With less than a month to go before the start of the 2008 Louisville football season, The Courier-Journal's U of L beat writer, Brian Bennett, announced Monday that he is leaving the paper to take a position at ESPN.com as the resident Big East football blogger.

Bennett broke the news, appropriately enough, on his blog.

After nine years at The Courier-Journal, I am leaving to work for ESPN.com, where I'll be covering and blogging about Big East football as part of the site's new blog network. It's an exciting opportunity that allows me to stay in Louisville and cover a sport with which I'm already familiar.

I grew up reading the C-J and always wanted to work here and write about our local teams. So these past nine years, particularly the past two as the U of L beat writer, have been rewarding and fun. I've especially enjoyed the dialogue with you, the fans, through this outlet and others.

The easiest way to make friends in a new city is to rip on a local writer, but I thought Bennett did a pretty bang up job over the last two years.

While it is a bit depressing to see yet another talented C-J writer hit the road, I am kind of excited - for us and him - that he'll have a slightly larger (and decidedly funkier) box to work out of. I mean the man was booted out of a game for blogging, can reel off Flight of the Conchords quotes, and has advocated listening to both Jay-Z and Band of Horses; he was really one of us all along.

Welcome to the other side, Brian, where list writing is job requirement numero uno, people send you lengthy hate emails because they didn't read past the first two sentences of your post to realize you were being facetious, and anyone who you think might have taken a harmless shot at you is a douchebag.

Go ahead and take the shackles off and call someone a douchebag. Just do it. I'm gonna do it. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia: you are a douchebag, my friend.

He'll get the message. They always do.

I think it's safe to say that whoever lands Bennett's old gig is going to be walking into a pretty awkward situation.

I cast my vote for Petrino.