Whether College Football Is Canceled or Not, Phil Steele Will Prevail
The master of the preseason guide has knocked out another edition of his college football bible. But with the season in peril, what’s to become of the game’s tireless chronicler?Whether College Football Is Canceled or Not, Phil Steele Will Prevail
The master of the preseason guide has knocked out another edition of his college football bible. But with the season in peril, what’s to become of the game’s tireless chronicler?
This week, on the day the Big Ten and Pac-12 canceled fall football, I went to Barnes & Noble to buy Phil Steele’s 2020 College Football Preview. The preview—inevitably called the “bible” or the “gospel” of college football—is a lot of things. First, at 352 pages, it’s really heavy. It’s filled with 8-point type. Among sports fans, the Preview is a rare print fetish object. “It might be muggy outside,” one reader tweeted upon getting the guide this summer, “BUT IT’S CHRISTMAS DAY INSIDE!”
Lugging the Preview to the checkout, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Steele would be collateral damage in the coming college media wipeout. Oddly, this Preview also felt more important. Most years, Steele devotes “a million words and numbers” (his highly believable estimate) to get fans ready for football. This year, he created a monument to a season that may never happen.
Reached at his Cleveland headquarters, Steele, who is 59, was still wrapping his head around his predicament. “I’m like, What the hell am I going to do?” he said. “Normally, a Saturday’s like an 18-hour work day. I’m drinking Diet Mountain Dew, just trying to keep up with everything I’m taking in during the day. I’m not hoping for that relaxation. I’d rather have some stress.”
August is when Steele’s guide usually sells most briskly. “Clearly, if there’s no football, it would affect it drastically,” he said. But if conferences like the SEC, the Big 12, and the ACC press ahead in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Steele predicts a “surge” in guide-buying. Fans could once again read about VHTs.
If you don’t know about VHTs, you’re probably new to the Phil Steele universe. A VHT is a very highly touted prospect. A prospect lacking the mojo of a VHT is an HT. Such distinctions are important to Steele. Though he long ago switched his guide from newsprint to glossy paper, it still retains the fanatical spirit of a zine.
The 2020 Preview begins with Steele’s mustachioed author photo and ends with a recap of last year’s Heisman Trophy. (“Phil Steele is proud to be on the voting committee for this prestigious award!”) It glows with the salesmanship of ’90s recruiting hotlines. Ads offer subscriptions to the digital service Phil Steele Plus for $69. On two separate pages of the guide, Steele lists verified accounts that follow him on Twitter. These include LSU’s Ed Orgeron, the official account of the Valero Alamo Bowl, and Soledad O’Brien.
Steele’s literary style is that of a man who has set aside artfulness to accommodate massive amounts of data. He entered the preview market in 1995 because he found the existing publications (Lindy’s, Street & Smith’s) wanting. “I would buy all the other preseason magazines out there and they just never had enough information for me,” he said. As Steele told writer Michael Weinreb, he once tried to shrink his type size even more.
I’m just going to go for the hardcore Phil Steele people. And there’s got to be 50,000 hardcore Phil Steele people out there willing to buy the magazine.Phil Steele
For years, Steele’s guide was filled with abbreviations. FHG (final home game). PS# (Phil Steele’s player ranking out of high school). I once imagined Steele rewriting Grantland Rice’s famous opener: “Outlined against a blu, gry Oct sky, the 4 Hrsemn rode x2.” But Steele just finished a three-year side gig writing for ESPN, and Bristol editors convinced him to remove many of the abbreviations.
Steele likes to show his work. In this year’s Preview, he predicts Texas A&M will be the no. 1 surprise team in college football. But before that, he recaps two decades’ worth of Steele surprise teams—in fact, sub-levels of surprise teams: “I had Auburn listed as my #7 Surprise Team in 2004.” The idea is to convince you that Steele has not arrived at these predictions lightly.
Reading the 2020 Preview, I detected a defensiveness that comes from putting up with college football fans for 25 years. “My preseason ratings are NOT my Power Ratings,” Steele insists on page 47. On page 23, noting the occasional discrepancy between his conference predictions and “overall rankings,” Steele writes, “This is not sloppiness on my part, but rather being meticulous.”
Steele’s admirers often treat him like an outlier. But he predicted a huge chunk of college football writing. Steele carved out a loyal, paying audience before Substack. Like the #grindingtape generation, he showed you could elbow your way into sportswriting through sheer tenacity. And by granting the same number of Preview pages to South Alabama as he does to Ohio State, Steele embraced a spirit that prevailed at sites like Banner Society. Every college football team ought to be fussed over, or at least made fun of.
Steele’s diligence earned him a kind of minor celebrity. His guide was mentioned on Season 2, Episode 11 of the A&E series Longmire. This spring, more than 100 of the 130 Football Bowl Subdivision head coaches let Steele interview them for an hour. Thumbing through giant briefing books, Steele asked the coaches to go player-by-player through their entire roster. All the conversations were off the record. “I’m not a journalist looking for a story,” he said. “I’m somebody looking for information on their team.”
The Preview was four months into its six-month preparation process when Steele’s Cleveland office was shut down by the coronavirus. He typically has a staff of 10 to 15. But, now, Steele was toiling on his guide alone, which a lot of us imagined he was doing all along.
“It wouldn’t have been a big dent money-wise not to produce a magazine,” said Steele. While his digital services earn good money, Steele’s guide does a little more than break even because it contains almost no advertising. Phil Steele doesn’t have time to chase advertisers. “We’re trying to put out a magazine here,” he said.
In April, the staff returned, and Steele, out of a combination of love and duty, decided to print the guide. The press run usually ranges from 150,000 to 200,000 copies; Steele slashed it to 50,000. “I’m just going to go for the hardcore Phil Steele people,” he said. “And there’s got to be 50,000 hardcore Phil Steele people out there willing to buy the magazine.”
As The Athletic’s Andy Staples noted, the publication of the Preview is a rite of summer. This year, its arrival was greeted as a “nature is healing” omen that suggested college football might be played, if for no other reason than football is always preceded by Steele’s guide. Then the Pac-12 and Big Ten postponed their seasons.
Asked how he’d spend fall Saturdays without college football, Steele said, “I’m hoping we get college football.” Asked about what meaning his guide might take on in a football-less year, Steele demurred. “I haven’t got ready to digest and process that yet,” he said.
Even writers who roll their eyes at the Scott Frost School of Playing Through It regard college football’s cancellation as a terrible event, mostly for the players. There will be a yearslong project to excavate the lost season. You can safely predict a bumper crop of longform about vanished Heisman runs and side-door national titles—the more improbable, the better. (“You know, the Aggies were Phil Steele’s No. 1 Surprise Team.”)
Steele has devoted more time, and certainly more words, to the 2020 college season than anyone. If the season is lost, the Preview will become its unofficial history. Or its VHT.
Toward the end of our call, Steele brightened when he mentioned the Football Championship Subdivision—the old Division I-AA—might play in the spring. “I think the FCS would really make out,” he said. “Everybody would be watching it. To be honest with you, I think I would make out. Because I’ve got the information up on Phil Steele Plus.”
