How excited are you?

For the past couple weeks lots of people have asked me how I'm feeling about the upcoming season. On an excitement scale of 1 to 10, I'm about a 6.

On the one hand, I think our offense will be fun to watch, and there's a lot of upside to the young guys we have playing there. Clay and Brown at running back. Toon and the gang at wideout. The line. Let's see how good Tolzien is. Can Phillips work his way into more snaps?

On the other hand, as much as I'm looking forward to seeing the new guys on defense, last year's defense was underwhelming, and a lot of those guys were experienced, talented, multi-year starters. Can we really expect to improve, or at least maintain?

On the one hand, when my expectations for a season are muted, we've had a history of responding with very pleasant efforts. 2005 comes to mind.

On the other hand, we could very well lose to Northern Illinois tomorrow night. Wofford? Hell, Cal Poly almost beat us last year, and The Citadel hung 31 on us at Camp Randall two years ago. And I'm going into the season counting on losing to Minnesota, which obviously isn't good.

So the college football bug hasn't bitten me as hard this year as in most years, but I tell you what: I was in the bathroom the other night and heard an ad on TV for tomorrow's Virginia Tech-Alabama game and got excited. I stayed up late (for me anyway) to watch Boise State and Oregon play last night in the battle of terrible home field vs. terrible uniforms. At about 10 a.m. tomorrow I'll be wishing I was in Madison.

6? Make it a 7.