Preseason prognosticators like Athlon Sports — the most accurate college football preview magazine on the stand — use many things to attempt to predict what the coming football season will look like. Returning starters, scheduling, historic trends, coaching, pending off the field issues and, of course, recruiting rankings all help Athlon editors predict the future of college football.

National Signing Day 2013 is right around the corner and Athlon Sports is releasing its position-by-position rankings for the Class of 2013 based on the Athlon Consensus 100. Who is left on the board? Who has the best class at one position? Who had positional needs to fill?

The merits of recruiting rankings are debated in every sports bar and around every water cooler in the nation. Athlon continues its look at how each all-conference team ranked as high school recruits with the first-team All-Big East team.

Related: College Football's 2012 All-American Team as Recruits

2012 Offensive All-Big East Team as Recruits

As the college football season draws near, Athlon Sports is making sure fans know exactly when and where to tune in this fall. Here are the Big East's Top 20 must-see football games for the 2012 season:

-by Braden Gall (follow on twitter @AthlonBraden)

Athlon Sports recognizes some of the best, worst, most unfortunate, bizarre and confusing teams, players and statistics of the 2011 season:

The Boy Named Sue Award: Collin Klein, Kansas State

We have ranked every college football program in the country, based on the attractiveness of the position from a coaching perspective. We considered many factors — tradition, facilities, location, money  — but in the end, we simply asked ourselves the following question: Where would we want to coach?

(Note: Current or impending NCAA sanctions were not a factor in these rankings.)