June 1 is rapidly closing in on us, which can only mean one thing. The yearly onslaught of NCAA football annuals is upon us. Each year I write that I am going to stop the addiction. Stop being wasteful. Stop buying yearly college football annuals.
Another year goes by, and I find myself throwing money away once again. What a proud tradition! The local Books-A-Million only had two guides on the shelves – SportingNews SEC Preview, and Lindy’s Southeastern 2006 Preview. Of course I picked up both.
I have not had much time to skim through the magazines yet, but a couple of things stand out. First, the SportingNews annual has Auburn and ‘Bama on the cover (yuck!), and they only have SEC coverage. In past years they had some national coverage, and some regional coverage (i.e. Troy, Southern Miss, etc). At least I am pretty sure this has been the case, but I do not save my yearly guides, so I am not certain if things have changed this year. This year’s version has a short Top 25 preview, and national schedules. Georgia is picked to go 10-2 (6-2 SEC), which is tied for 1st Florida. Everything depends on QB play this year, so we will see what happens after fall camp.
The second thing I noticed was the great sideline pictures in the Lindy guide. Nice! This guide is full of coverage around the south, not just the SEC, with some coverage of Conference USA and the Sun Belt. National coverage gets more than just a cursory glance. I understand that there are also national guides, while the league (or regional) specific guides are there for fans of specific conferences, but I still like to have some national coverage in my SEC specific guides. Looks like the Lindy guide will be a good read, but I could not find any predictions (not sure what is expected of GA, other than having a hard final four games).
