All Aboard

Hi everybody, and welcome to FromTheBleachers.net, my new college football blog.

A quick introduction: I grew up an Auburn fan, and graduated from AU in 1992. By profession I'm an aerospace engineer, but like Bo Jackson, I have a hobby during the fall. I've been writing about college football on- and off-line since the early 1990's. Scott Brown and I co-wrote "The Uncivil War," about the Auburn-Alabama series, in 1995, and I've also written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Birmingham News, Birmingham Post-Herald and Inside the Auburn Tigers along the way. In 1997, I started up my own site, Will's World, which ran more-or-less regularly until late 2000. By the time I first heard the word "blog," I'd semi-retired the site after four years of twice-weekly columns on all kinds of subjects; maybe 15 or 20% of the content there was sports-related.

"FTB" started life as a Monday-morning opinion column at AuburnSports.com five years ago, and was called "the best thing on the site" by Rivals.com co-founder Will Woods (and I didn't even have to bribe him for it). I continued to write the weekly columns at my own site after AuburnSports dropped all their opinion content prior to the 2004 season (a story worth retelling on another day), but I dropped the ball (and the column) last year.

After a good deal of thought and more than a little complaining from readers, I decided to ressurect FTB this year as a blog. I've been the emergency backup blogger at Stephen Green's Vodkapundit for three years now, and I've stretched Steve's good nature more than far enough by dropping in with Auburn and college football content over at VP. Needing a more appropriate place for that content and wanting to get back into the sports commentary game led inevitably to FTB, The Blog.

Besides which, I've become a big fan of Orson Swindle's hysterical Every Day Should Be Saturday, and I'm not about to let some no-account Gator lawyer have all the fun.

So that's it, and more than enough about me. The season's less than a week away, and even though it isn't quite time to head to the bleachers, it's more than time enough to get the tailgating started.