Turnovers can have a huge impact on games and on a team’s season. They can also lead to many misleading final scores. During the season I list all of the previous week’s misleading final scores on PhilSteele.com in my Monday Daily Blog. By reading about them each week you can uncover some underrated and overrated teams throughout the season.

Here are a couple of examples from last year. Iowa St benefitted from +8 in TO’s vs Nebraska and pulled out a 9-7 win. Nebraska turned it over 4 times inside the 5 yard line and lost despite a 362-239 yard edge. The next 2 weeks Iowa St was overrated and they lost by a combined 69-18 vs Texas A&M and Oklahoma St despite only being slight underdogs in each.

Florida St appeared to pummel BYU 54-28 on the road but they only had a 512-475 yard edge as they benefitted from +5 in TO’s. The next week FSU entered the Top 25 but lost to USF at home as a 2 TD favorite 17-7 and BYU bounced back with a 42-23 whipping of Colorado St.

Turnovers can not only make a difference in a game but can make the difference between a winning and losing season. Read more…

I have been working on magazine deadlines since December 1st and have just finished reading 75-150pg reports on each of the 120 FBS teams. The reports are created by my staff throughout the season as they read dozens of articles daily on each of their assigned teams. My staff then underlines all the important information for me and this gives me a lot of flavor of what was going on into and out of games throughout the season. I find it interesting every year to see how the writers’ perception of the team changes from August to January.

I have also just completed my projection of what the AP Preseason Top 10 will look like in August. In each of the last two years I have nailed 9 of the 10 teams that appeared in the Preseason Top 10 successfully with last years exception being LSU/Penn St and I may have had something to do with that. Read more…