I'm looking for the best mag that would take me from knowing absolutely nothing about College Basketball, to being able to go toe-to-toe with anyone as far as college hoops knowledge. And a bias towards UT coverage would be a big plus too. Thanks.
Personally, I think the best college mag is Athlon Sports. It gives you a preview of EVERY Division I college basketball team, all the way down to Virginia Military, every major conference, gives great articles on college basketball now and in the past, some of the best future recruits and prospects in college b-ball, and then gives their predictions for the NCAA Tournament and a ton of other stuff. It even gives you a great breakdown of all the teams, including recaps of last year, previews of this year, and then breaks down their strengths and weaknesses in the paint and on the perimeter. GREAT magazine!
I just bought the Althon mag and it's pretty good but not quite as good as rockmill makes it out to be. It doesn't give you previews of every team but does give you previews of the teams from the big 7 power conferences (acc,bten,b12,beast,cusa,pac10,sec) plus little caplses of the other conference and predicted tournament teams from those confs. The actually team previews are nice but there is not much in the way of articles. the sportingnews actually has previews of every team, though the previews are not quite as good as althon's, plus schedules for every team. I could be wrong, since i only looked at the mag. Sport illustrated and Espn used to come out with nice preview mags a couple years ago, though i don't know if they still do. I would look for those in the coming weeks, if not, then althon or sportingnews aren't bad choices.
I didn't buy an Athlon magazine last year, so they must have started cutting back on their information. They used to have 200 pages of solid info, with about 170 pages of nothing but info on teams. Sports Illustrated in my eyes is trash though. ESPN I don't know about, I've never seen their articles. Sporting News tends to be to condensed like KCM said. If Athlon has cut back on their articles I can't tell you a good magazine, because the rest of the magazines are so short and ill-informed or outdated (one magazine was giving info on teams as of July!), so I don't know what to say.
