This week I’ll be revisiting something I started last year by reviewing the bulk of the preseason college basketball magazines that proliferate the newsstands. I thought before publishing my first review of the new batch I would lay out a manifesto of sorts on what makes the perfect preview issue.

COMPREHENSIVE TEAM PREVIEWS This would appear to be obvious enough, but it’s a category frequently lacking in many of the highest profile preview magazines. I’m looking for information that I’ll be able to turn to throughout the season while I’m watching a game and learn enough quickly to watch the game with some understanding of both teams. I want rosters (with numbers!) and the basic stats from the year before. Player breakdowns (by position preferably) and recruiting analysis are also musts. Bonus points are given to publications that give equal time to mid-major and smaller conference schools as their importance and national exposure continues to grow.

FEATURES The best preview issues go beyond the team-by-team previews and provide interesting feature stories that illuminate the season ahead. Whether it’s rankings of the best backcourts or “Where are they now?” stories, I want stuff that’s not plainly obvious (last year, we more than exceeded the Billy Donovan story quota) and written with a modicum of skill.

PICTURES/GRAPHICS    As much as I enjoy reading a team preview or article, equally helpful are pictures of players (a few cheerleaders here and there don’t hurt either) so that a connection is made beyond simply reading.  I also group the overall graphical layout of a publication in this category.  Good graphical design makes for an easier read and enhances the later usability of a publication for reference throughout the season.  Bad or lazy design can make the entire publication suffer.

INTANGIBLES    The types of things that can’t be summarized but that enhance your general enjoyment of a preview.  Hard to categorize but you know them when you see them.

When the first of my review comes out tomorrow night (The Sporting News), I’ll be ranking it and each subsequent publication on these four criteria.

Sports Weekly, USA Today’s weekly sports news magazine that started covering only baseball but has gradually added the NFL and NASCAR as well, makes an attempt to expand to yet another sport with its inaugural College Basketball Preview edition.  Priced at a very un-newspaper like $4.95 (well except for maybe the Sunday NY Times), the actual Preview is very clearly a descendant of Sports Weekly, printed on the same tabloid style news print (although it seems like a much higher grade of paper) and featuring the familiar graphics of USA Today.

Now while college basketball may be a new step for Sports Weekly, college basketball heads know that the USA Today has long been a valuable resource for news about the game.  The annual Tournament preview edition of the daily paper that comes out the Monday after Selection Sunday is still one of the most valuable tools for researching and preparing for the tournament and was worth its weight in gold in the days before the ‘net.

The same style of coverage is brought to this venture and it’s good for a quick read, but lacks a lot of the depth that other previews offer.   It’s primary disadvantage is lenght, clocking in at only 60-odd pages.  The only teams that get genuine in-depth previews are their preseason Top 8 who get full-page profiles.  For the others, it’s a paragraph or two under the conference previews, with larger conferences getting slightly more coverage per team. Interestingly, while rankings for each conference are included, the rankings actually come from the Sports Xchange which is an Elias or Stats, Inc. style information bureau.

Overall, it’s the type of preview good for a short plane trip, but nothing that you’d really keep around for the season.  It ranks particularly low on the bang for the buck ratio as you can pick up much more comprehensive and detailed previews for only a dollar or two more going down the Sporting News or Street and Smith (preview on its way) route.

Hating the ACC has become as much of a college basketball tradition as chants of Rock Chalk Jayhawk or Big 5 games at the Palestra. Whether it’s complaints about the incessant media coverage and hyperbole of Dick Vitale or accusations of being overrated (particularly in light of the relative mediocrity of the conference last season) the ACC is the favorite whipping post of many fans. Well all the haters can add one more thing to the list: the conference gets its own nationally published preview issue and it’s actually pretty decent.

The magazine in question, the 2007 ACC Basketball Handbook, has been going at it for 34 years and does a tremendous job at providing excellent in-depth coverage of its only topic, the ACC. At 162 pages, the issue is filled with content including countless great color photos a good range of feature stories including their own national top 25 rankings.

The heart of the “Handbook” are the individual team previews, clocking in with at least eight pages for each team that almost make it a mini-media guide. There are even headshots, all-time best players and records, full stats from last season, and rather good preview text written by a local beat writer covering the team on a regular basis.

I won’t go into much more but I definitely recommend picking it up if you can find it locally (I’m in Dallas and picked one up at a Barnes and Noble) or it can be acquired here. I’m not an ACC shill by any means, but I respect good quality coverage filled with relevant info and this qualifies in all respects. I just wish they had one for every other conference!

I’ve got a bunch of new content lined up over the next few days including looks at the Street & Smith’s as well as Blue Ribbon. I also will upload updated meta-rankings from all the magazines.

With the college basketball season creeping ever so near, it would be conceivable to hope that the quality of the preview magazines would improve due to the later deadlines and more information at their disposal.

This was the attitude I took when looking at CBS Sportsline’s College Basketball Preview. CBS is, of course, THE network of the NCAA Tourney and Final Four and Sportsline last spring offered one of the greatest internet streaming experiences ever (second only to that great naughty Sorority Girls site..oops..why can’t I self-censor..) when they streamed all of the early round games live and for free on their site. It took about three days for my employer’s web-police to catch up to blocking the stream so I had at least three full days of b-ball bliss when I should have been submitting those TPS reports (with cover sheets of course!).

Given this connection, I really didn’t know what to expect with the preview. Was it going to be a sanitized “official” preview or something more substantive? The verdict? Some nice moments but for the most part it was a whole lotta UGGH! Here’s the breakdown:

• Features: Actually the one area that this magazine gets mostly right is feature stories. They offer a good mix including articles on Florida, the Missouri Valley Conference, the incoming crop of freshmen, a story on Memphis, and preseason All-Americans. There is one blatant and totally useless nod to their CBS connection with two full pages of bios of the “Voices of College Basketball on CBS” with full bios on everyone from Jim Nantz to Lesley Visser. It was humorous that they spelled Verne Lundquist’s name as “Vern” on the heading for his bio. Just useless fluff that they didn’t even bother to label “ADVERTISEMENT” in bold like you’ll sometimes see in those pseudo news stories.

• Rankings: The cover prominently advertises “Our Top 64″ and the magazine delivers solid rankings of the Top 64 teams with small capsule paragraphs explaining about each team’s inclusion in the list. Teams 1 to 5 are Florida, Kansas, UNC, UCLA, and Wisconsin. With the top programs ranked, one would figure it was time to roll into conference rankings but shockingly, there are NO conference rankings anywhere in the magazine. You get some language like “so and so should be decent” but they don’t commit at all to any conference rankings. It was shocking going through looking for something that should be obvious to include but just wasn’t there. I assume they’ll have some form of rankings on their website but to not have any rankings in the preview issue is unforgiveable.

• Team Previews: I’ll make it simple, the team previews are mediocre bordering on awful. There are no rosters, no facts at a glance, just basic previews breaking down each team by position with an overall outlook summary. Even power conference previews are not much longer than five or so short paragraphs and reviews of teams in other conferences are the skimpiest seen yet. These are quick hit previews, ok for quick consumption but offering no lasting sustenance.

• Overall: 4/10 This is that 4th year player who started his college career with promise but turns out to nothing more than a glorified practice player in the end. This was the most dissapointing preview mag so far because it is lacking in so many intangibles. The clincher is the absence of rankings for each conference which is an inexcusable error. Don’t get me wrong, there is some decent info to be found, but there is just too much missing to make this a recommended buy.

Athlon is another venerable name in the sports preview magazine industry and this season marks their 13th producing a college basketball annual. Since there are only two previews (Athlon & Lindy’s) out on newsstands at the time I write this, it’s inevitable that this review of Athlon will in some respects be a comparison to Lindy’s, which was reviewed last week.

Full review after the jump…. Continue Reading »
Reviewing the Previews: Athlon College Basketball 2006-2007

First up in our assault on the ‘06-’07 preview mags is Lindy’s College Basketball. Lindy’s is one of the older names in the preview game and have been publishing football preview mags for as long as I can remember.

This is the ninth edition of their college hoops version and was the first of the previews that I saw on the newsstands. Being among the first has its obvious advantages and disadvantages. It gets first to market, but will of course be missing some important info such as schedules and up-to-date rosters. In that respect, it’s important to view Lindy’s as a placesetter type of resource. It’s likely not something you’ll be pulling up frequently once the season starts, but it helps get the mind ready for basketball and helps set up a lot of the plots and subplots that will carry over into the Fall.

Continue Reading »
Reviewing the Previews: Lindy’s College Basketball 2006-2007