VTTW Board Index

The rankings are at www.philsteele.com. Tennessee is just ahead of Auburn and Miss St. You can also see the team pages for all the teams ranked so far, which gives some really good information.

I think Steele has fallen off a little lately in his predictions but the thing I will never forget about that guy is how he called our collapse in 2005 before it happened. I remember reading his mag before the season and thinking "This guy is off his rocker, we're going to be really, really good," and I'll be damned if he didn't nail it.

Typically, I'm not into pre-season anything and just wait for the results - just the nature of my 30+ year job where only results are measured. However, after last year's results, I'll take 27 at this point. Further, at the mid-point of the season I do expect to be in the top 15 or I will not be happy.


G

He is good at spotting teams that eke by and barely win a bunch of games, and once you do that, it's easy to tag them as overated.  It goes to what I often say about how close games often are.  Often a game is narrowly won and we move on, but if we had lost, it would have been counted as a disaster.  Case in point is UK last year.  How many times did we eke out a win in the last 10-15 years of our series with them?  At least 3-4 that I can think of, but we finally rolled snake eyes.  We all remember last year's loss, but who recalls that in 2007 they had to have a FG blocked in OT for us to pull out the win and go to the SECCG?

Anyway, Phil is good at spotting a team that has a lost of close calls and then predicting a reversal to that trend.

I do like his format, it's nice to get a sneak peek at the UT page of his mag.   Another thing he's usually pretty good at is his position analysis.  He predictes improvement at pretty much every classification.  He might not get them all right, but that has to be a good thing,  because he is right more often than not.

Looking at the summary section where he does the outlook and reviews the last few seasons, it gives some perspective on how far we fell the last few seasons.

We expected to be competitive in 2008, but it was a complete disaster.   2009 was not much better, but there were hopeful signs.  Then Kiffin ran off, and 2010 seemed to be the year we "took our medicine" by starting 2-6 and then rebounding against some really weak teams.   In spite of the ridiculousness of the losses to UNC and LSU, there was hope for the future.  2011 started with great hope, but we were literally crippled with injuries, and actually were WORSE than 2010.

This year we simply have to improve.  There really isn't any way to go but up.  We'll just have to wait and see, but just reading that preview by Phil, at least we have experience at every single position on the field.  It will be very interesting to see how we do.