Good Read on Phil Steele from local paper.

VinnytheWorm · Jul 30, 2007

COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Phil Steele puts out college football preview

Sunday, July 29, 2007 Doug Lesmerises
Plain Dealer Reporter
In the Westlake office where he spends 100-hour workweeks, opposite a floor-to-ceiling bank of 12 televisions, amid decades of handwritten college football play-by-play sheets, Phil Steele is surrounded by 15 photos of his daughter, Savannah. Her birth 15 months ago was the highlight of Steele's life. Yet, as the 46-year-old cooed at his newborn upon her arrival, he filmed his shoes, absent-mindedly pointing the family video camera at the ground.
"Ask my wife, I'm not great at a lot of things," Steele said, "but I can tell you the jersey number of the third-string tackle from Tulane. I can talk football."
He talks it and writes it in his language of abbreviations and self-designed statistics, the obsessive with a head for numbers making his life in the game his father taught him to love.
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</NOSCRIPT>Twenty-five years after starting a football betting tip line from the back of his parents' house, the 1979 John Marshall High grad produces one of a handful of major college football preseason magazines. The mid-June arrival on newsstands of Phil Steele's 2007 College Football Preview for $8.95, his 328-page labor of love and lunacy, helps signal the start of a college football season that, for Steele and his staff, never ends.
Steele has 30 full-time employees in an industrial park office; sales he reports between $4 million and $5 million per year; a circulation of nearly 500,000 for the six versions of his college magazine; a Web site at philsteele.com; an NFL magazine; a newsletter; a print shop churning out menus and wedding invitations; and an underdog streak he can't, and won't, shake. He revels in his competition with older college preview publications like Athlon, Lindy's, Street & Smith, and The Sporting News.
"That does make me feel good, to see those names, and I'm just a guy in Cleveland," Steele said. "But I like to take on the big boys. I never really liked rich kids."
He's the nut in this niche market who wakes up each morning at 5:55, arrives at the office by 7:02, maybe 7:03, downs nine 12-ounce cans of Mountain Dew before noon and makes it his business to know all 119 Division I-A teams - from Ohio State to Louisiana-Lafayette, from the Heisman Trophy candidates to the walk-ons. After a year of analysis, Steele writes the two-page previews for each team himself, plus the predicted order of finish for each conference and a national top 40, freely sprinkling in code phrases like VHT (very highly touted, meaning a player was a top high school recruit).
"No one ever said that it's fine literature," Steele said. "I write with a purpose."
Every part of his fall pastime has a purpose. Steele said he will watch every televised college game in the country, and before finishing his 2008 preview by next May, will have reviewed, and recited into a tape recorder for retyping, the play-by-play and boxscore from every game, more than 700 of them. He'll also read between 50 and 200 stories from local and college newspapers on each team, the stacks compiled by his staff, 20 of whom are devoted to the football side of the operation. The "fun part" begins with the first Saturday of the college football season on Sept. 1, when about 10 Steele staffers will chart three to seven games each from TV, radio and the Internet, while Steele takes in 12 games at once in his office.
"You research the guys all year," said Joey Lucci, who has been with Steele for six years, "and then you get to watch them play and you're like, 'Oh, they are real.' "

The Steele operation almost wasn't real, and it didn't begin as a Steele operation. The former Phil Seman changed his name to Steele because he thought it sounded better for the magazine. Raised in West Park, one of three sons of Henry and Mary Seman, Steele started that phone service as a 21-year-old and lost $15,000 in two years. He bought a print shop in Lakewood to put out a football newsletter in 1984, the money coming from the second mortgage his parents took out, a grudge against the bank officer who rejected Steele's loan request still in place.
"When he sets his mind to something," said assistant Nancy Avila, who remembers that four-desk first office, "somehow he gets it done."
Sleeping on a couch in the print shop, Steele lost money for seven years, turning a profit for the first time in 1989, the same year his father died of cancer. (His mother, his first newsletter typist, still works with him, as does his younger brother Jim.) He moved to his current location in 1992, put out his first magazine in 1995, and now in his 13th season is recognized for his meticulous devotion, with no statistic too small.
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</NOSCRIPT>Evaluating preseason guides, Eric Crawford in the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote last month, "[Steele's guide] is the only one that has attained full reference status for me." With his analysis always yielding some unusual picks, he's a radio favorite, criticized and praised around the country as a guest on about 40 shows a week during July. The operation is based on analyzing information, not first-hand reporting. Steele has met with college coaches, but because he operates the 10,000-circulation weekly betting newsletter, the NCAA in the past has advised schools to avoid too much interaction. With a drive within the company to de-emphasize the gambling and address straight football analysis, Steele hopes that opens up more direct communication with the programs while shedding his reputation, to some, as a handicapper.
An admittedly demanding boss, Steele competes like a coach, his scoreboard maintained by Chris Stassen, a software engineer from Newark, Ohio. Stassen's Web site, football.stassen.com/, tracks the accuracy of preseason predictions of 13 publications. Steele won last year, finished second in 2005, won in 2004 and cumulatively over the past five years is the most accurate, a point of pride that Steele tracks weekly during the season.
"I always liked the quantity of information and the completeness of information in Phil Steele's magazine," Stassen wrote in an e-mail, "but prediction accuracy is very highly weighted in my system and this caused him to be ranked in the middle of the pack early on. Since improving his prediction accuracy, he has been the runaway winner in my ratings every single year."
An Ohio State fan growing up, Steele roots now for his picks in his magazine and those dispersed as top tips to Saturday call-in customers. He's cutting his hours to get home earlier to wife Rebecca, stepdaughter Sierra and Savannah, keenly aware of their understanding of his obsessions. But he puts his life in those predictions. And if Utah State doesn't finish eighth, one spot behind Idaho, in the Western Athletic Conference this year, Steele will be ticked.
"There's no meaningless game," Steele said. "I want to win them all."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
dlesmerises@plaind.com, 216-999-4479

BlackBart · Jul 30, 2007

I have accepted Phil Steele as my personal lord and savior. And I wish I were making that up.

GoSooners · Jul 30, 2007

I really enjoy Steele's magazine. The proof is in the details, which he has more of than any other magazine. The only thing I can't understand about this year's edition is why all of a sudden Steele left out the history of each teams wins and losses against the spread. As gamblers this is one of our most important stats. Since he's usually a stickler for details, there has to be an ulterior motive involved in this decision.

rouxdogg · Jul 30, 2007

GoSooners said:
I really enjoy Steele's magazine. The proof is in the details, which he has more of than any other magazine. The only thing I can't understand about this year's edition is why all of a sudden Steele left out the history of each teams wins and losses against the spread. As gamblers this is one of our most important stats. Since he's usually a stickler for details, there has to be an ulterior motive involved in this decision.

I would say that this is part of the reason:

With a drive within the company to de-emphasize the gambling and address straight football analysis, Steele hopes that opens up more direct communication with the programs while shedding his reputation, to some, as a handicapper.

BTW, Sooners, who do you like to wiin the Big 12 North this year? Thanks and GL.

GoSooners · Jul 30, 2007

rouxdogg said:
I would say that this is part of the reason:

With a drive within the company to de-emphasize the gambling and address straight football analysis, Steele hopes that opens up more direct communication with the programs while shedding his reputation, to some, as a handicapper.

BTW, Sooners, who do you like to wiin the Big 12 North this year? Thanks and GL.

It very well could be part of the reason. Come to think of it I believe he also owns the pay gambling sheet Northcoast Picks which gives us all of that info from week to week. So that might have something to do with it.

As for the Big 12 North, I'm leaning towards Missouri to win. Mainly because they get Nebraska at home this season. And the Huskers have a tough schedule. But the more I look at the two teams the least I can tell them apart. The Huskers are a deeper team and may be able to outlast Mizzou by season's end. But it's very close. Much of Nebraska's success will depend on the performance of their ASU transfer QB Keller. If his offensive line is able to protect him, and he starts lighting up in the passing game, then Nebraska will more than likely win the Big 12 North. And could win the Big 12. The North has closed the gap a bit on the South. The Big 12 Championship game last year was closer than the score indicated.

rouxdogg · Jul 30, 2007

Thanks for the reply. Always enjoy your picks and writeups. Leaning towards Mizzou myself. Have been contemplating taking Mizzou to win the North at 2 to 1. I see Phil Steele also has them winning it. GL.

cd329 · Jul 31, 2007

why do you think all the sportsbooks send you all these magazines every year that guys like steele put out? Because the books want to lose money? Its because all those stats, trends and other stuff dont mean much and the books arent afraid of that stuff at all.
I have already gotton 2 football magazines from the sportsbooks. Am so glad they want to help me win, lollllllll.

rouxdogg · Jul 31, 2007

I receive plenty of those magazines from the sportsbooks, as well. BIG difference between those and Phil Steele's.

DrunkenHorseplayer · Jul 31, 2007

Agree with cd329; go to a sports book in LV and pick up a sheet with the day's games on it. Turn it over and on the back are all the same stats you get in these worthless mags; the casinos love giving bettors this info. The bottom line is if Steele were truly this knowledgable he'd be able to crush the books. He's nothing more than a CFB Bill James; the master of worthless numbers.

rouxdogg · Jul 31, 2007

Drunken Horseplayer said:
Agree with cd329; go to a sports book in LV and pick up a sheet with the day's games on it. Turn it over and on the back are all the same stats you get in these worthless mags; the casinos love giving bettors this info. The bottom line is if Steele were truly this knowledgable he'd be able to crush the books. He's nothing more than a CFB Bill James; the master of worthless numbers.

To each his own, I guess. I somewhat agree with what you are saying. I just think Steele's magazine is different. I know of several guys who do very well in college football and think that it is a must-have every year.

Furthermore, I would say regarding college football futures, this speaks for itself:

Stassen's Web site, football.stassen.com/, tracks the accuracy of preseason predictions of 13 publications. Steele won last year, finished second in 2005, won in 2004 and cumulatively over the past five years is the most accurate, a point of pride that Steele tracks weekly during the season.
"I always liked the quantity of information and the completeness of information in Phil Steele's magazine," Stassen wrote in an e-mail, "but prediction accuracy is very highly weighted in my system and this caused him to be ranked in the middle of the pack early on. Since improving his prediction accuracy, he has been the runaway winner in my ratings every single year."

GoSooners · Jul 31, 2007

Drunken Horseplayer said:
Agree with cd329; go to a sports book in LV and pick up a sheet with the day's games on it. Turn it over and on the back are all the same stats you get in these worthless mags; the casinos love giving bettors this info. The bottom line is if Steele were truly this knowledgable he'd be able to crush the books. He's nothing more than a CFB Bill James; the master of worthless numbers.

How do you know Steele hasn't crushed the books? His Northcoast picks Power Sheet has done well over the years. Especially with it's 4 star picks, which has hit for well over 60%. And it's one of the few sheets that I've seen that isn't afraid to show you it's winning percentage for the season. If Steele has been playing the books with his 4 star picks than he's done very well.

DrunkenHorseplayer · Jul 31, 2007

I don't know for sure that he hasn't crushed the books but if this info is such a gold mine why does he let everyone else have it? Why doesn't he keep it to himself and bet his own opinions?

VIEJODINOSAUR · Jul 31, 2007

It is called free money....no risk

GoSooners · Jul 31, 2007

Drunken Horseplayer said:
I don't know for sure that he hasn't crushed the books but if this info is such a gold mine why does he let everyone else have it? Why doesn't he keep it to himself and bet his own opinions?

Why do it one way when you can have it both ways? The football tip sheet business is a big business with a thousand different opinions. He's only one player. I'm sure he cleans up on both ends or else he wouldn't have been around all of these years.

ForgetWallStreet · Jul 31, 2007

Drunken Horseplayer said:
I don't know for sure that he hasn't crushed the books but if this info is such a gold mine why does he let everyone else have it? Why doesn't he keep it to himself and bet his own opinions?

Because the average Joe doesn't have the where with all or desire to properly interpret it. It's a win-win for Steele. I still doubt that he is a consistently great handicapper, but his mag has a lot more useful info to chew on than Lindy's and Athlon provide.

GoSooners · Jul 31, 2007

In the grand scheme of things Phil Steele's opinion probably doesn't matter that much. Him and his followers would probably barely make a dent in swaying the odds one way or another. Same goes for all of the other weekly rags. The odds changers are the big whales who pay big money for their selctions, and bet even bigger, as in millions on the games. Think "Two For The Money". But the funny thing is in the long run those pay services percentage-wise probably aren't any better than those weekly tip sheets. But the difference is because there is big money involved it's all about perception.

rolltide · Jul 31, 2007

I think PS would be the first to tell you his College "late phone picks" have been horrible for the last few years. I think he is as solid as any tout can be, works very hard, but falls in love with teams and continues to pick them throughout the season regardless of how many times they fail to cover

Anonymous1 · Jul 31, 2007

Good, bad or otherwise, his 5* plays the last few years have been very average, however, his selections have moved the line, so somebody cares.

StuntDouble1 · Jul 31, 2007

I heard he doesnt gamble.. if this is true then how much confidence can he have in his picks?? I like his magazines but his newsletter and "paid plays" are lame and the numbers over the years back me up. He always skews his win % by choosing only categories that he wins in...if he has a losing system, he will go back as long as it takes for him to look a winner and then print that % as legit. " Im 5-2 the last 7 games " etc. but he may be 15-19 over a month etc. Joke.:think2:

TheWolf · Aug 1, 2007

Well, sounds like he is trying to eliminate gambling from his college stuff....that sucks.

His college picks have been very bad the last couple of years. His NFL has always stunk so stear clear of those.

His writeups are always great and mags are a good read. Suck if there is no ATS info though.