Phil Steele Plus has everything that I use to handicap games. I started Phil Steele Plus as a tool for myself back in 2009. It gave me the updated Game Grades for each game, color coded the stats, updated Individual leaders and back then I had the charts at my fingertips for last 12 years of action. Here is a sample from 2009.
Each year we kept the previous years on the site, so I had a reference tool for previous years. Each year we added to the site and adapted and improved the sheets I look at. If you go to a team page you can scroll down all the way to 2009 and see what we used and then what we have now. There are SO MANY features on Phil Steele Plus and I will not go into all of them right now but today I will look at the last 29 years matchups.
Here are 3 samples from something that I am sure you are very familiar with and that is the service Academy Unders. If you watch the Phil Steele Plus Tour or read my newsletter you will see that since the Start of Inside the Pressbox and Phil Steele Plus I have use the Under in all 3 matchups almost every year and been greatly rewarded.
I have handwritten some notes on each sheet for you. Now the service academies use the option as they are generally not as big or as fast as their opponents and need a completive advantage. Teams that do not use the option have a tough time preparing for it and their scout teams cannot duplicate the speed and efficiency that the academies operate the option. However, even though all 3 use a different form of the option, the similarities give them a great edge as their defenses face the option every day in practice. The result are much lower scoring games than when those teams face non option teams. If you just blindly played the under in every service academy matchup since 2004 you would have a super record of 50-14-1 78%!!! A couple other notes from above you will note that there are basically 50% outright upsets the last few years so playing the underdog on a money line is solid. The dog is 9-3 ATS in the Army-Navy game. The Visitor has covered the last 5 in Navy and Air Force. Army is 7-2 ATS vs Air Force the last 9 after going 2-18 the previous 20. These things jump out to you when you look at the page with the color coding of RED and GREEN.
A couple explanations on the columns. The score of the game is GREEN is the team you are looking at WON straight up and RED if they lost. The Line of the Game column is GREEN if the team you are looking at covered and RED if they did not cover. This makes it very easy to spot spread trends in the series and you do not have to do the math on each game to figure out who covered. GREEN is good and RED is bad. In the home team column if the word says WIN then the home team won straight up and LOSS means the home team lost straight up. Once again to give you QUICK spread analysis if the color is GREEN the home team COVERED and if the word (win or loss) is RED the home team did not cover. The first time you look at the column you may be thrown by a Win being in RED or a Loss being in GREEN but that means the straight up winner did not cover. The upset column tells you if there was an upset that year. If the word upset is GREEN than the team whose page you are on pulled the upset and if it is RED than the team you are on was upset.
Let me show you a couple of other pages from this year. Here is the Penn St – Maryland matchup.
I have made some notes on the sheet. In the magazine the note is that Penn St is 18-0-1 SU in its last 19 trips to Maryland which makes sense as Penn St has had the better football program most years, is close by and their fans travel there. The last 29 years matchup shows they have only met 11 times in the last 29 years but the last 4 trips to College Park, Penn St was favored by an average of 12 points but won the last 4 meetings by an average of 52-8 and covered by 32 ppg. Penn St is 8-1 ATS the last 9 meetings and has recorded 52 sacks in the 11 matchups, almost 5 per game. As always, a GREEN number is good for the team you are looking at. If you were looking at the Maryland page for this matchup the Green numbers would be red and vice versa. I have a 3 Star on Penn St in this game and that will show up on the Schedule Predictor as a Best Bet.
Here is the current Kansas State vs Kansas Matchup with this one being on the Kansas St team page.
Kansas St has won an amazing 17 in a row in the series. On the sheet above I did circle the years from 1997-2003 as Bill Snyder delivered me many Best Bet winners in those days always clubbing their rival. When I looked at the spread record over the last 17 years, I see that Kansas St is a strong 12-5 ATS in those games so you would think I would have put Kansas St as a 2 star or 3 star for this game. I do want to note that the home team is just 5-11 ATS the last 16 years and Kansas St is at home so that tempered my rating down to a 1 star.
Now let me take a look at a FBS vs FCS matchup. Here is what is listed for Howard at Rutgers this year.
The first thing I want to point out that in the FCS section it is the opposite of the RED GREEN. The reason for this is we do not generate files for the FCS teams, so we pull over what was generated for their FBS opponent. As an example in the Howard section, you see that in the last 29 year they have faced 25 FBS teams but the column has 24 GREENS and just 1 RED. Since it is the opposite that means they are 1-24 SU vs FBS teams with their only win being in 2017 at UNLV as a 45 point dog (one of the biggest upsets in College Football History). The same for the spread column. It shows that in the last 13 matchups vs the FBS they have 9 REDS but that means they have covered 9 times as the red is for their opponent. The Rutgers RED GREENS are accurate, and you can see that the last 6 meetings vs FCS foes they have taken care of business and gone 5-1 ATS winning by an average of 55-7. Since Howard is good vs the FBS I only put a 1 star on Rutgers.
There are 138 FBS teams, and each team plays 12 regular season games so we have generated 1656 of these pages for the 2026 season. In the month of August, I will try to go thru close to 1000 of these pages and make my notes on the series history. I will put the notes on the home team’s last 29 years matchup. I will add a column to the schedule predictor with Best Bets for series history. On the pages on will list 1 star, 2 star and 3 star and who the series history favors. I will do this on the HOME team for each one. The 3 stars will be a best bet. How would you like access to these 1656 pages for the entire year as well as the all the other great information on Phil Steele Plus and get it at half price?
The price of Phil Steele Plus is just $99 for the entire year. This takes you thru the months of August, September, October, November, December, January and February. In those 7 months there are 32 weeks so that comes out to just a little over $3 a week. Right now, I am offering half off Phil Steele Plus to EVERYONE who purchased by 2026 College Football Preview magazine. If you purchased it online or thru our offices then you can call 1-866-918-7711 and we will verify that you bought the magazine and give you a special one-time code. You then go to the Phil Steele Store CLICK HERE and when you put Phil Steele Plus in your cart at $99 then type in your special coupon code you will get $50 off and get the entire year for just $49 and that included a digital Phil Steele College Football magazine ($20 value) and a digital FCS magazine ($25 value) and comes out to just $1.50 per week for the entire year including access to the Schedule Predictor for the entire year!
If you bought the magazine at Barnes and Noble or Books-a-million, naturally we cannot confirm your purchase online but have your magazine handy. Just call 1-866-918-7711 and one of my staff will have you turn to a random page and ask you a random question on that page. Once you confirm that you have the magazine in your hands, we will give you your personal code and you can go to the store and get the full year of Phil Steele Plus as well as both digital issues for $50 off and just $49. Phil Steele Plus is updated every day during the football season. Remember you get access to 138 FBS team pages, 128 FCS team pages, the schedule predictor and tons of other football info!
