your humble blogger joins the big dogs

We'd interrupt this blog for an important programming update, but you just started reading so it's not really an interruption. But there is an important programming update. FOV has joined the Blogpoll, the blogoweb version of the much ballyhooed** AP and Coaches' polls that are second only to eBay auctions in causing otherwise sane people to refresh their screens forty times a minute on otherwise productive Sunday afternoons. Just to see if that 15-point win over Duke looked as good to the pollsters as it did to us.

(Wait......I'm the only one that does that? Huh. I guess that's why I write a blog and you have a life.)

Anyway, the Blogpoll is operated and hosted by the estimable MGoBlog, and you can read about it here. What this means for the programming: Sundays or Mondays, or possibly Tuesdays (I reserve the right to be inconsistent) you will see in this space a list of 25 teams. The Blogpoll works the same way the media ones do. Pollsters rank teams, teams rack up points, aggregate list results in the rankings. So the FOV rankings will be listed here, for you to yell at me about the same way you gripe about the media ones, and on Wednesdays each week during the season, the Blogpoll in all it's glory is posted on MGoBlog, and probably various other places around the blogonets too. The real nice thing about the griping you do here as opposed to griping about the media polls is that the guys in the press box do not give a rat pellet what you think. On the other hand I am rather flexible and if a strong enough case is made that no way is Florida #12 they should AT LEAST be #11!!!! then changes can be made. It's the advantage of not needing ink to write.

Well, speaking of writing blogs, have I got some bloggery for you. Meet the Team day was yesterday, and predictably, the media had questions. And because Al Groh is still Al Groh, none of them got answered. I ought to check myself, of course. The media really had only one question. You're asking, too. All together now:

"Who's going to start at quarterback?"

And Groh's answer came loud and clear, as if shouted from the heights and rebounding in the dells:

"%&#$ OFF"

(I'm paraphrasing.) But it sent the scribes home more or less empty-handed all the same, and they all wrote the same article for their editors, and you can read them all here, here, here, and here. Generally if you read one you've read them all. Groh might have an idea in his head who he'd like to see step up and take the job, but if so he's not saying even that. What he's saying is this:

"It might take some games to find out who the one quarterback is or who the two are that we should plan on playing," Groh said. "It might take a few games to find that out."

In other words, hello 2006. And the thinking around these parts is that that is bad news. They say if you have two quarterbacks you don't have any. What if you have three?

But we may not be the only ones with a quarterback issue. This is probably not news, but the Trojans' Mark Sanchez, anointed starter, dislocated his kneecap in practice on Friday, which means it's possible that former Arkansas newsmaker Mitch Mustain could make his college debut in Scott Stadium on August 30. Something to keep an eye on.

EDIT: Ignore the above line about college debut. I am stupid. Obviously for anyone who ever heard of college football, Mustain has played the game before. It was frankly pretty hard to miss, given the whirlwind of controversy it (and he) caused when he was later benched again.

After the quarterbacks, the second biggest story (you can read this in pretty much any of the above links as well) was the kicking competition. Groh called the spring kicking "horrible", which tells you why the scholarship player on the roster is in a dead-even fight with two walk-ons.

**I've been waiting for a while for the right chance to use that word in a sentence. Also, BallyHooed would be a good name for a UVA blog. Aspiring fellow UVA bloggers, you may use that one. It's cool.