THEY'RE ALL ON THE SAME PAGE.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH The Media

They used to just blame the media. Now they're blaming the media guides.

It's the NCAA setting down its latest nit-picking edict, somehow convinced that the simple distribution of pertinent information was getting so far out of hand among member schools that all must conform - or else.

Here's the background: Once upon a time, colleges would pull together player bios, stats, year-by-year history and other useful tidbits, bind them together and hand it out to newspaper, TV and radio reporters to assist them with their work. As the years went by, the books got thicker - a natural progression as stuff accumulated.

But somehow, reference gave way to reverence, probably in the late '80s, when the NCAA decided schools couldn't put out recruiting publications any more. The media guides slowly evolved into a yearbook-like publication with filler ``look how cool we are'' pages added so they could be shipped to prospective student-athletes. Then someone discovered they could be marketed and sold for as much as $20 to the general public as kind of a keepsake.

Missouri's college football guide last season ballooned to what's believed to be the unofficial record - 614 pages, filled mostly with large photographs and other propaganda, bigger than most local Yellow Pages. It was largely disproportionate to those published by, say, Notre Dame (464 pages), Nebraska (440), Georgia (420), Michigan (416) and USC (408) for the 2004 season.

Eventually, schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference complained to the NCAA about this atrocity. The NCAA's first knee-jerk reaction was to do away with all media guides and have each school issue CDs or put it all on their Web sites, but such measures were deemed impractical.

So the NCAA's eventual resolution was an across-the-board cutback - 208 pages. Deal with it.

``It's about leveling the playing field,'' said NCAA spokeswoman Jennifer Kearns.

Or at least appearing to do so.

``It's kind of a silly rule, but we've abided by it,'' said USC sports-information director Tim Tessalone, who spent the summer making 200-plus pages of Trojan football history disappear from the previous year's 8 1/2-by-11 inch guide. ``I understand the rationale, but in all my years I've never met an athlete who came to USC because we have a cool media guide.

``I feel like we really cheapened the quality of the guides, and it's too bad.''

Trying to restore some value to the publication that shrunk from 3 1/2 pounds to about 2 pounds, USC's 2005 football guide went with a shiny, hard-bound cover sealed in plastic wrap. Tessalone said he expects the school will sell 5,000 copies.

UCLA, which trimmed 160 pages and about a pound of weight from last year's book, sells about 2,000 of its football guides. Bruins sports-information director Marc Dellins, who like Tessalone has been with his school's SID office since the mid-'70s, wishes this wasn't an issue.

``I don't think the NCAA should be regulating pages in a guide, but on the other hand, when you're producing a 500-plus page book, you have to wonder if someone has lost sight of what purpose it was serving,'' said Dellins, who will also have to trim about 30 pages from last season's basketball media guide to conform to the page rule.

``Every school has its traditions, and you want to represent them as best you can, but enough schools felt they couldn't compete anymore. We just have to find a balance between what the media needs and what fans may like. As far as I'm concerned, it's still a media guide.''

Dellins said football coach Karl Dorrell even took time to discuss what to keep and take out from the football guide. Tessalone said Trojans coach Pete Carroll left those decisions to the SID office and wished them luck. By condensing the typeface and removing some photos, USC and UCLA got the essential info in; whatever was taken out can be found on their Web sites or those of other schools.

Down the road, this size-matters issue likely will come up again, Tessalone figures.

``They want to create equality,'' he said, ``but the smaller schools will find out that, in a few years, they'll want to add pages as they have success, but then they'll be in the same boat.''

They can use 500-plus page annual NCAA college football record book as an anchor.

SOUND BYTES

WHAT SMOKES

--FSN West 2 plans to turn back the clock for Sunday afternoon's coverage of the Dodgers-Astros game, which starts with a live pregame at 12:30 p.m. to air all the 1955 World Series ceremony festivities. During the game, FSN's retro broadcast will start in black and white, with just two camera angles and no graphics or replays - for the first two innings, just as it would have looked 50 years ago. As more cameras and technical innovations are added (such as a switch to color after the fifth inning), Vin Scully will introduce and explain how and why each came about. ``It's really a fun way to show how far TV has come, even though we have to untrain ourselves to do it right,'' FSN Dodgers producer Brad Zager said. ``And to have Vin there taking us through it all, a man who transcends every generation during that period and who saw all these changes take place firsthand, that really ties it all together.'' On the radio side, a round table with players from the 1955 team is scheduled to take place on KFWB-AM (980) prior to Saturday's 7 p.m. broadcast.

WHAT CHOKES

--Oddly placed and timed, ABC will pay tribute to its own ``Monday Night Football'' history Sunday at 2:30 p.m. when it's likely no one who cares much about MNF history will think about watching it. The show, ``MNF 36: The List,'' is an hour-long special counting down the 36 greatest moments from the 36 years of the ``most successful primetime series in television history,'' as they like to point out. ABC Sports' production team decided the list for moments both on (such as Tony Dorsett's 99-yard touchdown run) and off the field (think Howard Cosell and Don Meredith in the booth). Included in the list that ABC's public-relations staff sent out is the controversial Terrell Owens-Nicollette Sheridan locker-room opening from just last year. Again, wouldn't this have hit the target audience better if it aired, say, after or before an ``MNF'' game during the season? Or even in the Super Bowl XL pregame show, when ABC has its last hurrah before giving the property to ESPN?

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SOUND BYTES (see text)

BY TOM HOFFARTH