Of good women and sports blogging

Dear Peter,

You definitely identify a major conundrum of the odd enterprise of intercollegiate athletics weblogging.  

As you know, I have, on occasion, sought the input of fellow bloggers regarding the best means by which to promote one's site, attract first-time visitors, and keep readers coming back.  One blogger not affilitated with Burnt Orange Nation replied, only half facetiously, that pictures of good-looking women didn't hurt.  

Susan is fairly understanding of that sort of thing, but, even if it starts to bother her, I have no fear that she will stop reading Dawg Sports because of it.  

Dawg Sports grew out of my prior weblog, Kyle on Football, which was in turn an outgrowth of the mass e-mails I used to send out to a burgeoning group of family, friends, and friends of friends before Paul Westerdawg informed me that there was a better way.  

Tracing the chain of causation back still further, the e-mails that antedated my weblogging were the product of research I did for "The Dawg Show," which I co-hosted on local cable T.V. for six seasons (1999-2004).  

"The Dawg Show" started because my brother-in-law, Travis Rice, was the news director for the local cable channel in Henry County, Ga., and his boss was looking for new programming.  In truth, though, the idea for "The Dawg Show" came not from us, but from our wives.  

The concept of "The Dawg Show" was always "two guys in a sports bar."  (For five of the six years of the show's run, in fact, we taped the show in a sports bar.)  The premise was that we weren't experts, we were just two guys who loved Georgia football and were having a slightly more refined version of the conversations being had in sports bars throughout Bulldog Nation.  The fan was supposed to get a glimmer of recognition at thoughts he had had or remarks he had made.  

Basically, "The Dawg Show" was a televised, truncated version of the conversations Trav and I would have over the course of eight hours of sitting on the couch in one of our living rooms while watching college football all day.  

In other words, our wives encouraged us to do "The Dawg Show"---and, by extension, Susan encourages me to do Dawg Sports---so that other people will have to listen to all this stuff rather than Trav's and my respective spouses.  

Susan gives my weblog a look every now and again, but she isn't a regular reader because she doesn't have to be.  She doesn't read Dawg Sports; she lives it.  

Thanks, as always, for getting the diary discussion started.  

Kyle