Each year in my magazine and usually in my summer blog series, I list the teams that lost the most or fewest games due to injuries or disciplinary reasons. Although certain programs are better at keeping players healthy, while other programs tend to screen more rigorously for character (or perhaps are more lenient on punishment), the inclusion of a team on either list is generally attributable to good old-fashioned luck.

 I re-evaluate every article and tweak some parameters. I adjusted the starts lost threshold to 34 or more (from 32) and 5 or less (from 6) two years ago. I also found that NO team with 10 or more wins, when also having 34 or more starts lost, improved therefore they were omitted. Here I list the results for this system for the last 15 years.

I did eliminate 2021 as in 2020 some teams played anywhere from two to 7 games and due to Covid restrictions there were a TON of missed starts so I could have had almost every team qualifying for +35 on the starts missed category. Last year I had the article in the magazine and there were four teams that qualified for five starts or fewer missed and those four teams were SMU, Wake Forest, Notre Dame and Middle Tenn St. Of those 4 teams only Middle Tenn improved their record.

Last year there were 12 teams that qualified for 34 points or more. The teams that made the biggest jumps were Southern Miss which went from 3-9 to 7-6, LSU which went from 6-7 to 10-4, Ohio U which went from 3-9 to 10-4 and the biggest winner was Washington which went from 4-8 to 11-2.

This year there are 23 teams that made the GOING UP box for the Starts lost and I only list 5 teams in the Going DOWN box below. Hopefully your favorite team stays healthy this year and has a solid year.

Phil Steele Plus list the start charts for every team and it is updated weekly during the season so you and keep track of all 133 teams and their injury situations. Here are two samples from last year with a team in Kansas that had very few injuries and a team like Boston College that had a lot of injuries.

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