Every year the bookshore shelves become ever more cluttered with preseason mags. So many of them now focus on fantasy stuff. For sports gamblers, most of the mags aren't worth the paper. Most of the magazines (Athlon, Lindy's, Street & Smith, Sporting News, etc.) consist of basic articles the likes of which you see in typical newspaper previews. They are your typical journalist skim the surface articles. They give you the highpoints of teams, the key players, the common media angles to a team, and meaningless predictions. If you are interested in one football mag that gives you solid information about the fundamentals of every college football team's entire roster, historical spread performances, matchup measures and indicators, various solid betting angles, and more, then I'd recommend Phil Steele's College Football Preview. It's not available at all bookstores, but I found mine recently at Barnes and Noble. The Blue Ribbon Yearbook (available only by mail order/online, and not in book stores) is a distant 2nd. (However, the Blue Ribbon basketball book is far and away the #1 college hoops book for bettors.)

If you want one mag to study the NFL, then I'd recommend you buy Steele's College mag and send in the card in it to get his NFL guide sent to you for free. It's not really that much better than others, but it's not worse. Most of the NFL guides contain about the same kind of journalist pablum and provide very little insight or edges for gamblers.

Teelander, I believe the most prominent trends mag is the one put out by Mark Lawrence. It focuses entirely on technical angles and trends (i.e. Colts are 8-1 ATS in October at home against the NFC). I am much more a fundamental guy than a technical guy, so I didn't mention it. But if that's your thing then you should check out the Mark Lawrence mag. I believe you can find that at some bookstores.

Coast, do you recommend any of those weekly sheets that you only seem to be able to get at newsstands around the board of trade? I'm talking about weekly publications like the gold sheet or blue sheet.

I pay attention to only two of them, the Gold Sheet and Power Sweep. They are long on information, angles and updates. I don't pay particular attention to the picks per se, but to the information underlying the picks. The other ones, for the most part, are long on picks, trends and angles, but not particularly insightful or contain unknown information. I also am subscribing to a new one this year, SportsMemo, from a group of Vegas guys that I very much respect. I get pdf versions of these via email and will share them if anyone is interested. Shoot me a private message with your email and I'll send them to you once I start receiving them.