Mid- week report

NCAA Flashback: Don't underestimate the importance of Larry Shyatt in Florida's national championship run!

Crying: Glen "Big Baby" Davis was almost crying when telling the CSTV cameras that he had to give up cookies and ice-cream in preparation for the upcoming season.

Andy Katz reports in his Insider blog that CJ Giles may be done at KU. The luxury of having a deep bench and probably a big-name forward waiting to commit in 2007... He also touches upon the KU sanctions and Nike's new battleplan for the summer evaluation period in July.

YocoHoops has started conference previews at FauxSports, beginning with the Atlantic-10 first. This is the first year of the A-10 without John Chaney.

A recount of the Indiana Midnight Madness with Kelvin Sampson at FoxSports. Getting Eric Gordon "back" looks like the first major victory for Kelvin. No doubt he must be now working on getting Greg Oden back ;-)

Also at FoxSports a story on how Coach K charges businesspeople $1600 to watch his practices and spew his typical feel-good nonsense. If I had Coach K's resources, recruits, preferential treatment from the media, the refs and the NCAA, heck, I could take Duke to the Sweet 16 every year ;-)

On the injury front, Space-Eater Dwayne Curtis of Ole Miss is out for a few weeks.

Latest conference preview at March Madness All Season is The Sun Belt conference, featuring mid-major power Western Kentucky, up-and-coming South Alabama, and Florida Atlantic breathing a sigh of relief as they got rid of the coaching disaster (Matt Doherty).

Gary Parrish chimes in on the Greg Paulus injury, but he's not the only one: Lorenzo Mata at UCLA, Dandgridge at Missouri, space-eater Pierre Niles at Memphis, and Joe Crawford. He also has a write-up on a very popular topic of the upcoming season: the status and state of space-eater Derrick Caracter. Once again Rick Pitino is playing with fire hoping for another Final Four run. On top of that Pitino puts on his Jenny Craig hat and demands 10% body fat and 275lbs before he allows Caracter to play. I am telling you this soap is gonna be huge this season!

InsideHoops covers: recruiting (AJ Stewart, Patrick Patterson (hot recruit), LSU, IU), Greg Paulus, Eric Gordon, Bruce Webber. Pitino is not the only coach putting on the Jenny Craig hat: Tim Floyd won't let Lodrick Stewart practice unless he loses some weight.

CBS Sportsline visits Tom Izzo and the Meeeecheeeegan State Spartans

CSTV daily news covers more news than you can possible read with CJ Giles on exit orbit from Kansas, Bucknell on ESPNU, Pitt's tougher schedule (from cupcake to crunch bagels), Kansas adds a walk-on Brad Witherspoon (6-1, 180), more TV schedule announcements and season outlooks, including Herb Sendek's first year in the desert, Olson's grand-son hired by the Wildcats (former walk-on Matt Brase), CSTV's Top Five TV games, a write-up on Bruce Pearl, a recap of Midnight Madness at various campus sites, and a whole lot more... Thank you CSTV!

For the latest news on TV schedules and Media Days, please check the links on the left column of this page

That's all folks!

Contact via email

Please feel free to email comments, suggestions, stories, etc, etc...

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The madness after the Madness!

Midnight Madness Highlights

Billy Donovan, the Prankster, messed up the Trophy hand-off causing the fake trophy to break into a thousand pieces on the ground. A Friday the 13th joke, but perhaps a sign of how Florida's season will end: Shuttered Title Dreams! (Roy Williams will cut down the nets again is my prediction)

Tubby Smith revealed during the Big Blue Madness broadcast that he is working hard at recruiting. Obviously, since he only has 11 players on the roster and just one commitment for 2007. By the way, keep an eye out for both Derrick Jasper and Perry Stevenson. These guys were flying under the radar of this super loaded 2006 class but Tubby may have the last laugh because these two guys will probably stick around for 2-3 years. Perry Stevenson will remind Kentucy fans of Ty Price, while Derrick Jasper should take over the PG spot from trigger-happy Ramel Bradley. But what do I know? :-)

CSTV's main coverage was at the Phog with Bill Self showing restrained optimism for the season and avoiding to make any bold predictions. Would a third-in-a-row NCAA exit put Bill Self on the hot seat?

The Jay Bilas preseason Top 5 featured on SportsCenter included Arizona, North Carolina, Florid, LSU and Kansas (in random order as I forgot the actual order).

I do not have access to ESPNU (add it already silly Comcast!), so I can't comment on their coverage


Season Previews!
The absolutely free online season previews continue to grow. March Madness All Season has an in-depth and growing season preview. They have both conference by conference as well as a general season overview, including top players, top teams, top 50 freshmen, impact transfers, top non-BCS teams, and a whole lot more: An index of all their coverage can be found at their index page at CHN

The 144-day previews continue at CHN with Marquette, Illinois (I can hear Bruce Webber crying a ...Gordonian river), Hofstra, Oklahoma State (without daddy-Sutton), Tenneeesssseee, Kentucky (look out for Jasper and Steveson!), UConn (wild wild card), Virgina (over-rated imho) and Xavier.


News

Three games is what Big Brother punished Derrick Caracter for his "violations"

Sad news for Duke fans: Greg Paulus suffered a broken foot in practice and I bet Coach K would love to use one of his assistants as his new starting point guard. More on this at YocoHoops and on ESPN-News, among many other places

Latest recruiting news, including the latest on Eric Gordon at http://recruitingwars.blogspot.com/

Latest from Gary Parrish: Speculation on what Nike will do next during the summer evaluation period, some thoughts on the effects of injuries, and SMU suffering through the coaching disaster that goes by the name of Matt Doherty.

Latest stories from InsideHoops: LSU gets a 7'2" 300+ center from The Patterson School (class of 2008), weight problems at USC and troubled twin Lodrick Stewart (thank you Mike Bibby, sincenerely USC Fans), Calhoun stayed quiet for 10-minutes for practice, the John Wooden Post Office in SoCal, Coach K of Puke promoting yet another book, midnight madness recap, Eric Gordon and Indiana, Derrick Caracter update, JJ Hickson, a Cincinatti player is under investigation for rape (don't blame Huggins for this one), and a whole lot more. InsideHoops is a great website to bookmark right now!. It covers the beat from various local and regional websites! Great job!

Latest from Andy Katz: Wichita State, Eric Gordon and Indiana/Illinois, the death of a Toledo player, Hawaii and Riley (the coach), and UMass bar fights.

more coming soon!!!

Review of the Sporting News (TSN) 2006-2007 College Basketball 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
I picked this one up at Borders, at the list price of $6.98, cover #5 (Arron Afflalo of UCLA and Derek Ravioli of Gonzaga).

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: B-
Very good coverage of recruiting (especially Top 50 JuCos), but not too many in-season features.
Front of the magazine

Top 25 (two pages with a sentence for each team)

Six pages of various features including a Mike DeCourcy story, a story on the new NBA Draft rule, revisiting the best incoming freshman classes of all time (77, 79, 81, 88, 95 and of course 2006), and various other things including a fan favorite Stock Exchange with BUY and SELL on certain teams and players.

Field of 65 projection

All American Teams (three of them)

Top 100 players, broken down by position (20 per position)

Top 10 frontcourts and backcourts
Back of the magazine

offer to subscribe to TSN for 33c per issue (60 issues total, 92% off newstand price)

major preseason tourney schedule and conference tourney schedules

Top 100 Class of 2007 (provided by Rivals.com) OJ Mayo is #5! Wow!!!

Top 25 Class of 2008

Top 25 Class of 2009 - Lance Stepheson in the top 5

Top 50 Incoming players - class of 2006; Yes, Oden is #1

Top 50 incoming Junior College players for the 2006-2007 season. Great JuCo feature, by BallStars.net

Top 50 Junior College sophomores - to enter Division 1 in 2007-2008. Great JC feature as well by Ballstars.net

Recap of 2006 NCAA tourney scores and list of future NCAA sites







Part Two Overall Grade: A

Conference Pages. Grade: B+
* The Conferences are printed as they are ranked by TSN. #1 rated conference is (no surprise) the SEC. TSN is unique among preview magazine in presenting all 31 conferences in ranking order. Last one are the Independents.
* The six BCS conferences get one full page as a conference preview, featuring first and second team predictions, player and newcomer of the year, a six-category Honor Roll (best shooter, playmaker, NBA prospect, defender, most versatile and most underrated). Also included the Top 10 Impact Newcomers, last season's standings, and detailed team-level statistics of last year. Also short intro, ascending and descending teams, and three players on the rise, and a picture of a player. All this per conference.
* The next few conferences (A10,MVC, MWC, C-USA, WAC) get less than half a page as a conference preview, embedded in the page of our one their teams. These get similar coverage as the BCS conference, expect its the Top 5 Impact newcomers, and they dont get the short intro/ascending/descending/three players on the rise. Shockingly the Colonial is not among these!
* The remaining conferences get a 1/5th of a page preview that has the all-conference team prediction, last season's standings, and player/newcomer of the year prediction

Team by Team pages. Grade: A
* Each team predicted to make the NCAA gets an asterisk by its name
*** The top teams of each BCS conference get a full page preview, with a complete roster with jersey numbers. A big surprise is that while the height/weight/class and PPG/RPG/APG are maintained, the percentages are no longer posted! (FG%, 3PT%, FT%). These were available in last year's TSN NCAA basketball yearbook. There is a data box for the university including the overall record of the coach and his record at the school, and the names of all three assistants and the number of years at the school, among other things. A unique feature of TSN is the including of the full schedule in this page. The text of the preview is broken down in three groups: "What we like", "What Scares Us", and "X-Factor". Also included is a text box of "An insert-conference-name-here Coach Says", providing a short scouting report on the team.
* The remaining teams of each BCS conference get half a page preview. This has the same structure except there is less text (obviously). Half page previews do not get the "An xxx coach says" scouting report. This includes some NCAA-bound teams
*** For the advanced mid-major conferences (A10,MWC,MVC,C-USA,WAC) the coverage is as follows. (Shockingly the Colonial is not among these!):
* The top team gets a 3/4th to a full page preview (similar format as the BCS reports)
* The top half of each conference gets a half page preview (similar format as the BCS reports)
* The bottom teams only get 1/6th of a page coverage. No rosters, no schedules, very little coverage. It does include the projected starters, and the coaches overall and at-this-school record. If your team is one of these, you won't be happy!
*** The remaining conferences get just 1/6th of a page coverage for all their teams, with the same structure as the previous bullet. This surpringly includes the Colonial conference!





Shortcomings

One obvious difference between this edition and the previous editions is the quality of paper it is printed on. Presumably in an effort to save money TSN went with a newspaper-like paper instead of the more glossy type used in their previous magazines. This feels better than newspaper paper though, and it really shouldn't matter, unless one must have glossy paper :-)

Some of the individual player statistics are gone compared to previous TSN editions (FG%, 3PT%, FT%).

Poor coverage of the Colonial!

No coverage of Women's NCAA basketball

Downgraded coverage of the bottom teams of the A-10, WAC, MWC and C-USA: In previous years all the teams in those conferences got a half-page preview. This year, (presumably more cost-cutting), TSN downgraded the coverage of those teams to a mere 1/6th of a page, without any of the special features such as complete rosters with jersey numbers or schedules. If you are a fan of those teams, you may want to look elsewhere.


Compared to the other NCAA college basketball preview magazines

TSN is unique among other preview magazines in putting the team's schedule in the same page as the team preview. This is only available for the BCS teams and the top teams of the advanced mid-major conferences. But it is a very handy feature!

TSN (Sporting News) is unique among preview magazine in presenting all 31 conferences in ranking order.

Extended JuCo player coverage (top 50 of 2006-2007 and top 50 of 2007-2008)



Recommendation

If the Shortcomings above do not deter you, and you only want to buy one magazine as a college basketball fan, then I would recommend this one, with Street and Smith a very close second. (The in-page schedules give TSN the edge over Street and Smith)

If you want to buy a preview magazine to specifically follow your favorite team(s) and conference(s), then you have to sift through all of them to see which one has the better coverage for your favorite team(s) and conference(s). For example this one does a poor job covering the Colonial and has downgraded coverage of the bottom teams of the A10, WAC, MWC and C-USA. But it has upgraded coverage of the Missouri Valley, and it leapfrogged the MVC ahead of those four! Yes, they think MVC is the 7th best basketball conference in the nation.



Upcoming reviews

Next review will be the USA Today special edition, now available in newstands wherever the multicolor fishwrap is available

Other preview magazines available: Blue Ribbon Yearbook, CBS Sportsline, ACC Handbook,

Not yet published: SI special edition and ESPN the Magazine previews.

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

Midnight Madness tonight Friday October 13!

West Coast Bias: All times reported are PACIFIC!. Add +3 for Eastern Standard Time (EST).

Look at the date: Friday October 13! But instead of watching a horror B-movie marathon, you can instead visit your local university for Midnight Madness or watch some of the festivities on TV and on the Net!


Midnight Madness stories

Kieran Darcy nano-essay on ESPN Page 2

Highly touted 2007 forward JJ Hickson will be celebrating his verbal commitment tonight. Find out where he committed!

Shoe Madness! ESPN's Outside the Lines: First Report had a segment on Starbury's $15 shoe and discussion on how it will affect the market and the Shoe Wars.

ESPN's Feature Story heading into Midnight Madness, The Impact 25.

Andy Katz disects the Schedules of various teams. He gives props to Dave Odom and Lute Olson for their touigh scheduling. He sugar-coats UConn's staying at home and eating cupcakes for the whole of 2006 (the local team you see). Karl Hobbs gets the "Mark Gottfriend" award for trying to improve on his cupcake schedule of last year. Bob Huggins takes him team to (!) North Dakota State. Oregon has a shaky schedule, mirroring Ernie Kent's situation. The 11-wins watch - that's how many Bob Knight needs to pass Dean Smith. Andy Katz awards the best 10 schedules to.... LSU, North Carolina, Gonzaga, ..., ... read his story to find out the other seven :-)

Sidney Lowe, according to Andy Katz, says that Andrew Brackman hasn't actually made up his mind. Get your story straight NC State :-)




Midnight Madness on TV

ESPNU starts at 7pm Pacific (10pm EST) with a 30-minute preview show, then North Carolina, Indiana and George Mason getting one hour each. ESPNU Midnight Madness Schedule. No word yet if any of this will be shown on any of the other ESPN properties such as ESPN2, or ESPN News or ESPN Classic (last year they showed highlights on ESPN2, but the TV listings did not reflect that).

Fox College Sports will cover the Florida Gators midnight madness festivities, with one rerun later in the night/morning. There is conflicting information on the actual start time. FCS will also show Kentucky's midnight madness tape-delayed on Sunday at 2pm pacific (5pm EST)

CSTV will have a special 60 or 90-minute version of Crystal Ball previewing the season and visiting some campuses (not known which ones yet). The show will start either at 8pm or 9pm pacific, and repeat about half a dozen times over the next 48 hours.

A 30-minute women's preview special (Crystal Ball special edition) will be shown on Sunday on CSTV, with multiple replays.

No indication whether Fox Sports and Best Damn Sports Show Period will have any Midnight Madness coverage.

Injury Reports (so many of them!)

Andy Katz has a new (and free) story on many of the injuries around the country. Obviously he covers Greg Oden (January return) and a number of other (mostly BCS) teams. Spencer Hawes is not listed in his report, but he will be if he updates it. He features South Florida in his story (as if their talent level wasn't a problem) which has half of the team dealing with injuries and recovery. But help is on the way as the team features two high-major disgruntlees (Verdejo of Arizona and K. Gransberry of LSU). Another 1-15 for South Florida? Does anyone else think that Georgetown fell so bad for them last year that they let them win, possibly with the blessings of the Big East brass? This year I predict 2-14 for South Florida :-)

Random Thoughts

Quick Hitters
* Kansas football and basketball placed on a three-year probation, but won't have any effect on post-season play
* NC State: Win Some Lose Some: Andrew Brackman decides to concentrate on baseball this season but they beat Tenneessee for touted recruit JJ Hickson



Quasi-Features
Who will be this year's Villanova? I have two candidates so far:

Oregon Just like Jay Wright a few years ago with Foye, Ray, Frasier and Sumpter, Ernie Kent has assembled an all-burger cast with Aaron Brooks, Malik "Nike Flew Me Here" Hairston, Jackson-wannabe Marty Leunen, and scoring wings Bryce Taylor and Champ Oguchi. Along with half a dozen serviceable forwards. This team is clearly underachieving and just like Jay Wright was at some point (before getting a moral victory against North Carolina in the 2005 NCAAs), Ernie Kent is on the hot seat. Can they pool their talent together and channel it into a successful TEAM effort? Can they escape the recent tradition of not winning consistently?

Marquette The comparison here is only on the talent level, since Marquette did very well last year. The trio of James, McNeal and Matthews could be the next Lowry, Ray and Foye trio! Watch out Big East!


CSTV has officially announced and published their 2006-2007 national basketball TV schedule. Both men and women TV games: http://www.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/stories/101106abc.html. Men only list of games, easier to read: http://www.cstv.com/cgi-bin/tvsched.cgi?gameSel=BASKETBALL+-+MEN%27S. Highlights of their TV package:

Their first game is Friday November 17, New Mexico State at Loyola Marymount (California). Reggie Theus and his all-transfer team goes west!

Three South Padre Island games, featuring Wisconsin -vs- Missouri State and Oklahoma State -vs Auburn.

Pete Newell challenge: Bob Knight vs Stanford, and Nevada vs Cal (Fazekas vs Hardin)

Conference games from Conference USA, Atlantic 10 (fourteen really), and Mountain West among others

Big Five games from Philly, including LaSalle-Villanova

Conference tourney coverage including both semifinals of Conference USA, Mountain West and Atlantic 10

Three high school and prep games during the MLK weekend in mid-January featuring six touted prep/HS such as DeMatha and Patterson

Player Rankings and All Break-out teams

CBS Sportsline looks at the top 100 players, top 20 for each position:

Centers Oden is #4! Who were rated above him?

Power forwards A Dookie is #2. A Gator is #1.

Small forwards Here come the Carmello-wannabe freshmen at #1 and #2

Shooting Guards Tough choices here as there are no real standouts.

Point Guards The Gator is #3 even though he has the ring?

Granted positions in college are more fluid, with some players caught in-between depending on the situation and system employed by each coach. But the above method of ranking is probably the easiest way to do this.

All Break Out team selected by Luke Winn of CNN SI. He actually selected a team (five players). This is a good topic for debate actually...

Weekend update!

• Thanks to Jonathans Givony's blog at DraftExpess.com for the link from their website!
  
• The latest recruiting updates with links to stories about verbals for Pitt, Minnessota, Nevada, Charlotte, UMass, Nebraska, Tulane, Wichita State, Oregon, SDSU, TCU and Creighton among many others at Recruiting Wars. Also the latest recruiting battles in a Jeff Goodman story at Fox Sports.
  
• Among the stories at InsideHoops: Other stories: A sad day in the Purdue family. $25 million towards facility upgrades for the Domers. Big East teams in the upcoming polls. University of Georgia president addresses graduation rates, recruiting and competitiveness. An SF Chronicle story on the new NBA Draft rule, highlighting Greg Oden and Spencer Hawes. A Cincinatti Post story on why Kentucky "failed" last season (Thank You Randolph Fax-the-Papers Morris). Former Kentucky Jules Camara deciding where to play pro, in Lebanon or Iran?
  They also report a series of problems:
  
  • Eligibility issues with 7'3" Thabeet at UConn
    
  • Qualifying issues @ Arkansas with Michael Washington
    
  • Prowell and Dollard suspended at Auburn
    
  • Richard McBride suspended at Illinois
    
  • A congressman questions NCAAs tax-exempt status. Myles Brand the CEO of the most profitable entity not paying taxes?
    
  • Too much coffee at UMass?
    
  
  
• The CHN previews continue on pace with UConn, Virginia (rated too high imho), Xavier, Michigan State, etc.
  
• Gary Parrish blogs again, this time on Sonny Vaccaro refusing to back down.
  
• Andy Katz Insider talks about Hal Pastner planning to start a new early July high school evaluation event, and Dick Davey being a do-everything kind of guy at Santa Clara.
  
• CSTV Daily News is as always loaded with information on many teams. There you will find that Gary Williams will appear on Comcast Sports Net's "Monday Night Live", you will get a profile on South Carolina's Bryce Sheldon, learn about Midnight Madness plans for many universities, Missouri celebrating a game scheduled on ESPN360 (thank you Quin Snyder), the Valley (MVC) reaching new attendance highs and CSTV's Andy Elrick planning to attend the Colonial's (CAA) Media Day on October 25. He also lists his All-Name team (ten of the most unique player names according to him).
  
• Luke Winn of CNNSI gets repremanded by one of the readers as he veers deep into politics.
  
• Seth Davis (re)visits AJ Price of UConn. INSERT favorite LAPTOP joke HERE!
  
• CNNSI On Campus selects the top 15 freshmen this year. Not basketball only, but obviously Greg Oden is included.
  
• Free Tickets Anybody? It took the Kentucky fans 30 minutes to grab 21,000 free tickets for their Midnight Madness extravaganza. Midnight Madness is October 13. Last year Kentucky's was featured on Fox College Sports. This year they are opting to cover Florida (National Champions you see).
  
• Barton county Prison Break?
  
  
• Coming Soon: Review of the Sporting News 2006-2007 College Basketball Preview Yearbook
  

Mid-week update

CHN continues to update their 144 previews with Xavier, Michigan State, Missouri, AF, USC, New Mexico State and Wichita State

Latest stories covered by Andy Katz "insider" blog: SCU's Davey wearing a receptionist hat, a midnight madness story with SoCarolina and Dave Odom, and an update on Dusquene

Gary Parrish of CBS sportsline has new blog thoughts on Sonny Vaccaro's latest outburst against everyone else meeting without him present. Also covered as are updates on Washington (Wolfinger injury), Marquette (Patrick Hazel commitment), and LaSalle beating the odds and getting both Williams twins.

InsideHoops has been on hiatus. Expected to return any day now.

Latest DUI updates: Plummer of Dayton and McBride of Illinois.

The Domers pour $25 million to renovate their arena. The Big East arms race is on! Tough to stand out in a 16-team league...

More news than you can possibly read by CSTV. Updates from various teams, including UC Davis on national TV, the Lopez injury at Stanford, schedules, media guides, TV coverage press releases and midnight madness announcements by various teams, including Late Night with Roy Williams which is scheduled to be on ESPNU.

Jeff Goodman at FauxSports has a story on Curtis Sumpter's road to recovery and the Villanova Wildcats.

Pre Season Topic: Hazing

The topic of hazing was recently covered on CSTV's Taking Issue with Brian Curtis. Dr Susan Lipkins was a guest and an author/expert on this topic. Among the sites mentioned in that show were the following:

InsideHazing.com

badjocks.com

ncaahazing.com

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 :-)


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