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Posted (edited)

I know.  In the famous words of Wayne Campbell, "Get the net!".  I do have the net, but I've purchased the college football mags since I was a child in '88.  It's tradition at this point.

Lindy's and Athlon's are out.  They both have Texas #1 and really, really like Arch.  I've barely opened them, but a couple of quick observations.

1. Lindy's has a dumbass list of top 15 conference games.  TX v GA is 2nd after PSU/Ohio St.  I'm fine with that.  What is annoying is that that's there's only 4 SEC matchups on the list.  Apparently, Tulane v. Memphis is a bigger deal than TX/aggy, TX/OU, or TX/FL.  Lame.

2. I'm as big a sunshine pumper as any on here, but Athlon's may have outdone me.  This is their list of national unit rankings:

QB - TX 1st

WR - TX 6th

RB - TX 3rd

OL - TX 8th

DL - TX 1st

LB - TX 1st

DB TX 1st

I mean, I love my school as much as the next guy, but good Lord, if that was to verify, this team would be better than 2001 Miami, 2004 USC, and 2005 Texas combined.  Exaggeration, but I think you get my point.  

FWIW, these two mags are preseason to me.  Phil Steele and, especially, Texas Football are my favs.

Edited by Knoxtnhorn
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Posted
1 hour ago, Ignatius said:

They’ve been dogshit for 25+ years but I can’t stay away from them…

It's a sort of addiction for sure.  At this point in my life, I scan through them then end up putting them in the magazine rack of my bathroom for reference throughout the year.

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Posted

I buy three every year- Dave Campbell’s Texas football (to keep my collection complete), Phil Steele (comes out in early July) for the ridiculous amount of data and objective analysis, and Wadlington’s “Thinking Texas Football” (comes out when he is damned well good and ready)

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Posted

I buy any I can find with the exception of Dave Campbell's. I still love reading all of them front to back. Going to go buy the two that are out later today. Phil Steele's is always my favorite. I usually have my own thoughts gathered across the big conferences by the time I start reading these and it is always fun to see the disparity from my perspective versus the writers in each magazine.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, closetojumping said:

I buy any I can find with the exception of Dave Campbell's. I still love reading all of them front to back. Going to go buy the two that are out later today. Phil Steele's is always my favorite. I usually have my own thoughts gathered across the big conferences by the time I start reading these and it is always fun to see the disparity from my perspective versus the writers in each magazine.

What's your beef with Dave Campbell's?

4 hours ago, statsman said:

I buy three every year- Dave Campbell’s Texas football (to keep my collection complete), Phil Steele (comes out in early July) for the ridiculous amount of data and objective analysis, and Wadlington’s “Thinking Texas Football” (comes out when he is damned well good and ready)

Forgot about Waddington's.  Good stuff.

Posted

DCTF has always been about the back half of the book for me.  The college and pro previews are whatever. I'll read the high school content many times over. 

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Posted

Let’s hope Athlon’s print division is better than that trash web “content” they are putting out. Click-baitiest shit I’ve seen in a while, just repurposed (stolen) material from elsewhere with alarmist headlines. It’s even worse than the current iteration of Sports Illustrated, which has now seemingly adopted a “fans can now write articles for us” model like that trash site Fansided and the early years of Bleacher Report. 

The juxtaposition in sports magazine journalism has really been remarkable in the last 25+ years or so, with the web obviously a game changer. ESPN The Magazine was born in ‘98, Sports Illustrated became junk, while in the web world, BR has in recent years hired some legit writers and The Athletic has a pretty solid stable (yet still quite capable of some dumbass takes).

Old man rant over, now where’s my copy of SPORT ?

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Posted
11 minutes ago, cabowabo said:

$11.95 for the 2024 edition of Dave Campbell's??  That's a hard pass for me.  

You can have mine, Im getting the 2025 version this summer. 

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Posted

There was a time the magazines were worthwhile in large part because they wrote the truth.

If your team was bad (As a TCU alum I can attest to this.) they would say that School A is facing some challenges in the offensive line or secondary or the entire fucking roster, but they wrote the truth.

Then they started writing to not piss anyone off and basically what you got are inaccurate depth charts, incomplete rosters, and lukewarm pablum of your favorite school with a shift to national topics that could posted in any of the magazines versions across the country.

Now,  with the portal, the push to get more freshmen on the field to get what you can out of them before they possibly leave, conference realignment, and the conference scheduling that makes no fucking sense the writing has literally become throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks and what slides down. 

As far as Dave Campbell, it much like Whataburger, hasn't been worth a damn since it was sold to the assholes north of Texas.  Campbell knew the State, he knew the coaches, and his staff had a great feel for the high schools.  Being honest, i am not sure how in the world anyone possibly get their arms around that much information as there are over 3,000 high schools in Texas.  

Yes, there are going to be the automatics in each classification, but there are always schools that come out of nowhere and for me it is the same reason why recruiting lists really aren't as valuable as they once were in that there are just too damn many to be accurate.  

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Posted
57 minutes ago, PGFrog said:

There was a time the magazines were worthwhile in large part because they wrote the truth.

If your team was bad (As a TCU alum I can attest to this.) they would say that School A is facing some challenges in the offensive line or secondary or the entire fucking roster, but they wrote the truth.

Then they started writing to not piss anyone off and basically what you got are inaccurate depth charts, incomplete rosters, and lukewarm pablum of your favorite school with a shift to national topics that could posted in any of the magazines versions across the country.

Now,  with the portal, the push to get more freshmen on the field to get what you can out of them before they possibly leave, conference realignment, and the conference scheduling that makes no fucking sense the writing has literally become throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks and what slides down. 

As far as Dave Campbell, it much like Whataburger, hasn't been worth a damn since it was sold to the assholes north of Texas.  Campbell knew the State, he knew the coaches, and his staff had a great feel for the high schools.  Being honest, i am not sure how in the world anyone possibly get their arms around that much information as there are over 3,000 high schools in Texas.  

Yes, there are going to be the automatics in each classification, but there are always schools that come out of nowhere and for me it is the same reason why recruiting lists really aren't as valuable as they once were in that there are just too damn many to be accurate.  

Very well stated.  This is one reason why I think Phil Steele is still worth the price.  (As I noted, I'm just a creature of habit in buying the other mags.)  I first noticed, what you are speaking to, with Dave Campbells several years ago.  They always have a section containing the "best" college players in Texas.  They go out of their way to ensure that every team in the state has at least one player listed.  It got really ridiculous about 4 years ago when they had North Texas and UTSA (going off memory; could be off) with more on the state 1st and 2nd team than Texas or aggy.  

One thing the mags aren't handling very well is the portal.  They don't seem to know how to account for starters lost v. starters gained from the portal.  In the past, a returning starter was bolded, and it was obvious if this was going to be a major or minor loss.  Now, they're just bolding returning starters coming back to the same team.  There is no accounting for improvement from the portal other than the occasional blurb re: one or two incoming players.  Tech, for example, looks like shit per the current format but most agree they've upgraded their roster.

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Posted

I respect Phil Steele for looking at past predictions and pointing out good and bad picks.

The other mags would look absolutely silly if they did this because they make their picks with PR as a primary consideration. 

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Posted

In the 80’s and 90’s the value of these magazines was that they represented a large pitcher of cold water in the long trek through the desert of no college football between January 1 and the season starting in September. I guess if you followed recruiting you had February NSD, and there may be the odd reports out of spring practice, but these were just a big dose of content for the football starved fan to get you through the summer. I always loved marking the time when they first showed up on the supermarket magazine rack in June. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Knoxtnhorn said:

Very well stated.  This is one reason why I think Phil Steele is still worth the price.  (As I noted, I'm just a creature of habit in buying the other mags.)  I first noticed, what you are speaking to, with Dave Campbells several years ago.  They always have a section containing the "best" college players in Texas.  They go out of their way to ensure that every team in the state has at least one player listed.  It got really ridiculous about 4 years ago when they had North Texas and UTSA (going off memory; could be off) with more on the state 1st and 2nd team than Texas or aggy.  

One thing the mags aren't handling very well is the portal.  They don't seem to know how to account for starters lost v. starters gained from the portal.  In the past, a returning starter was bolded, and it was obvious if this was going to be a major or minor loss.  Now, they're just bolding returning starters coming back to the same team.  There is no accounting for improvement from the portal other than the occasional blurb re: one or two incoming players.  Tech, for example, looks like shit per the current format but most agree they've upgraded their roster.

Agreed and I think a great deal of that comes down to a lack of manpower to do the research and the fact that being accurate really isn't all the important to them or the consumer. If it did Lindy's would have been gone along time ago.

Example for me on the portal is how you evaluate a transfer and project their impact on a program.  Using a couple of players who might be familiar to the Horns' fanbase,  TCU picked up a pair of brothers who went to school in Ft. Worth, signed with Bama, and then transferred back home to TCU.  One was the highest rated transfer for TCU's 2023 transfer class based in large part to his being a 5-star Bama signee, but no one questioned his health.  A little thought of transfer from Jackson State made a bigger impact on the Frogs offensive lineman than the Bama transfer. 

The other brother followed in 2024 from Bama, did start at center,  but was completely ineffective in the run game and I think actually helped improve the interior line play for TCU when he transferred to Miami for more money. I would mention their name, but their Dad might ask for money. Not your finest alum guys. 

Tech is a great example, on paper they have added talent, but some of those guys transferred from big schools after not playing and others played a great deal at small schools. How do you project who makes an impact without watching tape on those  who played and digging into the story at the school if they didn't play much.  

What we end up getting is a stream of info that sounds good, but really doesn't mean anything and very similar to a 20 second clip of a quarterback throwing at some quarterback camp or a lineman going through cone drills. 

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Posted (edited)
3 hours ago, PGFrog said:

Tech is a great example, on paper they have added talent, but some of those guys transferred from big schools after not playing and others played a great deal at small schools. How do you project who makes an impact without watching tape on those  who played and digging into the story at the school if they didn't play much.  

What we end up getting is a stream of info that sounds good, but really doesn't mean anything and very similar to a 20 second clip of a quarterback throwing at some quarterback camp or a lineman going through cone drills. 

Agree with you completely on what a transfer will bring to a team being a tricky aspect of ranking. There are many reasons a player might not have been productive at one school, then is at another. Those range wildly from the system the player was in to where they go, the supporting cast around that payer at the old place vs new, the OC or DC, the players buy in, the psychological health of the program, and too many other factors to list. A 5 star who sucked transferring from a team that sucked to another team that sucks isn't turning into a stud. A 3 star that was mildly productive in one system could turn into a NFL draft pick in another. It's that wide with perhaps a tad hyperbole but not a lot.

Edited by BurntEyes
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