Football season is upon us.

Woohoo!

As I have in years past I will be posting on the BYU football team this season and recapping the games. But before I kick off my own posts on the Cougs I figured I would give you some links to the best day to day BYU football resources I have found:

1. Greg Wrubell’s blog — Greg is the “voice of the Cougars” with KSL radio but he also has a pretty good blog. The reason I rank it #1 on my list is that in addition to his decent write ups he also includes audio links to the daily press interviews with Bronco Mendenhall and coaches and players at his blog. It turns out that these interviews are the source material used for basically all of the other blog posts and articles out there about the Cougs so I like to listen here first. Source material is almost always preferable to the filtered stuff. (Marion G. Romney once said he preferred to drink from the spring upstream rather than from downstream water that the cattle have been wading through… I agree)

I will also note that Bronco Mendenhall gives fantastic interviews. His frankness is astonishing at times. His interviews sound nothing like the insipid and inane coach-speak interviews that are the norm these days. The guy apparently figures he can be forthright without hurting the chances of his team winning. I love it.

2. Jay Drew’s blog — Jay took over covering BYU sports for Rhiannon Potkey over at the Salt Lake Tribune and has done an admirable job. Rhiannon’s blog was hands down the best in the business last year and she blazed the trail for the upswing in interesting reporter-blogs we are seeing now. While she was the pioneer Jay has picked up and carried her mantle well. Jay has the best content in general and if it weren’t for the actual source audio being available at Greg’s blog I would put him in the number one spot.

3. The Deseret News Cougar blog (starring Dick Harmon and Jeff Call) — This blog is not bad. Dick Harmon used to be the #1 source for Cougar news but it seems time and technology have caught up with him a bit. In a lot of ways this blog is basically a weaker version of Jay’s blog, but sometimes these guys come up with insights you don’t see elsewhere so it is worth checking.

4. Cougarfan.com — This is just an aggregation site but I like to use it because I am too lazy to go to all those newspapers etc. individually. It is also cool because they take tips from readers and link to articles in non-traditional places at times so you can find articles you might not have otherwise seen. (And of course I am a big fan of useful aggregator sites to begin with.)

5. Cougarboard message board — This is an active message board that is a decent place to scan. Like most boards there are plenty of lame comments by numbskulls and knuckleheads but there are also quite a few knowledgeable regulars who keep the quality high enough to make the board worth coming back to. As with the bloggernacle there is a pretty well established clique of regulars there and like the bloggernacle they seem to do enough troll policing to keep the forum from degrading too far.

There are other places too but these are my favorites. For truly obsessive fans there is the subscription based Total Blue Sports, the value of which people debate on the message boards. (I’ve never subscribed so I don’t know how interesting the articles are over there.) And the Provo Daily Herald has some good articles but not enough of them to make my top 5.

Anyway, these are my favorite sites for BYU sports news. Feel free to check them out if you want to see where I go to get some of my source materials over the course of the season.

If there are any sites out there you think deserve to be in my top 5 let us know about them and why they deserve to make the list.

Next Up: My highly anticipated 2008 BYU football preview!