UK Peregrine wrote:BGSU33 wrote:One thing I was actually hoping we would do is add more pages. Since the NCAA limited the maximum number of pages to just 208, I was hoping we would increase our page count to match it, but we're still at 180.
This strikes me as an odd complaint. Adding 28 pages would please you for some reason. The media guide has room to grow instead of having to cut things in the near future. It's not about quantity anyway, but quality. I've only had a couple of hours since I got home to leaf through my media guide, but I have to say I'm very pleased with it.
I'll only say this much....our guide has improved greatly in recent years from what it was in the past, no doubt. But the last couple years, it has remained very much the same design with little change or improvement. Like facilities, media guides need improvement all the time. My point about expanding page counts is this.....we actually lost two pages in the guide and went from 182 last year to 180 this year. Aside from that, having worked in an SID office for eight years, I've seen a lot of media guides during that time. While we have made improvements, if you compare our guide to many schools out there, it falls well short of how good it can be. That's my "complaint." Compared to many other guides, it has few images (and the ones that are there are small) in the players bios section, it has a lot of shrinking font size (especially in the record section) instead of increasing page count, a lack of a creative template for the page format, etc. Check out our Doyt L. Perry Stadium spread in the guide as well, it's very weak. There are also some typos that stand out that could have been caught with spellcheck. These are the exact type of issues that are judged by CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America).
With the limitations on page count, this actually helps conference like the MAC compared to the BCS. At Virginia, we hired a publications specialist to improve the design of our guides while the SIDs have done the updated text and UVa's guides have improved greatly. Our former publications director actually just went to Kentucky, where UK has already had a nice design and will probably improve.
So if you wonder if I think we should add more pages, my answer is - heck yes. If we expanded bio sections with larger action shots, added more pages for a pictorial preview section, add paged to expand record sections, etc., we could easily expand 12-16 pages. Do I think we must have 28 more pages - no. Do I feel we could improve what we have - yes.
and keep all the revenu for football.
