While today's soggy, nasty weather isn't exactly a recipe for high spirits across the Northeast, at least we have this:

With the calendar turning to October, Midnight Madness is two weeks away -- and college hoops season is essentially already here.

Fall workouts are in full swing across the country, with formal practices around the corner. The fall recruiting season is in full swing, with some schools (Rutgers) potentially reshaping their programs' identities and others (the Fran-McCaffery-led Hawkeyes) starting to put the pieces together.

And though I've been busy doing everything from getting the paper out to coordinating Trentonian.com's new digital high school football coverage and working with other members of the Journal Register Co's ideLab team, the blog should be running at a high level between now and May.

We're still finalizing plans in a few areas, but here's a preview of what we'll have in store.

1. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. ... The MAAC Games of the Week, power rankings and picks will be back, as will coverage of every Rider home game and ALMOST every away game. It's never easy for me to get out to Buffalo, and I doubt I'll be able to make the USC game, but either I or one of The Trentonian's correspondents should be at every non-Buffalo MAAC game, in addition to the three games in Western Massachusetts and the Pitt, La Salle and Howard non-conference games.

2. Live chats during all of the aforementioned Rider games and during select other times throughout the year. We had a better-than-expected turnout for the chat during the announcement of all-MAAC teams last March.

How many chats we run depends exclusively on how much of a turnout we figure to get. So I'll throw this out there now: On which other occasions would you tune in for a chat?

During MAAC media day?

Once a week, possibly with various beat writers and columnists chiming in?

Any other times? Leave a comment, send me an e-mail (bdoody@trentonian.com) or -- most conveniently -- hit me up on Twitter @bendoody.

3. In case you haven't noticed, the team up Route 206 from Rider has gotten a heck of a lot better over the past three years.

When I got to The Trentonian in 2007, once-proud Princeton had become an Ivy League afterthought. But that's hardly the case anymore. With Cornell getting clobbered by graduation losses and a coaching change and Harvard losing all-universe point guard Jeremy Lin, the Tigers will enter the season as the favorite to win the Ivy title and capture the league's NCAA tournament berth.

That means expanded Tigers coverage both here and at Trentonian.com. The Tigers coverage won't in any way take away from the MAAC and Rider coverage, but should help expand the blog's reach beyond its MAAC base.

4. Like Princeton, Rutgers has given fans reason to pay attention. The Scarlet Knights are likely in for a dreadful 2010-11 season, but as I type, Mike Rice's 2011 recruiting class is ranked seventh in the nation by Rivals.com. So we'll have as much Rutgers content as possible.

5. We'll continue to monitor the progress of former MAAC players playing professionally -- especially Jason Thompson, Kenny Hasbrouck and Ryan Thompson in the NBA.

If there's anything you'd like to see here that isn't listed above, let me know. In the meantime, hope everyone had a relaxing offseason and is rarin' to go for another season.