The Best Place to "Watch" WSU on
the Internet
First off, I've included only the free sites in this review.
I'd be happy to review the paid sites if they would let me in.
If you have a paid site you think is worth paying for, let me
know. I will review the official WSU paid site, since it
is one of the primary places Cougs go.We must review -
www.WSUCougars.com
This is the official site of WSU
football, this is the one that the University created
specifically for the athletic department with the help of
collegesports.com.
Early in the year when the game was only on radio I would pull
this site up (a subscription is required) and listen to the
game, while tracking it online at ESPN and/or Yahoo.
Beginning with the Stanford game, WSUCougars.com added the game
tracker feature that makes ESPN and others so much better to
use, and greatly narrowed the gap in most respects. You
can see the game tracker and stats without the subscription, but
need the subscription to actually listen to the game.
Sadly the game tracker on this site is small, cramped, and a
little blurry compared to the same thing at ESPN. Even
worse, you can't see it during the game!!!!! Here is
a quick flash! if we have it up and are listening to the game,
we don't mind it taking up part of the screen! I found it
irritating and hard to read, in particular the right hand
screen, and that is on a 20 inch monitor at 1280 X 1024.
One nice thing, you can sort the players stats by clicking on
different columns, which makes analysis easier. Along with
this you can look at their
"Game Day Central" Page, which has news and
updates for the current game. Unfortunately when I clicked that
button, the "Game Day" was set to last years Apple Cup. Just a
little behind the times. The Site just doesn't cut it for
anything but the audio itself....
The winner? ESPN. No, Really. Did you know that almost all
sports websites get the same information at the same time from
the same place? That place is http://biz.stats.com/.
They collect the stats, including play by play, and farm it out
to everyone else. It saves all of those sports websites
from sending someone themselves. Who, you might ask?
Here is partial list: Yahoo, EA Sports, Fox Sports, DirecTV,
ESPN.com, SI.com, MSNBC and AOL. Yup, that's pretty much
everyone who is anyone in sports. Sites like ESPN add
their own content for games they are covering, and many of these
outlets have some kind of writer on staff that creates original
content for the site. But for play by play and in game
stats they all come from the same place. I found ESPN and
Yahoo to
be quicker at posting the current game information by a few
seconds, and their presentation seems more complete, that's why
I chose them. If you have found a site that you
really like for that let me
know, so we can include it!
Email us here.
NOTE: Since my original review of these sites many have "Me
Too'd" their systems and added the same capabilities as ESPN,
which makes your decision in many cases one of personal
preference - which layout you like best. WSUCougars.com as
even been upgraded to the point you might just use that site if
you have already paid the subscription to listen to the games
there.
The Coug.com Rating system is as follows:
5 Cougs is the best, 4,3,2,1. Sites that really suck get: 1
Husky, of course.
The main websites we reviewed were Yahoo,
Sports Illustrated,
USAToday,
Sportsline,
ESPN
ESPN - Rating: 5 Cougs
Best thing: Very cool game cast pop-up that one thing on
the site gets 5 Cougs all by itself. You need
macromedia flash to see this, its a free download if you don't
have it.
It has a nice green field, including the team name in the
appropriate end zone, first down markers, and lines showing the
lengths of each play in the current drive. If you click on
the quarter markers right above the field you can see at a
glance the distances (on the field) of the drives in that
quarter graphed out. Looking at it you get a visual idea
of how each team is doing. Click on the "Scoring" marker
above the field you get a graphical representation of the scores
by each team chronologically. Awesome. hover your
mouse over any of the lines, and all of the information about
that play is shown
A small banner at the top of the page tracks other Pac-10
games, including the Score, possession, time left and quarter.
Clicking on a game in that line replaces our game with which
ever game you click, but that's OK because you can click on our
game and come right back. This is the ONLY site that shows the
last play right below the field graphic, as well as a current
drive summary. They even have a live chat room you can
watch right on the site. If it was about our game I might
never go to a game again. Instead it is a nation wide
chat, so you get things like "How 'bout that USC". So its
just a distraction, I chose to show the game stats instead.
every time you click on something, you pull up something else
you like.
This is the first time I have "Watched" a game on the
internet and felt like I really knew what was going on. Someone
who really loves football created this page. Leave it to
ESPN, I guess.
Yahoo - Rating:
4 Cougs
Best Thing: A very intuitive site, gives you all of
the important things simply.
I wanted to look at the GameChannel, but it would never load
for me. Grayed out It looked nice, but if you can't
get to it who cares?
USAToday -
Rating: One Husky - Oh yes, its that bad
Aside from being incredibly ugly, you get minimal information
poorly represented. Wow, we didn't think we would find a
site this bad in 2005. Nuff said.
Sportsline -
Rating:
Best thing: The
Alumni Tracker which does most of what you would think.
from this site you can keep track of all your favorite WSU
football players, from Calvin Armstrong to Cory Withrow...sorted
by last name, of course. This tracks only guys playing in
the NFL, so guys like Jason Gesser aren't included, but it is
still a good place to go if you want to create a fantasy
football team consisting completely of Cougars!
Sports Illustrated
Rating:
Best thing: A
statistical Game-by-Game Log which makes it easy to compare
the games that WSU has played this year in spreadsheet format.
The graphs are easy to read, though by the time you get done
with all of the advertisings and the SI header and the menus you
are 2/3s of the way down the page. The advertising on the
right side of the page makes it even more cramped.
The "Box Score" and "Play-By-Play" buttons are below the
score, but it took me for ever to find it, don't know why.
The Live Box Score looks like the Stadium Scoreboard so it is
easy to read. I'd like to see the play by play go from most
recent play down the page to the first play of the game.
The last play is the one we want to see, and every refresh means
you have to page down again. This was true of all of the
sites We reviewed.
The conference scoreboard is laid out very well, With a
"Week" banner across the middle that allows you to check out
what happened in the conference in prior weeks and what is
coming up.
Worst Thing: it takes for ever for the site to refresh,
making the play by play always several minutes late. The
only place I could find a control that seemed to adjust the
refresh time was on the conference scoreboard.
Other Worst? Thing: There is a button for photos which
takes you to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model collection, I
missed several plays researching this for you.
Distracting. Now if they had a window at the top and
rotated the swimsuit model pictures instead of the advertising
we never click on, THAT would be a killer app for Sports.
Wait... Does the "Man Show" have a sports website?
For more information
on exactly who went where
click
here
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