Welcome, Falcon fans.

We’re going to try something new this fall camp, and we think you’ll enjoy it. Ay-Ziggy-Zoomba.com Webmaster Grant Cummings and I are on the wrong side of the ever growing unemployment rate and have realized we’re struggling to fill all of the free time on our hands. Grant has combated his boredom by playing with his new born baby girl. I’m relying on NCAA Football 2010, BLL’s (Bud Light Limes, of course) and Facebook/Twitter.

Those activities only take up about 12 hours of my day — although too many BLL’s usually means I’m useless the next day until 1 or 2 p.m. — so I’m looking at other hobbies. I enjoy skiing, but that’s a few months off. Camping and screwing around on the wave runner are fun activities, but my friends aren’t in favor of anything that involves being outdoors — unless we’re talking about the patio at Ziggy’s Bar, which I suppose counts. After concluding that my natural hobbies are writing and sports, I decided I want to have a little fun and mix them together in an effort to deliver a cool product to you.

With the help of Grant, I’m going to cover BGSU fall football camp for Ay-Ziggy-Zoomba.com. As a jobless newspaper reporter, I hope to capitalize on this whole Internet thing by providing amenities that newspapers cannot — video interviews, blogs, and maybe some podcasts if we get really motivated. We’re not going to take ourselves too seriously on here. Sure, we’ll do our best to provide useful information, but we’re going to take some chances, tell some immature jokes and, of course, give gambling advice on MAC games (18 games above .500 against the spread a year ago). We’ll have to see how everything goes, but we might extend this project into the football season, while obviously keeping an eye on basketball as well (scroll to the bottom of the post to read about Monday’s difficulties at Anderson Arena).

Some of you may know me. I’m Ryan Autullo, and I covered BGSU sports for The Blade beginning Aug. 2007 and ending when I got laid off Dec. 2008. I know this is going to sound like I’m bitter, but does seniority seem like a constructive way of determining layoffs? Imagine if your team’s coach had to cut eight players. Would you feel comfortable about the direction of that program if the coach blindly cut the eight players with the least amount of seniority? No. No you wouldn’t.

Quick side note: My final story at The Blade was on Perrysburg stud T.J. Fatinikun signing with the University of Toledo, an announcement that came a few weeks after he de-committed from Bowling Green. I wasn’t happy that my last written memory at The Blade was about a kid spurning my alma mater to head to the rival, but I can appreciate good irony.

(Also, I’m putting biases aside and hoping Fatinikun has a great career. Very, very nice kid, who often called me simply to vent about how difficult the recruiting process was becoming. Mike Ward worked his tail off to get Fatinikun to jump ship to UT.)

Sorry, I just noticed I’m getting long winded. But give me a break, it’s the first blog I’ve written since late December. Incidentally, that blog post — which handicapped the candidates for the BGSU football job — was torn apart on the radio by a very angry Dan Dakich. Maybe I can go back-to-back and write something nasty about The Blade on this blog post that will get blasted in tomorrow morning’s paper. Nah, I have way too many friends there that I love. But anyway, yeah, I’m sorry for being long-winded, and I also apologize for any blatant grammar or spelling mistakes. My only writing fix over the last seven months has been Facebook statuses and credit card slips from Uptown/Downtown.

I’ll wrap up (or is it rap? See, I told you my grammar is slipping) this blog post by just saying I’m looking forward to providing you decent coverage of BGSU sports over the next few weeks or longer. Grant, who is the web site know-it-all in our partnership, and I hope to post some interviews tomorrow from the first day of fall football camp. Some technical difficulties are preventing us from posting Monday’s video interviews with women ballers Maggie Hennegan and Tamika Nurse. Actually, the only technical difficultly we’ve run into is, technically, I was operating the camera, and now we’re having difficulties finding the videos. Whoops. Just as I asked you to take it easy on me for this way-too-long rant and my sluggish grammar, please be patient with us in regards to uploading video. But we’ll figure it out.

Give me by the end of the night and I’ll post a blog breaking down this year’s Falcon football team. I think they’re going to do fine. They’re not going to crash the BCS or anything, but they’ll win games,

Any suggestions, questions, or complaints, e-mail me at rautullo@gmail.com.