Greetings Nittany Nation and welcome to the Collegian's first-ever blog dedicated to Penn State football.

Why start this blog, you ask? Isn't the blogosphere crowded enough already?
The reasons are fairly simple:

1) There's a lot of information that we, the football writers, gather or hear throughout the week that doesn't make it into the paper edition. This will be a place where you can find tidbits that don't necessarily warrant an entire article.

2) For those of you that didn't get tickets and won't have access to the Big Ten Network, we'll be live blogging the Florida International and Buffalo games in detail. If you can't watch, you might as well read.

3) To keep you current with happenings around the Big Ten, or country. It's good sometimes to realize what's going on outside the campus bubble. We will be writing a weekly article off the Big Ten coaches' conference call for the paper, but there always seems to be some leftover information or some stories from other college newspapers that Penn State students never hear about.

4) To have some fun, too. This is the Collegian's first attempt at a football-only blog but we figure it's a good place to encourage reader feedback, positive or negative. So if you have any thoughts of your own, information or rumors (i.e. I saw Dan Connor hobbling around campus with a full leg cast -- completely hypothetical, by the way) please send them along to footblog@psu.edu.

There are three of us writers and we have one cranky but enjoyable football editor. We'll all hopefully contribute here regularly and we'll collectively respond to any questions or comments in a weekly mailbag posted on the blog.

I'm Corey McLaughlin and my beat brethren are Mark Viera and Kevin Horan. Josh Moyer covered the team last season and is back for more as our lovely editor now. You may remember Moyer from this column he wrote about the Temple football program last year.

And as always, don't forget about the Collegian's dead tree edition. You can send letters to the editor by following the instructions here:

'Til next time,
-- Corey