Summer Delight: Annual Trek to Newsstands for Football Mags
Searching the newsstands for college
football magazines has long been a tradition for me.
Reading the national and Big Ten forecasts of various publications has
ranked among my top 10 delights of summer since grade school.
Somewhere between fresh strawberry
shortcake and lazing by a swimming pool comes the pleasure of reading
about the Gophers, the Big Ten race, the nation’s top 25 teams,
preseason All-Americans, the best incoming freshmen and high school
seniors to watch. Through the years, publications have expanded their
content and in addition to all of the above a reader just might see a
pictorial of the nation’s hottest cheerleaders, or an article on
regional tailgating with recipes included.
As a kid I was excited in late July or
early August to buy my Street & Smith’s, the bible of college
football magazines. The best of times was reading Street & Smith’s
in the family car as we drove thousands of miles during August
vacations. I read page after page and it didn’t matter that the
predicted order of finish in the Big Ten was similar each year.
Perhaps there was appeal ─ even security
─to the sameness of each issue. An Ohio State football player was often
the Street & Smith’s cover boy. The Big Ten section was always written
by Columbus sportswriter Paul Hornung. As a kid I was almost
dumbfounded by the coincidence that there could be a Paul Hornung
newspaper guy and an even more famous Notre Dame and Green Bay player by
the same name.
Ohio
State (no surprise) was often the favorite in the Big Ten race and it
was a rare issue that predicted a high finish for the Gophers, but that
didn’t stop me from analyzing every word Hornung wrote about Minnesota.
Often I thought he slighted the Gophers, showing an eastern football
bias.
And I might even have been critical of the
Gophers chosen for photos in the magazine, or perhaps the absence of any
Minnesota players. Back in the 1950s and 1960s players posed for stock
photos, often not wearing helmets and grimacing like a pro wrestler.
But who cared as long as your favorites were included in the magazines?
Today the marketing is more sophisticated
with regional covers, and now a Gopher is often found on the cover like this
year’s issue of Sporting News College Football Magazine
that includes a small picture of Minnesota quarterback
MarQueis Gray.
The marketing plan also puts the college football publications on the
newsstands before summer officially arrives.
That means I am a buyer now in June, not
August as in the old days. And there are more magazines to choose
from, making this preseason tradition almost as much fun as the fall
college football season.
To some the preseason publications are a
waste of time and money. This view is pragmatic and asserts that
nothing matters about the college football season but the results on the
field. I can’t argue that games are won on paper but college football
publications offer a glimpse into what might happen and fire up the
passion on the eve of the season.
If you don’t get it, then maybe you don’t
like strawberry shortcake either.
