2006-2007 Street and Smiths College Basketball Preview Yearbook

Update September 2007

The 2006-2007 season is long gone, but the 2007 NCAA College Basketball Tournament games are available on DVD!.

And you can get started on the 2007-2008 season by checking our Gigantic 2007-2008 preview of links.

Catch up the latest recruiting rankings


The original 2006-2007 review
The Street and Smiths 2006-2007 NCAA basketball college preview yearbook is now out! I picked it up at Borders Bookstores for the list price of $6.99 (display until Dec-5-2006). This is a west coast edition with UCLA's Arron Afflalo on the front cover.

You can support this review if you make your Amazon purchases following this link



And now I am putting my Magazine Reviewer hat on.

Comprehensive Review
* The review is divided in two parts
* The first part covers all the special features, stories, recruiting and player rankings.
* The second part covers the meat of the magazine, the team-by-team within conference-by-conference analysis.


Part One: Grade: A-
Very good coverage on recruiting and JuCos, but not many in-season features.
Front of the book

Editorial on Coaching Carousel

Two page feature on the incoming freshmen

All American Teams

Top 25 Teams with a 15-line 1/3-page wide paragraph for each team. This is a bit of a shocker, but North Carolina is listed as #3 (WoW!) Duke at #5 (WOW!)

Whatever Happened to feature, looking back at the All America Teams of 10 years ago, 1996-1997 seasons, featuring names such as Battier, Chris Burgess (he escaped the Puke Empire), Odom, El Amin, Schea Cotton (who?), Luke Recker, etc, etc

Compact one page list of last season's standings by conference. Nice quick reference page!

Top 100 incoming freshmen sorted alphabetically and by region. No individual rankings

Nice "New Destinations feature" on page 15: Features Transfers eligible for this season, transfers eligible for next season and 2006 Coaching Changes
Back of the book

One page preview of NCAA Division II

One page preview of NCAA Division III

One page preview of NAIA

Three page coverage of JuCos, listing the top 10 JuCos for this year, the top 50 or 60 JuCos moving to division 1 in 2006-2007, and statistical leaders of the 2005-2006 JuCo season.

Three page Women's Preview with Top 25 teams and a couple of other features

Two pages of short profiles of twenty 2007 recruits (including OJ Mayo, Kyle Singler, Kevin Love, etc) - sorted alphabetically

High school All American Teams of 2007, including four five-member teams, and long lists of "High Honorable Mention" and "Honorable Mention". Also included "High Honorable Mention" and "Honorable Mention" for the class of 2008 and beyond (all undersclassmen). Sorted alphabetically.

All Metro teams (five players per metro area, most major cities listed)

list of the promiment high school basketball and all star tourneys

Top 25 High school basketball teams. I can't reveal who is #1, knock on oak wood ;-)

Women's High school All American Teams of 2007 as well as a long list of honorable mentions divided geographically

Top 20 Women's Prep schools

Final statistics of the 2005-2006 season for Division I, II and III, NAIA and Women's Division I and NAIA.

List of 2006-2007 preseason tournaments (Maui, Alaska, NIT, etc)

Calendar listing conference tourney dates and NCAA tourney arenas

Complete schedules of all teams (in tiny print)



Part Two: Overall Grade: A-
The Top 14 conferences go first, sorted alphabetically, followed by the remaining conferences which get significantly smaller coverage.

Conference Pages. Grade: B
* The Top 14 conferences get one full page for a conference preview that features a long write-up on the conference, a quick recruiting recap per team, and the superlatives (best player, best freshman, best coach, etc, etc). The rest of the conferences get a short 20-line 1/3rd of a page wide paragraph and the top 5 players, and a couple of superlatives. Significantly less than the top 15.
* The top 14 conferences are according to this magazine (sorted alphabetically): ACC, A-10, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, Big West, C-USA, MAC, MVC, MWC, Pac10, SEC, WAC, West Coast (WCC). Surpringly the Colonial and Horizon are not included in this and get reduced coverage.

Team Pages. Grade: A
* The top 14 conferences get luxurious coverage as expected. The top and mid-level teams of the BCS conferences, and the top teams of the non-BCS conferences get a full page preview. The remaining teams of the top 14 conferences get half-a-page review (horizontally). Each team has complete rosters with jersey numbers, height/weight and class status (FR/So/Jr/Sr). Street and Smith continues their unique feature of a graph charting each team's wins for the last five years. Cool feature. An even cooler feature is a 1 to 5 power rating of each team in terms of Offense, Defense, Rebounding, Playmaking and Coaching. Only teams with full page previews get this feature! Coaching records are only printed for the coaches tenure at their current school, not their whole career. Assistant names are listed! Teams with full page previews get a short Impact Rookie segment. The meat of the preview is contiguous without any sub-divisions and pretty much free-flowing depending on each team. Teams are listed in POF (predicted order of finish) for each one of the 14 conferences mentioned here.
* The remaining teams (not of the 14 conferences mentioned above) get a very short preview each. The top players are mentioned but there are no rosters. Very short coverage here, totalling one page for each conference total.


Shortcomings

If your team is in one of the 14 conferences listed above, then you have nice coverage. If your team or conference is in one of the remaining conferences, the coverage is poor (one page for the whole conference).


Compared to Lindy's and Athlon
+ Complete schedules (but with very small fonts at the back of the magazine)
+ Five year trend graph of number of wins for some teams in the top 14 conferences
+ Power Ratings (1 thru 5) on Offense, Defense, Rebounding, Playmaking and Coaching for the top teams from the top 14 conferences.
+ Better women's coverage than the other two
+ More JuCo coverage
+ Division II, III and NAIA one page preview each
+ Jersey numbers included
- No individual player statistics per team
- no predictions on the field of 65 (other than their Top 25 list upfront)
- not as much coverage on an individual basis of each team's freshmen/newcomers as the other two


Recommendation

A nice overall magazine, covers most of the basics, great for the college basketball fan in general or fans of the 14 conferences getting expanded coverage.

A little thin on special features but has more recruiting features than others so far.

A lot of reviewers are afraid to make a hard recommendation because they don't want to upset anyone. I will be brave here since none of the magazine publishers are likely to read this review (or care) anyway :-) If you are going to be buy only one, from the ones I have reviewed so far (total of three), I recommend this one :-)



Upcoming preview magazines

Blue Ribbon yearbook, CBS Sportsline, ACC Handbook, Sporting News, SI, and ESPN

If you are a publisher and you want to send me a copy for an early review, I will be more than happy to review it :-)


Supporting this blog and reviews
You can support this blog and reviews if you make your Amazon purchases following this link