We are still at the point of the college football season where rankings are king, and predictions get more air time than almost anything else in the game. The latest prediction to come out is one that we’ve been waiting for over the past couple of months though. It’s Phil Steele’s predictions for the preseason top 10.
If you don’t know Phil Steele, he is one of the most respected college football analysts in the world, and he has one of the most popular college football magazines that hits the shelves each year. We still have a few months before that happens, but until then Steele has granted us some early insight into his prediction of the preseason AP top 10 in college football for 2023.
And before you just sneeze at another prediction from another national writer, consider Steele has been very good at predicting what these rankings will look like. In fact, over the last 14 years, he has gotten the top 10 right in eight of those years. It’s safe to say that this top 10 from Steele is liking going to look pretty much like the preseason AP Top 10 we see sometime in August.
Unfortunately for the Oregon Ducks, that may not be good news. Steele doesn’t have the Ducks inside his predicted top 10, despite them holding one of the most talented rosters in the nation, and despite ESPN ranking them highly in their ‘Way-too-early Power Rankings.’ Ironically, Oregon is one of the only picks that Steele got wrong a year ago, when he predicted the Ducks would rank No. 10 in the AP poll, but they came in at No. 11.
So might he be flip-flopping that mistake this year? Oregon fans can only hope. Here are the teams that got into the top 10 ahead of the Ducks.