Statistical heaven - all for 3p per page

For many cricket-lovers, the best day of the year is when Wisden thuds on to the bookshelves.

 Quite a few football experts feel the same way about the Playfair Football Annual. 

 Me? I get the same feeling about Phil Steele’s American Football preview magazines.

 It’s a fair bet that you haven’t heard of Mr Steele. He’s a 46-year-old award-winning sportswriter, whose Cleveland-based company produces annual preview magazines for the top two levels of college football, as well as the professional National Football League.

 Each magazine averages roughly 250-300 A3 pages so that when they land on your doormat, as the two college previews did at Warrillow Towers this morning, you know about it.

 Phil Steele magazines are not for the casual fan. If you’re the kind of supporter who tunes in once a year for the TV coverage of the Super Bowl and thinks Joe Montana is still the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, forget it.

 Even if you see NFL coverage as a useful add-on to your Sky Sports subscription, this may not be for you.

 But if you want schedules, results going back six years, offensive and defensive individual team statistics, lists of potential NFL draft picks, pages of analysis of every offensive and defensive unit of every one of the 300-plus colleges in the Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision (don’t ask......) plus the 32 NFL teams, this is for you.

 There is so much information here that a fair bit of it isn’t even in English, or even American English. To get everything he wants to say into those 300-plus pages, Mr Steele has to resort to abbreviating some of the more obvious words and football phrases; so much so, in fact, that the list of abbreviations covers half of an A3 page.

 As you’d expect, then, the layout isn’t pretty. But if you want to know who was the second-leading tackler in the 2010 season for the Jacksonville State Gamecocks of the Ohio Valley Conference, you’ll find it here (on page 135 of the FCS magazine).

 Mr Steele and his 28 statisticians spend 365 days a year compiling this information (yes, there are college and NFL games on Christmas and/or New Years’ Day). Yet the finished magazines are astoundingly cheap. It cost me £32.94 to get all three shipped to Tamworth from Cleveland. At just under 1,000 pages of information, that’s a tad over 3p per page; considerably cheaper than Wisden.

 So why American football? Why am I so in love with a sport which is essentially straightforward, but which most of the world finds completely incomprehensible?

 My interest (you may call it an obsession) goes back to my schooldays and a chemistry teacher called Dr Ken Thomas. He had studied in the US in the 1960s and came back determined to spread the gospel of this terrific sport he had seen. 

 It was Ken who hounded ITV into showing brief highlights of the Super Bowl on World of Sport in the mid-70s. It was Ken who advised Channel 4 when they first broadcast the NFL in the early-1980s. It was Ken who wrote the first British guidebook to the sport, the nattily-titled A Guide to American Football (available now on Amazon for, er, 1p).

 And it was Ken who decided that the best way to get us interested in his subject was to show us American Football videos in our lunchbreaks after chemistry lessons.

 You’d be surprised how many young fans turned up. 

 Ken was the only teacher about whom I can say that I got an O-Level in his subject purely  because of his enthusiasm and drive.

 I remember him for that; but every time I look at a Phil Steele magazine, I remember him for something which has brought far greater enjoyment to my life than chemistry ever did.

 Go to www.philsteele.com for more information about Phil's magazines and to order copies.