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.
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.
