In a perfect world I would have announced that I am taking over day to day coverage of the UConn football program with the first blog entry.

However, I wanted to meet with UConn coach Paul Pasqualoni first and since news broke on the beat before that took place, I have been posting some recruiting news as well as updates on UConn players in the NFL so in some ways I am putting the cart in front of the horse with the announcement that I am the Register's new UConn football beat writer but better late than never, I guess.

With the Big East coaches and selected players being available to the media tomorrow and Tuesday, I guess this is as good a time as any to write this blog. I am no stranger to UConn having covered nine Final Fours and five national championship teams during my stints at the UConn women's basketball beat writer and will continue to cover the UConn women in addition to handling UConn football coverage. I also spent a year covering recruiting of UConn several years back and have covered an occasional UConn football game. For the last four years I was a Yale football beat writer and also was the Register's lead high school football writer for a few years. My love of college football began when I spent two years in Miami in the early 1980s. I was a regular at the University of Miami home games during the 1983 and 1984 seasons and was in the stands when Miami beat Nebraska in the 1984 to win the program's first national championship.

I know I have no easy task following in the footsteps of former beat writer Chip Malafronte. Chip has taken a new role as the Register's sports columnist and I imagine he will still be around UConn quite a bit. Every person handles an assignment differently and I am sure this will be the case with me as well. I will do my best to provide recruiting news as well as trying to bring insight into the players who suit up for UConn. There are interesting times in the college football world with the unstable environment surrounding conference realignment, the long desired move to a playoff system in the highest level of collegiate football and of course there is the situation at Penn State which continues to unfold. I'm very excited about my new assignment. It will be a much different situation from my time covering Yale when I was pretty much the only newspaper to cover the team (not counting the campus newspaper). That is certainly not the case with UConn so I clearly have my work cut out for me.

In addition to my twitter account NHRJimFuller, I have created a facebook page at www.facebook.com https://www.facebook.com/UConnFootball which I encourage you to like as I will be posting updates on that page.

When I sat down with Paul Pasqualoni on Monday the future of the Big East was one of the topics of the interview. I filed a story for tomorrow's paper about that subject. I was curious to get Pasqualoni's take on the impending departure of Syracuse for the ACC since he won more than 100 games during his 14 seasons as the Syracuse head coach and guided the Orange to nine bowl games. He was more focused on who was coming into the Big East than he was who was leaving and also addressed how the addition of teams from Florida, Texas and California could positively impact UConn's recruiting. The video below has Pasqualoni's thoughts on those subjects.