It’s that time of year. The part of the calendar that college football nerds everywhere can’t wait for. Phil Steele, college football prognosticator extraordinaire, has come out with his 2009 preview.

More on where he pegs this year’s Terps after the jump (hint: it’s not so good) but first a word on Steele’s record. He claims his magazine has been the most accurate preseason magazine the last ten years.

According to the website www.stassen.com, which ranks these sorts of things, Steele’s is in fact the most accurate and best preseason magazine out there. The guy watches up to 12 games at a time every Saturday from 1-7 p.m. You think that’s insane?

How about the fact that he has a staffer chart each of the games so he can go back and look at the play-by-play of each contest through the week, writes a detailed report of each team and reviews those reports in the offseason?

That’s probably not healthy. Anyway, he’s not real high on the Terps’ chances this year. Steele is big on experience, and after losing a record amount of seniors from last year’s team, the Terps are low on that.

Steele ranks the Terps last in the Atlantic Division, saying:

“This year they have just 9 returning starters (fewest ACC) and their 56% lettermen returning are the fewest for a non-service academy team. The Terps draw both Duke and Virginia out of the Coastal (along with VT) but this looks like a rebuilding year (#11 Offensive Line ACC, #12 Defensive Line) despite one of the most experienced backfields in the ACC.”

Steele seems to like Da’Rel Scott’s potential for this season, putting him on his ACC first team, ahead of guys like Virginia Tech’s Darren Evans and Clemson’s C.J. Spiller.

Steele also has some Terp opponents ranked surprisingly high. Cal is his preseason No. 9 team in the nation and Rutgers is No. 16. You can be positive nobody will have Rutgers that high, if they even have the Scarlet Knights ranked at all.

While most agree that Cal is going to be a decent team, it’s hard to say if anyone else will rank them in the top-10.

Should be an interesting season as always. Anybody have any predictions for a record? Over/under last year’s eight-win mark?

akrautdbk@gmail.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.