OntheRecordSports.com wants to know how well fantasy players can anticipate performance each weekend, rather than who can build the best lineup.

The new site, which officially launched its beta phase on Monday morning, affords users the opportunity to predict how individual players will perform in upcoming contests and challenge others to do better. It also allows users to create profiles, upload other personal content such as videos and talk trash to each other.

The site also offers community games, including contests for the Super Bowl and NCAA tournament that purport potential top prizes of $5 million.

“We felt like the time was right for a fresh take on fantasy,” On the Record Sports chief executive Mark De Philippi told Sports Business Journal. “The big boys have pretty much cornered the market on commissioner-style games.”

According to SBJ, the venture is backed by investment capital in the seven-figure range, and the prizes are insured. OTRS has partnered with STATS LLC in this offering and was founded by former Upper Deck executive Jamie Kiskis.

“We’ve been doing fantasy for a long time and now have the opportunity to really pick and choose our partners in this space,” Stats senior vice president of sales Greg Kirkorsky told SBJ. “These guys came to us with a really fresh take and a way to get at the casual fantasy player in a meaningful way.”

According to OntheRecordSports.com, Kiskis — a San Diego State alum — developed the idea on the Aztec Talk message board in response to boasts of other posters who often claim to have “called” athletic results before they happened.

Fantasy sports are good for your league.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree or in-depth research to determine that. It’s common sense. Look around.

The NFL has exploded over the past five years or so, at the same time as fantasy participation has been growing by about 25 percent a year. Every outlet for football content has begun to cater its coverage to fantasy players. The NFL itself was the first of the major sports leagues to host fantasy leagues on its website.

Or check out baseball highlights on ESPNews. The “Fantasy Impact” box might not always present a stat that is actually relevant to fantasy owners, but the box is always there when they display the final score. Meanwhile, baseball continues to set attendance records and make a ton of money from broadcast rights.

The NBA and NHL now run fantasy games through their official websites, too. It’s just a good idea. It engages your fans, gives them an increased stake in the results of your events, and offers a potential entry point for new followers. Fantasy not only appeals to fans of a sport, but it can welcome in new consumers who might have no rooting interest in a particular team or might not have paid much attention to a particular league in the past.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s why the NCAA’s objections to fantasy haven’t made their way to the level of legal action.

Major League Baseball and now the NFL have taken fantasy providers to court over access to their athletes, and those two entities exist for the sole purpose of profiting from athletic contests. The NCAA, meanwhile, has stuck to writing op-ed newspaper pieces and sending letters to about how it doesn’t like the use of athletes’ names or the attachment of prizes to the college fantasy contests.

As we’ve pointed out here before, U-Sports has been running college fantasy games with player names included for more than 10 years. Obviously, CBS’ decision to name the players in its college football game this season put the issue on a much larger scale, but are we really expected to believe that no one in the NCAA was aware of U-Sports or any of a few other providers before? The governing body of college sports is simply too large an organization with too much concern for player eligibility to have not come across the games until this year. It seems far more likely that the CBS hoopla finally generated the kind of publicity that required an official response.

It does make some sense for the NCAA to come out against fantasy games publicly. As the official website states: “The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a voluntary organization through which the nation’s colleges and universities govern their athletics programs. It is comprised of institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals committed to the best interests, education and athletics participation of student-athletes.” From an academic standpoint, fantasy games offer no redeeming value to student athletes.

Of course, as stated here in the past, neither do a three-week championship basketball tournament, bowl games over winter break, Thursday night games on ESPN or baseball championships that stretch well past the end of classes in the spring.

That’s why it also makes sense for the NCAA to mount no formal challenge to fantasy sports. Fantasy offers free-of-charge marketing exposure and consumer engagement for college sports — the same sports that generate millions from broadcasting rights for the “voluntary” governing body and many member institutions.

Will the public push between the NCAA and fantasy providers take on a more official capacity at some point? Maybe. It would be hard to make much sense of such action, though.