Barnhart's useful as a barometer of conventional wisdom, at least from a southern perspective. If you want to know what people outside the program think about your team/coach/quarterback/whatever, Barnhart's a good place to start. He knows everybody in the business in the south, and what he writes is sort of an aggregated, then distilled version of what all the coaches and media guys and everybody else think. You won't get any groundbreaking insight from Barnhart, but you will find out exactly where everybody else thinks you are.