Media guides: a thing of the past?

[PonyTales]

Got an e-mail from PonyFans.com member "Chris Fowler" who mentioned this:

"If an April vote follows an NCAA Management Council recommendation, the media guide will be banished. Not downsized. Not sold instead of given away. Just eliminated, in favor of the deadline-unfriendly CD-rom."

Seems trivial to many of us, but it might be a significant change. Media guides are closely monitored by the NCAA -- even though there aren't size limits (see the telephone book printed every in Austin), but only the covers are allowed to be in color, there are specifications about the paper that's allowed, etc. While many of us never use a media guide, they are great resources to have around, and they are must-haves for recruits and their families. A well-designed media guide can present a professional, classy reminder of a school for a recruit. Elimination of the guides might well even the playing field, albeit only a little.

And while it might be a bit of a hassle to have all that information (which athletic departments still will have to write/maintain) on a CD and on school websites, it might be financially beneficial to a school like SMU, because media guides are extremely expensive to produce. Hopefully, if the vote to abolish them goes through, that cost won't be eliminated from the athletic budget -- it will be re-directed elsewhere.

[Hal]

The biggest media guides I've ever seen are Notre Dame, Florida State, Georgia and Texas -- by far the biggest of them all. I've heard the same thing, that they are regulated (i.e. the use of color on covers only) to reduce a perceived advantage by big-budget schools. But even with that restriction, the impact one of those "War and Peace" volumes makes is considerable. It almost seems like those big schools invented the game, or that they have more tradition than some other schools like SMU, the service academies, etc. -- which of course isn't always true. Anything that can be done to make things more equal would be an improvement, in my opinion.