Daily Blog - Thursday June 11th

You would think with the 2009 Phil Steele’s College Football Preview sent to the presses about a month ago and now on the newsstands that it would be time to relax. Actually the last 2 weeks we’ve been on magazine deadlines as we are finishing our 5 Regional Magazines. The SEC, Big 12, Big 10, Pac-10 and ACC/Big East regional magazines all have 6 full pages on each BCS conference team and 4 full pages on the non BCS conference teams.

This year we are including each regions FCS or 1AA conference teams in each Regional. I am personally going thru and predicting each FCS conference and there are 14 of them plus the Independents and 125 teams overall. One thing I am doing when I forecast this years races is look at the predictions for last year and judge how I fared. There is a website (preseason.stassen.com) which tracks
how all the major magazines fare each year in their predictions and this site has been tabulating those records since 1993 which is even longer than my magazine has been around. Over the last 10 years the Phil Steele’s magazine is 30 points better than the 2nd place magazine and that is something I am very proud of.

There is no site to tabulate how the magazines have fared in the FCS or 1AA rankings. I have devised a spreadsheet on the computer to use the same method of tabulation that Stassen uses and after 9 conferences we are currently leading the race but it is not over yet. I will have the final results on Monday when I wrap up the ACC/Big East regional which has over 100 pages devoted to the FCS or 1AA teams.

I am having a lot of fun going thru the conferences but it is tough to digest and forecast a conference per day. There is little time to get a lot of other stuff done so you will notice on the Facebook site that I have not been able to answer all the questions that have been popping up the last week. I will get to each and every question by early next week and if you are not already on the facebook site, go to the front page of this website and click on the Facebook link and it will take you there.

I am currently finishing up the Colonial conference and I will either be doing the MEAC or Southern Conference next. I am currently looking for magazines that forecast the FCS so I can compare last years results. So far the only other two that I have are Lindy’s and The Sporting News. In the 2008 Lindy’s magazine they have 4 pages devoted the FCS in their national preview and it does include a forecast on each conference. The 2008 Sporting News has 19 pages devoted to the FCS with a forecast for each league. Do you know of any other magazines that predicted the FCS in 2008? If so contact Debbie@Philsteele.com so we can get them into the final tabulations of accuracy for last year.

84 Days until the start of football!