Football season now ends in February. A lot of us need a football fix that only a magazine can bring. Therefore, football season previews now appear on newsstands as early as the third week of May. We now have a full-blown football magazine season, which lasts almost as long as football season itself.
Most magazines regionalize themselves, at least with the cover. A national magazine may have Texas players on the cover in Texas, and have USC players on the cover of the same magazine in California, for example. There are also magazines (Lindy's, Athlon, etc.) that publish regional editions, in addition to their national edition. If you want to spring for it, you can also order all their regional editions from their websites. With the advent of the Internet, there's no need to buy eight magazines at once.
I look for magazines on the shelves beginning in May, but rarely buy one until June. I don't want to buy a magazine merely because it's first on the shelf (Lindy's and Athlon are out). I want quality and quantity, and I don't want something rushed to press just to be first on the shelves.
Every year, I make sure to buy Dave Campbell's Texas Football. It is sold on newsstands only in Texas (could they sell many of them anywhere else?). DCTF gives good previews of all Big XII South teams and other Texas major college teams. It gives a couple of pages of lip service to the Big XII North, and a couple of pages to national college football. There are also sections devoted to small colleges and the two Texas NFL teams. The magazine is best known, though, for its exhaustive preview of high school football, with previews of every school, public and private, 11-man and six-man. There are over 1100 football-playing schools in Texas, and DCTF touches all of them.
Tonight, for the first time, I picked up Phil Steele's College Football Preview. This is a football geek's dream. It contains 328 pages of full-color, small-print information. It is full of more statistics and point spreads than anyone could ever use. The magazine is short on aesthetics, but is chock full of information. And, it doesn't just cater to gamblers, but appeals to fans as well. I plan to put it to good use.
I love football magazine season. I'm ready for the action on the field, though.
2 comments:
How funny. I was at Border's tonight with a few friends and I noticed a whole section of football mags and saw these. It made me also think of how it's getting close to gear up time for fantasy football!
Yes, and there are about 10 fantasy football magazines out there! I think Yahoo has had signup for leagues since May. Maybe we should just have year-round football. :-)
Football magazine season lasts almost as long as real football season.
I was sure wanting to see College GameDay yesterday morning. LOL
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