Where from here.

As I said last week, my goal is to return to more-or-less daily posting from now through the Thursday of the Big Ten Tournament (see, because the basketball team...it's gallows humor). The big caveat is that we are expecting son #2 in mid-October (yep, great timing, especially with my Cubs in first place), so things may get a bit dicey around that time. When football season begins, I'll be doing the usual preview/wrapup posts as I did last year, and I'm sure that the Big Ten Bloggers roundtables will begin soon (Northwestern blog Lake the Posts has been sponsoring an insanely detailed preseason prediction roundtable, but I did not partake).

Between now and then, I'll be doing the following:

• Before last football season, I did a "season that was" feature from scratch, recapping each game of the 2006 season. I plan to do the same this year, but this time I'll be able to recycle my own work, refreshing your mind and mine about how the memorable 2007 season transpired. These won't be on any sort of regular schedule, but I plan to start this week.
• In August, of course I will take a look at IU's returning roster: what the Hoosiers lost, who is returning, and the like.
• As with last season, I probably will preview IU's opponents during game week rather than before the season, but I will do my best to point you in the direction of preseason previews posted by bloggers covering IU's opponents.
• Last summer, I wrote quite a bit about the Big Ten Network saga. It's not nearly as up-in-the-air as last year, but it will be interesting to see whether the other major cable providers such as Time Warner and Bright House (I don't know if Bright House counts as major, but BH covers quite a bit of central Indiana, including downtown Indianapolis, the old city limits of Indianapolis, and some suburban areas) are on board by the time the football season begins.
• Of course, I'll continue to follow the NCAA saga and IU's search for a new athletic director.

What you won't see from me are any more predictions about the NCAA proceedings. Most conspicuously here, but also elsewhere, I was quite confident in my prediction that IU would not face a failure to monitor charge. I still stand by what I said about NCAA precedent, but this situation is unique and doesn't seem to fit in to any sort of framework. While penalties such as TV bans and postseason bans seem a bit much in these circumstances, it's now obvious to me that even though IU's NCAA record was pristine, the NCAA is going to treat IU as a "repeat offender" to the full extent possible as punishment for hiring Sampson. Nothing would surprise me at this point, so no more confident predictions from this corner. As I said in the linked post:

I think there are two competing equities here that will pull the NCAA Committee on Infractions in two directions: first, the temptation to hammer IU for knowingly hiring a coach with an NCAA history who then committed similar infractions in his first year, on one hand; and on the other, IU's attempts to monitor the behavior of the staff and IU's prompt self-report and investigation.

The Committee made clear a couple of weeks ago in which direction they are being pulled.

In any event, it's football season, and my focus will be there for now.