Welcome into a special Inside Carolina podcast. I'm Tommy Ashley. You see Spencer Haskell there on the screen. We've got feel still with us. If you are a diehard college football person, and I'll freely admit, I spent much of my youth, all my allowance, grass cutting money, buying magazines, buying preview magazines for all the

sports, but especially college football. And so if you're listening to this or watching this,

you know that Phil Steele has had the Bible since 1995. Phil, first of all, thank you for taking

time to join us.

I know that it is a labor of love for you, but my first question is,

how in the world do you keep up with all of this stuff now,

given the nature of college athletics, the nature of college football,

here in 2026, it is chaos off the field player wise. How do you keep up?

I appreciate that, Spencer. And you're right. The last five years have been a lot tougher than it used to be with the magazine, although I will say this, 2000, 26 was beautiful, not having that second spring portal window.

In fact, every coach I talked to, we'd start the conversation.

Hey, Phil, how you doing?

Oh, coach, I am doing so wonderful.

I don't have to rewrite 138 teams all in the month of May.

I can talk to the coaches in the middle of April as opposed to waiting until the portal window closes at the end of April.

I talked to 133 and 138 coaches this year going over the rosters with them.

But, you know, it's interesting, Tommy, that the coaches would respond, hey, Phil, it felt like so much more of a team this spring

because we could coach the players harder. We could list somebody third string and we knew

they weren't leaving after spring. And we knew the players we were taking into spring,

the guys we were coming out of spring and taken into August. And the players didn't have to worry about being replaced.

So I think overall we're going to see a better brand of football.

But basically I've got a staff of 10 to 15 people that work here.

We work on nothing but the magazine for seven months.

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