Phil Steele is here

And you won't believe how high he is on Penn State

One annual harbinger of college football is the arrival of Phil Steele’s annual magazine. It amounts to 130 team media guides in one dense package, and is thus standard equipment for anyone who covers the sport.

Steele makes tons of predictions and even more rankings, and uses much of his limited editorial space each year to point out that no one’s picks are more accurate¹. For every FBS team, he ranks each position-group, strength of schedule by his own system and by last year’s opponent’s W-L records, the teams most likely to improve and regress, etc, etc.

I bring all this us up because Steele is very, very impressed with Penn State. I can’t quite believe how impressed he is with the Lions.