent FSB.com story.

Advanced Sports Logic — Welcome to The Machine. Frankly, I’m not sure I could properly explain this, so here’s what the site says: “Our patent-pending Probulator^TM technology … uses the variance and accuracy of player projections to simulate your entire fantasy football season with powerful probability distributions.” It’s another tool for making stat-based recommendations throughout the year to help your fantasy football team.

Fantasy Judgment – Michael A. Stein is the latest lawyer to launch a site for fantasy dispute resolution. In addition to offering a single-use package and full-season option, Stein is in the market for partnerships with league-hosting sites to provides his services to users.