Both Michigan and Ohio State said today that they will stop printing their media guides for all sports. Instead, all information will be online in pdf format, which many schools already do in addition to the print version.

I’m sure there are many economical and environmental reasons to stop printing hundreds of pages of (sometimes useless) information about every athletic team on campus. But in some way, it saddens me that this is happening.

When I was in college, we used to get media guides mailed to the student paper from every school that was on Pitt’s football schedule (Big East and whatever non-conference teams it played). We kept them secure in my desk. In fact, the only thing that was guarded more heavily than the media guides was probably the bottle of rum hidden in another drawer.

Those were the paper’s media guides, and they usually came in pretty handy. When we actually went to the games - home and away - there were even more copies of the opposing team’s guide, and I usually scooped one up for myself.

And then there were the basketball tournaments. At both the Big East and NCAA Tournaments, there were more media guides than my suitcase could handle. I always left with one of each.

I imagined the day, 10 or 15 or maybe even 20 years down the road, when I would go to my collection of media guides and say “Let’s look at who was on Virginia Tech’s football roster in 2002,” or “I wonder who holds the record for points in a season for Notre Dame basketball?” Maybe I’d have kids who one day would look at my media guides and marvel. What a collection it was, big enough that if filled half a bookcase.

Amazing, yes. But too soon, I found out how much of a pain it was.

After graduating college in April of 2004, I moved from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. By July of that year, I was moving again, this time to Kentucky. In January of 2005, I was on the move again, back to Pennsylvania. And then by October of that year … well, you get the picture. And by then, I was sick and tired of lugging around so much stuff. Something had to go.

Enter the media guides. I tossed A LOT of them. Some I kept (although now I’m not sure where). But most are gone. Part of me is sad because of that. More of me is thankful - not only that I got rid of them, but also that schools are going to stop making them.

Put them all on a Web site. Let those in need of information go online to look for it. After all, isn’t that what the Internet is for?

Tags: college sports, media guides, Michigan, Ohio State, story time