Phil Steele's 2012 magazine

[Beyond the Bets]

I tweeted this out earlier but was curious to see what you guys had to say on the matter. Obviously, I love Phil Steele's magazine and respect his opinion. He has been at this a long time, and his mag is a must-have simply for the sheer volume of what's in it.

But I've never quite understood why people accept the idea that his team previews are "jampacked" with information?

Over the last few days, he's been providing PDF previews of certain pages. And, well, if you look at the team previews—there's lots of old, irrelevant, recycled information from previous years. Emphasis on past, not present.

His "forecast" is the most glaring weakness.

Blue = new info / preview
Red = old info / rewind

[BetATL]

Couldn't agree more. It's a good magazine to gain a general understanding of each team; how many starters each team has back, new coordinators, etc. but it lacks some key in-depth info.

That's why I believe an "online" magazine could be much more beneficial. Mainly, because you can edit it all the way until the start of the season. A lot of things change before now and the start of the season that are unaccounted for in the magazine because it comes out so early.

[Skating Tripods]

While the historical shit is largely irrelevant, the way the he monitors recruits and transfers is highly beneficial for creating preseason power rankings. I know I don't follow JUCO transfers or the top recruits very closely. He (and his team) does.

I think a 3-yr history is important though. It's important to see how a QB improved and how he handled the loss of his key weapons. Same with RBs and offensive line losses. Same with how a player has adapted under a new coach or coordinator. Basically, a recap of the senior class and their progression. You can see if you can expect a kid to go past his previous numbers, see if he's maybe reached his ceiling, or whatever else.

It has merit. Not enough to justify his absurdly high printing cost. I talked to a friend of Steele's last week who threw out some figures of what he loses on the magazine. It's pretty staggering. He told me that he's advised him to get rid of the old information for the sake of lowering printing costs, but it apparently didn't get through.

Agree on BetATL's point about unaccounted for information. Sometimes, the starting QB for a team isn't even listed in his depth chart. But, hey, you also have to do your own homework and then adjust your power ratings accordingly.

[ChiefZilla]

(05-15-2012 01:47 PM)BetATL Wrote:  Couldn't agree more. It's a good magazine to gain a general understanding of each team; how many starters each team has back, new coordinators, etc. but it lacks true in-depth info.

That's why I believe an "online" magazine could be much more beneficial. Mainly, because you can edit it all the way until the start of the season. A lot of things change before now and the start of the season that are unaccounted for in the magazine because it comes out so early.

Ditto on this.

[RyanParrill]

The fact that we're only talking about 1 magazine may explain why there's very little new info. There's market share to be had or it's a business model you don't want to copy. Probably both.

Obviously, we all feel the direction BTB has laid out for another CFB preview would be well received.

Though, there's something to be said for having the magazine in your hands. Similar to the way most of us still use pencil/paper. This could be an option, as discussed, not the requirement.

[The Cosmic Kid]

K-State at No. 37?!

[jimmysingh9]

I agree wtih all the statements above. I actually think the part that BTB highlighted is the biggest wast of space in that magazine. I cannot believe Phil Steele has continued that way. I have actually emailed him about that before to no reply.

Like how does Andrew Luck's freshman #'s prepare you in any way for Stanford's QB this year? He has to put more emphasis on this year and yes going into last 2 years would be good perhaps.

The rest of his information is great. I personally love his unit rankings because it helps me with O-line and D-line rankings which is huge for me in CFB.

[SkyBlues42]

He's hit or miss. Some of the stuff is very useful, others, you can just ignore. But that's the case with just about any magazine or preview you can think of. Not everything is 100% useful.

[lindetrain]

Year after year, it fascinates me that people complain about this magazine.

Sure, we've seen that info before. But Phil and his team only have four months to compile all this information on all 120 teams. Assuming a fairly small profit margin, I doubt he has the resources to add more employees and provide an even more in-depth magazine than what he already puts out. IMO, realistically speaking, this is about as good as it can get.

[gynecologist]

linde makes a great point.

[Beyond the Bets]

(05-15-2012 06:46 PM)lindetrain Wrote:  Year after year, it fascinates me that people complain about this magazine.

Sure, we've seen that info before. But Phil and his team only have four months to compile all this information on all 120 teams. Assuming a fairly small profit margin, I doubt he has the resources to add more employees and provide an even more in-depth magazine than what he already puts out. IMO, realistically speaking, this is about as good as it can get.

I'm not sure where you're getting "fairly small profit margin." The dude operates a multi-million dollar business and owns a 14,000 square foot home with an indoor basketball court.

No resources? Can't add additional employees? Please. He has a staff of 33 people and works round-the-clock on his magazine; analyzing game tape, clipping newspaper articles and printing out online stories eight months out of the year.

The magazine is fine. It's the over-the-top glorification of it that's troubling. If you go through the team-by-team previews, it's 10 percent content and 90 percent regurgitation of statistics that are no longer relevant.

Roughly 25 of the annual's 300 pages each year are devoted to Steele telling us how awesome his predictions were from the year before.

Don't get me wrong: I like the magazine and annually use it far more than I do any of the others. It's a great reference guide and the layout is familiar and unchanging.

But, yeah, definitely overrated.

[Beyond the Bets]

Again, Phil loves to promote himself. He's great at it, too. And his passion for college football is incredible and awesome and all that stuff.

But when you look into his process - and when you understand the resources he has available to him - it's almost underwhelming when you see the finished product.

Because truly, it could be much, much better.

* * *

From Washington Post:

By dint of a frightening work ethic and the creation of ingenious algorithms that turn obscure statistics into stunningly accurate predictors of a team's success or failure, Phil Steele has worked his way from sleeping on a cot in the back of a print shop to running a multimillion-dollar business, owning a 14,000-square-foot home (featuring an indoor basketball court), and being regarded as one of the nation's preeminent experts on the sport.

He houses his operation in a drab one-story building in an industrial park in suburban Cleveland. The overhead fluorescent lights illuminate a dozen or so desks. There are replicas of football helmets on the walls. The talk rarely rises past a murmur.

A few steps away, Steele's small office is dominated by a wall of 12 televisions. He monitors 50 or so games each Saturday, from noon till after midnight. The most important four games are displayed on the sets on the lower right.

"The games on the main quadrant, I catch every play. The next level" -- he draws a chart on a scrap of paper, indicating the sets just outside the main four -- "I can catch every three or four plays. Those on the far outside, I check in every eight to 12 plays."

Each staff member is assigned to cover a particular conference. They chart every play of every game and produce a shorthand summary report for him by Sunday morning. There is so much microscopic handwriting plugged into little grids and color-coded dots and abbreviations that it appears to be hieroglyphics.

Every team is given a grade for every game based on a complex computer model Steele developed and tweaks each year. Every player at every position on every team is also given a weekly grade, based on his output of yards gained or given up, and this weekly performance goes into yet another yearly grading matrix. He reviews these and then dictates short, data-packed narratives of each game into a tape recorder, which then go up on the Web site.

By midweek, staffers file into his office and discuss each team's upcoming game with Steele and Rolf Bertulies, his general manager. Steele also reviews the teams' game-by-game progress this year. He then makes his weekly forecasts, down to the final score.

Meanwhile, another set of staffers is assigned to cull reports from local media on all 120 teams. These are compressed into summaries that reflect not just wins and losses, but quotes, attitudes and gossip about each team each week.

Starting next Monday, Steele will begin reading those reports ("I have to read at least 24 pages an hour") and producing a position-by-position analysis on every team in the nation. He has to do one of these every three hours. He logs the time he starts analyzing each team and the time he finishes. When he's done, he marks the progress with a yellow highlighter.

This information is then plugged into computer models he has developed that predict a team's future success against a particular opponent. One module is based just on the yards each team gains; another, on total points scored. Then there's the "points per yard" statistic, which computes the total yardage a team gained last year, divided by the number of points it scored. The lower this number, the better. He has developed a parallel corollary over two decades of research that holds that if a team gets more than 10 turnovers than it gives up one year, then it will almost certainly have fewer wins the following season.

"College football is all he does," says Rick Perk, a friend and charter member of the Wednesday night basketball pickup games in Steele's gym. "He won't miss watching a game because nobody else will watch it like he does. If he puts his shoes by the basketball court when we're playing, then you better just leave them there. He wants everything a particular way."

[lindetrain]

(05-15-2012 10:40 PM)Beyond the Bets Wrote:  

(05-15-2012 06:46 PM)lindetrain Wrote:  Year after year, it fascinates me that people complain about this magazine.

Sure, we've seen that info before. But Phil and his team only have four months to compile all this information on all 120 teams. Assuming a fairly small profit margin, I doubt he has the resources to add more employees and provide an even more in-depth magazine than what he already puts out. IMO, realistically speaking, this is about as good as it can get.

I'm not sure where you're getting "fairly small profit margin." The dude operates a multi-million dollar business and owns a 14,000 square foot home with an indoor basketball court.

No resources? Can't add additional employees? Please. He has a staff of 33 people and works round-the-clock on his magazine; analyzing game tape, clipping newspaper articles and printing out online stories eight months out of the year.

The magazine is fine. It's the over-the-top glorification of it that's troubling. If you go through the team-by-team previews, it's 10 percent content and 90 percent regurgitation of statistics that are no longer relevant.

Roughly 25 of the annual's 300 pages each year are devoted to Steele telling us how awesome his predictions were from the year before.

Don't get me wrong: I like the magazine and annually use it far more than I do any of the others. It's a great reference guide and the layout is familiar and unchanging.

But, yeah, definitely overrated.

Just judging by the website (poorly designed and given very little attention), and the fact they're located in an office building suite in Cleveland somewhere, I assumed it was a relatively small operation. I wouldn't have thought their income would outweigh their overhead to the extent they were bringing in millions of dollars, and definitely wouldn't have guessed Steele was anywhere near a millionaire, despite his popularity in college football circles.

Regardless, I think there's one key issue with the in-depth analysis you all seek - with this being "Phil Steele's" magazine, that analysis can really only come from him, and only him. Whereas Athlon, Lindy's, and other preseason publications can use multiple writers for their previews of each team, Steele prides himself on being the only one providing any type of analysis. Between all the other work he's doing for the magazine, I just don't know if it's feasible for him to provide all these in-depth team write-ups as well. The position breakdowns he does now are easy and quick for him.

From what I've read in the past, he and his team are working 60-80 hour weeks in the four months leading up to the magazine being sent to the presses. Hell, maybe he does have the money to add another 10-15 employees to his staff to make these requests for a more in-depth magazine possible, but I don't really know.

One thing we do agree upon - he touts himself a bit too much. But his magazine is like the Bible to me, so I find a way to look past it.

[Beyond the Bets]

(05-16-2012 02:37 AM)lindetrain Wrote:  The position breakdowns he does now are easy and quick for him.

Of course they are. Because they just rehash what happened in previous years, stuff that's already been written in earlier magazines.

Again, I like Steele's magazine. By the time football season rolls around each year, the pages are worn and the cover is ripped. But his over-the-top self promotion, his declaration that his pages are "jampacked" with information, the consistent touting of prognostications made in previous years (anybody can pick college football straight up winners at an 80 percent rate), etc., opens himself up to criticism.

[Skating Tripods]

Steele owns a sports service in Cleveland as well (which I didn't know until recently). That's where the bulk of his money comes from. Again, like I said, someone who is a close friend of Steele told me that Phil operates at a loss with the magazine. I don't know how many people work for him or anything.

This same person told me that Steele doesn't like to travel, so outside of local media appearances and radio shows, the only means he has to get himself recognized is self-promotion. Rumor has it that he was in line for a real big gig not too long ago, but the network soured on him when they found out that he doesn't like to travel. And I'm talking big gig. National. Not sure if Steele was blowing smoke up this guy's ass or not, but they go pretty far back and Steele got this friend of mine/ours into the business of betting.

Not sure if it's a fear of flying or whatnot, but he's apparently a pretty introverted, stay-at-home kind of guy, as his work would suggest.

What I was told was that Steele is trying to paint himself as more of a historian of sorts and disassociate himself from the betting aspect of it. Hence, why he wants to sell his sports service, Northcoast Sports. I think he realizes that it makes him more marketable if he doesn't have gambling attached to him.

[Beyond the Bets]

ST - Please don't try to bring facts into this discussion.

It might ruin the narrative.

[Cafe Latte]

Steele's book is a good starting point. Nothing more. There are also 124 Div I teams this year. The amazing part of the "rest of the story" is with all the information Steele has that he only handicaps college football and he's lost with his service 3 of the last 4 years. It's great to watch 50 games each week if you know what to look for but Steele is just a fact gathering person and not even a sports bettor.

[SkyBlues42]

I think a lot of people that rely on stats, spend so much time looking at those, that they don't watch and analyze the games. In Steele's case, however, he does say that he watches a lot of film. The point Skating made, about Steele wanting to become more of a historian, makes perfect sense.

[adutton6]

Speaking of super awesome preseason mags, how is the BTB publication coming?

[Beyond the Bets]

(05-16-2012 12:13 PM)adutton6 Wrote:  Speaking of super awesome preseason mags, how is the BTB publication coming?

Slower than expected. But it will get done. If not by May 28, which is the current target date, then a little after the storm of mags that get released in early June.