By David Jones
Florida Today
If a top college football recruit misses a weightlifting session these days, he can make up for it pretty easily.
All he has to do is open up the mailbox, where the 480-page University of Texas football media guide and other War and Peace-sized promotional books will soon arrive.
They're thick and glossy and crammed with more information than any sportswriter filing a game story on deadline needs to know, which was their original intent.
Of course, they're not just for beat writers and broadcasters anymore. The ever-growing guides have become recruiting tools as much as press packets, filled with pages touting state-of-the-art facilities (Emmitt Smith talks up Florida's on Page 17 of the Gators' 2003 guide), campus culture (Page 29 of LSU's book has a guide to Cajun cuisine) and what a fabulous place it is to live (straight out of Colorado's guide: "If heaven is a college town, it's probably as beautiful as Boulder.")
But how much is too much? That's the question some members of the NCAA are asking two decades after the organization banned schools from publishing separate guides for recruits and media, leading to the bulky books we have now.
The NCAA's Academics-Eligibility-Compliance Cabinet, which is charged with the review of recruiting materials, has sent a bill to the management council, proposing that all media guides be curtailed to 200 pages and 81/2 x 11 in size, citing cost issues and the competitive advantage higher-profile schools have in publishing them.
The proposal will be voted on in April. If it's passed, sports publicists at Florida (348 pages last year), Florida State (364), Miami (320) and other college football powers will be scrambling to cut back.
"Does it need to be 400 pages? Probably not," said Notre Dame sports information director John Heisler, whose office put out a 484-pager last year, complete with an ad from adidas, official footwear of the Fighting Irish.
"All of us would admit we've expanded our guides for recruiting purposes. If we all were limited by a page count or some other format restriction, life would continue."
Cost concerns
Coaching staffs can't make their way to the home of every top prospect in the country, which is where the guides come in.
"We view our football guide as another member of our staff that's able to go directly into a recruit's home and show them what it's like at West Virginia," said Rich Rodriguez, head coach of the Mountaineers.
They cost a bundle -- Texas prints 21,000 each year and has worked out a deal with UPS to ship them in two days for between $3 and $5 apiece -- and arrive at the home of every top prospect on a school's recruiting list. Inside is everything you ever wanted to know about that school -- from player, coach and school president profiles to academic programs offered to chapters of historical statistics.
"In recruiting, it is a great benefit for us to use the media guide to sell not only our athletic program, but our whole university," Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville said.
Texas assistant athletic director John Bianco said his school has a budget in the range of $150,000 to produce them -- a far cry from schools on the other end of football's Division I-A spectrum.
UCF budgets about $24,000 for media guides and prints 4,500. South Florida, with a budget of between $25,000 and $30,000, prints between 2,000 and 2,600. Florida Atlantic, which is making the leap to Division I-A from I-AA, will spend about $11,000. Star lineman Eddie Haupt got his first media guide from Alabama when he was a sophomore at Merritt Island High. The guy with the 41 scholarship offers is eagerly awaiting this year's batch, which will arrive in the mail in the coming weeks and help him make his decision on which program is right for him.
"It helps, especially when I haven't seen that school," Haupt said. "I'll look at them closely. Maybe the ones I'm more interested in, I'll spend more time on them than the others. But I'll look at them all."
The 'thump' factor
The media guide craze started in the early 1980s, when schools began printing slick, full-color guides to promote their programs to high school seniors. The media got a second guide that stuck mostly to stats and such.
But in the late 1980s, the NCAA stopped allowing schools to print separate recruiting guides, causing most of them to just put out one book that was distributed to both the media and recruits.
A monster was born.
"Once that happened, the media guide became a factor in recruiting, taking the guide away from what it is supposed to be into a mix of recruiting and media information," Michigan SID Bruce Madej said. "The guides just got bigger and bigger and the joke among some of the SIDs is that they have to have a big media guide for the 'thump factor' -- the sound the book makes when it hits the table."
One of the earlier leaders in the jump to the thump was former Florida SID John Humenik.
"The late '70s was really when it first started to change," Humenik said. "Football coaches were becoming much, much more aware of the PR value of pretty much everything related to their programs. Of course, technology was just kind of starting to move and then ESPN came on in '79 and USA Today started in the early '80s. There just seemed to be a lot more awareness on the part of coaches relative to overall presentation, what other schools were doing."
The Gators' media guide (64 pages in 1982) more than doubled overnight. UF started doing recruiting calendars, flyers and books -- which were all eventually outlawed after schools pumped up their budgets to lure recruits with slick PR campaigns.
The competition to produce the biggest thump finally reached the extreme last season.
If Notre Dame had played Texas in 2003, a media member would have been confronted with about 1,000 pages and 10 pounds of printed material to carry around.
Florida State SID Rob Wilson's recommendation for complaining media?
"Recruit stronger sports writers," he jokes.
Growing demands
With Internet technology and the advent of CD-ROMs, some have proposed that guides be wiped out entirely.
Even though it would save big-budget athletic departments $100,000, most sports publicists are against doing anything that rash.
CDs aren't as convenient for media types to access on tight deadlines -- and certainly not the way to strike a balance between with the programs with the bigger budgets and the little guys, argues Florida State's Wilson.
"Eliminate big media guides, and I can assure you that the schools with the most money will have something on their (Internet) site nicer than we have," Wilson said. "And the first time a recruit mentions that, we'll all be headed for our IT guy's office like salivating dogs."
Boston College SID Chris Cameron favors size restrictions but not getting rid of guides entirely.
"I'm all for leveling the playing field, but I'm also a big-picture guy," he said. "Why is it so urgent to some ADs to save $100,000 in printing costs while there are construction cranes in the parking lot building multimillion-dollar facilities?"
In the meantime, high school seniors need to keep pumping those weights. They'll need the strength when all those media guides start clogging up the mail boxes in the coming weeks.