Thoughts on Media Guide Legislation
College Sports Information Directors of America
In a society where more is considered better, we often have examples where less is best.
One dish of ice cream is fine, thank you. You don't need that second one. A glass of wine will help your heart. A bottle of wine will stop it.
One wife to a customer, please, at least one at a time. And you may be able to handle one credit card, even if all you have is that one wife, but two or three can really get you in trouble.
We mention this because one of my favorite aspects of college athletics is now being threatened, in part because it has become more than it was intended to be.
The NCAA is considering Proposal No. 03-88, an initiative from the Atlantic Coast Conference that would essentially eliminate the printed media guide in favor of the unreal reality that is cyberspace.
What has happened to the college media guide, especially football and basketball but not entirely, is a complex issue. Once upon a time, its purpose was as simple as its name implies: to be a book of facts to help the media.
Consider WVU's football media guide. In 1991, it was 176 pages. This year the women's soccer guide was 140 pages -- and that sport is only six years old.
The football guide has swelled to 368 pages.
Over the same period, the men's basketball guide swelled from 120 pages to 216.
And neither of them is anywhere near as big as, say, Notre Dame's football guide, which pushes 500 pages.
The guides are so big, so bulky now that transporting them around has become a problem. Some media members actually have to ship the guides home from media day because carrying them is too heavy to be practical.
The reason for all this is because coaches have taken the guides away from media relations directors, turning the guides into recruiting tools, since they are among those rare items the NCAA allows coaches to give to recruits.
And so it is that the first 42 pages of the WVU football guide is nothing but recruiting drivel, and much of the book's content is aimed at selling a recruit or a potential contributing alumni, rather than being convenient for the media member.
With the increase in size in the guides has come a like increase in expenses, and in this day and age where most universities are losing money on athletics, they see this as an area to cut corners.
Most sports information directors are opposed to the elimination of their media guides, some simply for such egocentric reasons as that it lessens their importance, others because of far more valid reasons that have to do with what these books are really all about.
In West Virginia, for example, as many as 12,000 of them a year are sold to fans.
"They are keepsakes," said Shelly Poe, the school's SID.
Poe admits schools across America have fallen into a media guide "arms race." If Ohio State has three pages about Columbus, Michigan must have four about Ann Arbor.
It is too simple to think that the problem is solved just by putting the information online.
"I'm a book person," Poe said. "I like going back to the 1984 guide and looking something up in it."
Poe makes a strong point when she notes that schools do not have to put out media guides that encompass 500 pages and that they do not have to print them for recruits and fans.
The answer, it would seem, is an NCAA regulation that caps the number of pages and restricts distribution to the media and, perhaps, to the fans.
BOBHERTZEL is sports editor of The Dominion Post. He can be reached at sports@dominionpost.com