How Steele has managed to build his empire without venturing far beyond the three-minute driving distance between his home and his office speaks to his enthusiasm for watching games (on television — he never attends them) and describing in detail what he observes. Steele, who has more than a dozen full-time employees, has difficulty delegating work.

“It could be Phil Steele Publications without me,” he said. “It’s now a brand. It’s not one person anymore; it’s a company. It could get to that. But I think that’s what makes me different from anybody.”

On a sunny morning last month at his office, by the time coffee was just beginning to brew elsewhere in the Midwest, Steele had completed a one-hour workout, read two newspapers, eaten a full breakfast, finished a diet Mountain Dew and a Red Bull, and conducted two of the five radio interviews on his schedule — despite insisting that July was one of his quietest months.

In front of him were three computer monitors and stacks of articles. Every morning, his mother, Mary, a former secretary, compiles them from newspapers that cover college football. They accumulate quickly throughout the season, spilling into folders and boxes that pile up in corners of an office that can appear at times to be collapsing inward.

Bobbleheads nodded on shelves. Steele sipped from a football-shaped mug. Dressed in a white shirt and tie, he stood to show a visitor a copy of his first magazine. The format and simplistic style, crammed with stats and tables, have remained fundamentally consistent. Even the placement of certain boxes and the blotchy color pattern have not changed in 20 years.

“I like to have everything in the same spot on every page,” he said. “They’ve got websites where everything is splashed across, and you click here. No, I like black and white, left to right, straight lines.”