FPM: Welcome to UConn Football Preview Month-ish

For some eight months now - since UConn's pasting of South Carolina in a mostly-ignored bowl named after a somewhat decent pizza chain - we at TheUConnBlog have been growing anxious and excited for the following UConn football season.

I just wanted to type that and see what it looked like. Weird.

We're entering heady days, people. Heady days. Today at 4 p.m., fall camp will open at the Shenkman Center in Storrs. It's very nearly football season.

And for the first time in program history, UConn football fans - few though there may be, given the basketball program's 20-year head start on the world-domination plan - have expectations to compete for a spot at the big boys' table. True, UConn was just 8-5 last season - a season from hell made palatable by life-affirming wins over Notre Dame, South Florida and USC-East - but as you'll read over the next month, we at TheUConnBlog are thinking big.

To put it very simply, yes: I think it's possible UConn can win the Big East, completing the transformation from "Atlantic-10 also-ran" to "BCS bowl game blowout victim" well ahead of schedule. (This is as far away from the blog's official collective position - see tagline above - as I can get without being seditious.)

With that in mind, we at TheUConnBlog are proud to announce the beginning of our second annual UConn football preview. There's quite a bit to discuss, so instead of hitting you with one action-packed week-ish of content (as we did last year), we're going to space out our pieces; we'll let ourselves explore the studio space, to ape that terribly overrated SNL sketch.

That's why we're calling this Football Preview Month-ish. We are, as of the moment I am posting this, 26 days, 3 hours and 30 minutes away from UConn's season opener in Ann Arbor. In between this moment and kickoff, we'll be posting one or two preview pieces per day. They'll include position primers, opponent capsules and a year-by-year review of UConn football since joining Division I-A, along with a few other things we think you'll find interesting.

Chew on them. Digest them. Maybe even toss us a comment or two(!). Learn the names, mock the opponents, wonder at what a long strange trip it's been since Randy Edsall was recruiting out of a dirty trailer in between the field hockey field and the dilapidated high school-sized football stadium.

And get pumped. You can say you knew about UConn football before it was cool. (Alternatively, you will look back cynically after UConn goes 9-4 and wins the Yankee Bowl and laugh at the naivete. Either way).

Below the jump, the full schedule (lineup subject to change, no money back) for Football Preview Month-ish, in handy chart form:

In addition to the pieces you see scheduled below, we have a few other goodies in the planning stages. And of course that's in addition to our regular hilarious and informative non-football-preview-y content. Start counting the days, people. Hope you enjoy Football Preview Month-ish, and let's go Huskies.