Who am I? What am I doing here?

Last night, I almost went to see LSU vs. Bama in gymnastics. Gymnastics here is a big deal. The meets are better attended than the men's basketball games, in part because the tickets are cheaper than a movie ticket, and in part because a lot of young girls here do gymnastics. My wife has season tickets and she goes with a friend. The friend had to leave town, and I was going to take her ticket because it was LSU and because my wife needed someone to go with her. I've been before, and I have to say it was a lot of fun, and I don't even particularly like gymnastics. I did not make it last night, however, because I took my wife to the hospital. We thought we were having out baby, but it turns out we weren't.

Anyway, since I don't have gymnastics to talk about, I'll just do a postmortem on my first week of keeping a blog. I'll also tell you a little more about why I'm doing this.

I've been a poster at TigerDroppings for a long time. In my time at TigerDroppings, it has evolved from a fairly small community of posters to a huge, bawdy festival of LSU-ness. It is undoubtedly (though I have no statistics to back this up) the single largest and most heavily trafficked LSU-related site on the web.

I respect what Chicken has managed to accomplish. I'm sure Droppings has surpassed his expectations many times over. My problem with Droppings is that, at its size, it has kind of left me behind a little bit. Though there is still great content from many of the posters there, the signal-to-noise ratio has gone way down since 2003. There are so many posters there, and so much activity, that there is little sense of any permanence in any of the writing there. If you start a new topic at a high traffic time, chances are decent that it will fall off of the first page and into oblivion within an hour or so, unless you say something inflammatory or excessively optimistic. The result, I think, is that it discourages in-depth analysis, and the culture has gotten increasingly combative and negative.

Why spend 20 minutes writing out carefully crafted thoughts at TigerDroppings? Most responses will be along the lines of, "I don't come here to read novels," or "That's 2 minutes of my life I'll never have back", and the post will slowly sink to the bottom of the page and into oblivion, never to be seen again. You get a lot more permanence and a lot better response if you say something like, "Check out the [boobs] on Tim Tebow's girlfriend," or "John Brady is teh suck," or make some kind of disparaging remark about DandyDon. I'm not trying to be elitist or anything, but that just isn't my style.

That's why I decided to start this. Well, that and plain old vanity. This is my place for writing about football in more depth, in a place that has more permanence, even if the traffic is a lot lighter. So, place me alongside the Dandy Dons of the world, writing an LSU blog, though I think if you stick around, you'll see that my style is a lot different from ol' Dandy's.

Don't get me wrong, I also respect what he has done. He has kept an LSU blog since long before anyone used the word "blog". At the time he started, I was living in Delaware. The Advocate was just starting to get an online presence, and Dandy was probably my single best source of LSU news. His style is to a little more scattershot than mine, however. He tries to tell you a little bit about everything going on, while I will try to take one topic at a time and give you a lot of depth of analysis. He gets a lot of criticism, but I bet his track record on "scoops" is as good as you'll find at the other sites.

As for what you can expect in the near future, I'm thinking about eventually inviting some guest posters. I have some people in mind who can add a very helpful and interesting perspective, if they're interested in bringing it here. I also have a lot of posts already in the hopper, just waiting to go. Right now, a lot of thoughts are going through my head, and I'm writing them down to turn into posts. Some of them are completed or almost completed, but I'm holding off on them because I will need to have SOMETHING available to post when my baby comes and time becomes a bigger problem.

Among the expected topics in the future:

• Why it's not a bad thing when a player leaves the program.
• Why people look at the 40 yard dash to evaluate players, and why they shouldn't.
• What the heck is a quarterback rating, anyway?
• Richard Murphy, the most highly anticipated redshirt freshman running back in my memory.
• My completely useless March Madness coverage, which may necessitate bringing in a guest writer.
• Why I don't like Tubby Smith's coaching style
  

So stick with me.