Three weeks ago, I noted the change by the NCAA in standardizing media guides. I made the following observation:

This strikes me as a really stupid thing. This means the useful stuff like history and records may be struck from the media guides. Hopefully, they will just shift that sort of thing to being online, as a special supplement to get around the rule.

Now, a West Virginia columnist milks it for a whole column. He takes a shot at bashing Pitt’s media guides:

My personal favorite is Pitt, where the guide that details a 13-member basketball squad annually weighs more than the one that contains information on a 100-plus-member football team. How do they do that?

It’s called paper stock. There are different weights. Hope that helps in your ongoing understanding. For the record, the basketball media guide had less pages than the football this past season.

He also thinks it will be bad that the history and records will be relegated to being “only” online.

Oh, you can still get that information, but you’ll have to do it online. I’m lucky. I can actually get a hard copy of it myself because the NCAA has agreed to allow schools to publish a separate records book (black and white and photocopied, thank you), available to the media, not to recruits.

So, now, let me get this straight: The NCAA will allow media guides to become publications (albeit smaller) aimed at recruits, which was the problem in the first place. But the group now strictly forbids schools from passing out to recruits copies of the supplemental records, which no recruit in the history of athletics has ever wanted. And meanwhile, the media guides have strayed even further from any actual usefulness to the media and, at the same time, will no longer contain a lot of the information that fans like to have for their 10 bucks.

Yes, sir, sounds to me like another problem solved by the NCAA.

Does he sit in a press box these days? Every reporter has a laptop and an internet connection — even in West Virginia (probably). The odds are, they barely crack open the media guide when it is all online. Of course the media guide is about selling the program and the school. Not just to the recruits, but to the fans.

As I’ve thought about this more, and I see more potential good out of this. At least with respect to Pitt. This will force Pitt to better develop and create more useful and searchable records of its stats and history. Right now, it doesn’t have to. It just uses its media guides and puts them in PDF format to page through. It’s easy for them, and it looks decent. The other bright side is that you can download your own copy to retain without having to spend $15.

But to have more searchable stats on the web, how is that a negative. Pitt is only moving forward with its season by season stats in football and basketball. They aren’t going back to past years for the same details. They seem to have done more with basketball, regarding searching stats, but a lot is still accessed as PDF files.