Here are some answers to your questions...

Before we start in with , a few caveats regarding our Following Football posts, to answer reoccurring questions...

 *** We'll call everything in this Tuesday-through-Monday time frame "Week 7", even though for the NFL it's actually their eighth week (and for the CFL it's week 16!), just as a common frame of reference. So Week 7 starts today (October 14th), Week 8 on October 21st; and they'll end with the Monday Night Football game of the week (October 20th for Week 7, for example). All clear?

*** We use point spreads as a means of reference only regarding what the expected outcome of games are. We do NOT advocate betting on football (or anything else, for that matter). As a matter of fact, those of us running FF have literally never bet on football, not even the office Super Bowl pools (which are technically illegal, by the way!). Besides that, our predictions are regularly terrible, and anyone basing their betting on our preferences is twice foolish...

*** We try to cover all four brands of football listed fairly evenly, in season: for the American readers, our NFL and NCAA coverage will be the most familiar to you, but we also want to expose you to the wide-open wonders up north in the Canadian CFL and (our preference!) the non-stop, high-flying action of the Australian AFL. American football tends to run August through January; Canada from June through November, and Australia from March through September. (And we'll have to find something to do in February...)

*** We have no favorite teams here at Following Football. Because we're based in Idaho, we tend to cover stories around the western region more than the rest, but not substantially, and we're more interested in stories, in the unusual occurrences, and in building fan interest in all the different forms of the game. (There's no reason we wouldn't expand down the road into rugby, or Gaelic football, or some other version - but we want to start with what we know.)

*** Finally, we want to encourage you to join in the discussion! Use the comments section after each post to contribute your thoughts - don't just let us know privately what you think! We hope to encourage dialogue on the topics we present. It'll be our job here to make sure it doesn't devolve into the name-calling and obscenities that many such sites seem to allow. Thanks!