Sporting News Football Registers

[Throwin_Samoan]

I'm close to completing a run of the Sporting News Football Registers (a very valuable research tool, even despite the amount of online information available) and I wonder if anyone knows if the 2006 edition was the last one? I know 1966 was the first one, but I have not seen any available post-2006. And, for some reason, the 1997 edition seems particularly difficult to find. That's gonna bug me, as someone who is a completist.

Did TSN stop with the 2006 edition?

[JWL]

Yes, they stopped after the 2006 book.

[Throwin_Samoan]

Thank you!

That 1997 edition will be my white whale of the moment, then.

[CraigRye]

Just out of interest what sort of info do they contain that you can't find online?

[Throwin_Samoan]

Just out of interest what sort of info do they contain that you can't find online?

I suppose by combining what you could find at various different sites, you could find much of the same info. That said (as with anything, more sources are good), the earlier books, especially, were great sources for information like:

• The etymology of nicknames. For instance, Pat Richter (1960s tight end) was born Hugh Vernon Richter (that you can see on his profootball-reference.com page), but the TSN Register tells you that the nickname was "Handed down from father, who was born on St. Patrick's day."
• Hobbies, which were not always hunting and fishing, but things like "stereo high-fidelity equipment" (Richter again), "jigsaw puzzles" (Pete Liske), and "water skiing and math" (Ted Hendricks).
• Actual college degrees, where applicable. Larry Grantham, for instance, earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from Ole Miss.
• JuCos attended, which you don't always see in the reference sites (sometimes on Wikipedia). Broncos/Raiders/Bills/Chargers defensive lineman Dave Costa attended (and, presumably, played at) Northeastern Junior College in Colorado before finishing at Utah. "Utah" is normally what you'll see listed for his college because that was the last one and the one he was drafted from.
• Back when minor-league football was actually a thing, more than a few NFL or AFL players had actually plied their trades in the semi-pro leagues. There are notations to that effect. Jets DB (and later TV guy) John Dockery, for instance, played with Waterbury of the ACFL in 1967 and Bridgeport of the same league in 1968 before playing three games with the Jets that year (plus the AFL Championship Game and Super Bowl III).
• Transactions are often more detailed than you see on the S-R site or profootballarchives. Baseball-reference.com is outstanding when it comes to trades and such, but the football sites I normally see are sometimes lacking. These books do a better job of presenting that info, including when someone was on the taxi squad.
• Guys who get drafted in a given year but never make it still have an entry (most of the time). You can pretty easily find a list that tells you that the Dolphins took Morris Brown defensive tackle Myles Brown with a 17th-round pick (#419) in 1970, but you're not likely to find elsewhere that he liked "Western movies, jazz and sports in general" or that he went to T.W. Josey High School in Augusta, Ga.
• Pronunciations, which, for players you never saw play or heard speak or heard described on a telecast, can be useful. 60s running back Hoyle Granger did not, as I would have supposed at first glance, pronounce his name "GRAIN-jer," but "GRAHN-JAY," which makes sense when you know that he hailed from Oberlin, La. and was likely a serious Cajun.

Yes, online sources can offer more detailed statistics (including postseason accomplishments) because they aren't limited by the amount of information you can get on a certain number of dead trees. They can have game logs and let you easily get from one year to the next or from one team to the next. I'm not ever going to stop using online sources for research.

You may never need any of the information detailed above, or you may be able to find it from a combination of Wikipedia and newspapers.com and obituaries and things. But I like these and, being a completist, once I started collecting them (I had one, then I found a run of about 20 of them for $1 each at book fairs) I couldn't just not get the rest. And I have a variety of research projects in the works for which these books are, if nothing else, good verification sources, being contemporary accounts of where players were in their careers and lives at a given point in time.

YMMV. But I like books, and I like having more information when I can get it. Especially for a good price.

[JWL]

^Good post

[RyanChristiansen]

Very nice. Thanks for sharing what's in this resource. I can see lots of narrative uses for that type of information.

[lietzaro24]

I have also found all of this to be very true. I originally starting using these for my USFL project (1984 and 1985 USFL guides and registers and 1984-1987 Football Registers) to research transaction dates for players (trades, releases, demoted/promoted to and from development squads, etc...) and then realized that they are a gold mine for NFL transactions as well. Once I started collecting them, I decided that I'd like to have all of them from the Super Bowl era going forward through the 1990 editions. Most of the same information can be found on PFA, PFR, Stats Crew (among other websites) but they are a nice tool to have when you are researching a particular season. Most pertinent information for NFL stats, games and such is pretty well complete other than defensive stats after 1990. I've noticed that a lot of teams media guides have defensive stats going back into the 70's but it is far from complete and official.

I would like to recognize and thank the people that run PFA and Stats Crew. The wealth of information that is up on your sites has been extremely helpful and is much appreciated.

For those of you who may be interested in knowing about my USFL project. I've started with the 1984 season I'm working on compiling complete rosters, stats and active rosters for every game. I've tried figuring out the starters for each game but that is proving to be very difficult considering limited resources. I've only been able to figure out about 50 to 60% of the starting lineups for each game via youtube videos and a few other sources. I'm about halfway done with 1984, 1983 will probably be next since it'll be easier than 1985 (which I'm feeling will be impossible to figure out weekly active rosters since there was no 1986 USFL Guide and Register). I was able to dig into TSN archives to find box scores (which seem to be complete) and transactions for the 1985 season but they seemed to take the development squad transactions out for '85 and just go with trades, releases, signings and such. They did much better detailing 1984 transactions. Anyway, I'm looking forward to trying to see what I can come up with.

Well that's a little about what I'm doing. I'm relatively new here and I thought I should say hello. Thanks for reading...

Rob

[Throwin_Samoan]

Welcome, Rob.

Yeah, I had actually ordered the 1986 USFL Guide and Register, only to have them not print it when the trial went the way it did and the 1986 season was scrubbed. That would have been a great resource to have. (Somewhere, someone has the galleys, darn it!)

Some team media guides will list starters for games of the previous year. (I'm looking at Houston's 1985 guide right now, which has a participation chart showing who played and who started each game, but you're on your own figuring out who played LCB vs RCB when it just says a guy was a CB.) I looked through a few just now and Houston was the only one of the first four I looked at that had such a chart, but it may very well be that others do, too. (I have them all, FWIW.)

In the absence of the game books that are such a great resource for NFL games (and even leagues of more recent vintage), you have to kind of piece things together.

[TodMaher]

Just out of interest what sort of info do they contain that you can't find online?

I suppose by combining what you could find at various different sites, you could find much of the same info. That said (as with anything, more sources are good), the earlier books, especially, were great sources for information like:

• JuCos attended, which you don't always see in the reference sites (sometimes on Wikipedia). Broncos/Raiders/Bills/Chargers defensive lineman Dave Costa attended (and, presumably, played at) Northeastern Junior College in Colorado before finishing at Utah. "Utah" is normally what you'll see listed for his college because that was the last one and the one he was drafted from.
• Back when minor-league football was actually a thing, more than a few NFL or AFL players had actually plied their trades in the semi-pro leagues. There are notations to that effect. Jets DB (and later TV guy) John Dockery, for instance, played with Waterbury of the ACFL in 1967 and Bridgeport of the same league in 1968 before playing three games with the Jets that year (plus the AFL Championship Game and Super Bowl III).
• Guys who get drafted in a given year but never make it still have an entry (most of the time). You can pretty easily find a list that tells you that the Dolphins took Morris Brown defensive tackle Myles Brown with a 17th-round pick (#419) in 1970, but you're not likely to find elsewhere that he liked "Western movies, jazz and sports in general" or that he went to T.W. Josey High School in Augusta, Ga.

Well, I do have that info on my site (www.profootballarchives.com) except for the "Western movies, jazz and sports in general."