For Serious College Hoops Fans

If you like college basketball or if you think you're among the cognoscenti about college hoops, you have to buy this book. I have purchased The Blue Ribbon Guide for the past five or six years, and while it costs 3+ times the money a shorter magazine might cost, it's well worth it. The coverage of the Top 25 teams is outstanding, and the coverage of the average team is excellent and, importantly, detailed. Put simply, you'll get much more detail (if much less pizzazz and color) in The Blue Ribbon Guide than in any other publication. The articles on each non-Top 25 team contain quotes, discuss the entire roster, the effect of player departures and the potential impact of new recruits. I read it closely when it arrives, and then I refer to it periodically during the year.

This guide suggests a concept that I've had for a while about a college basketball blog. There are many excellent blogs out there on college hoops (click on the links section of this blog to find many of them), but none goes so far as to cover every DI conference and team in detail (at least to my knowledge). My proposal to the blogosphere is that someone create this blog, which would have links to each team in each conference, the newspapers (student and otherwise) covering these teams and the team's own websites (which are populated with information published by the college's sports information department). In this fashion, you could have one-stop shopping for all college hoops teams. Yes, I know that the professional publications claim to provide this information, but they don't provide sufficient links or information. They provide what I would call "accomodation" coverage -- just enough to be respectable, but not enough for someone who wants to dig deeper. And if you read many of the blogs I link to, you know that there are fans out there who like to dig deeper.

But, alas, that's for another day. In the meantime, for the best one-stop coverage of all college hoops' teams at a season's outset, you know where to turn.

Enjoy!