In just a couple of months, Susan and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. This is a good thing, for many reasons and on multiple levels, and one of the ancillary benefits of being married is not having to deal with being single.

I have been told by numerous women of various backgrounds over many years that what they look for in a guy is decency, kindness, intelligence, and a sense of humor. As a decent, kind, smart guy with a sense of humor, I used to take heart at hearing such a declaration . . . until I came to realize that it usually was the last thing I heard right before the declarant stopped talking to me so she could go off with a guy who was rich, handsome, arrogant, and emotionally distant.

Fortunately, being married, I no longer have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of dating, but I still found myself intrigued when the Ladies . . . announced that they would be hosting a hot blogger bracket competition to determine the most desirable sports weblogger.

For the record, I have Warren St. John winning it all in my office pool.

Here, I thought, was a competition in which the bar would be set sufficiently low that I might stand a chance. No longer would my intellectual ability and my inherent likeability be a hindrance; here, in a field composed mostly of heavy-set guys with pasty-white complexions sitting in their parents' basements in their underwear, my overwhelming averageness of appearance would operate as a benefit! In the land of the unattractive, the bland man is king!

Accordingly, with Susan's blessing, I entered, never suspecting that the competition would be as hotly (with two T's?) contested as it has turned out to be.

One of the requirements was that I submit a photograph. As it turns out, there really are only two recent photographs of me that do me any justice at all, both of which are familiar to regular Dawg Sports readers. There is this one:

. . . and then there is this one:

I went with the latter because, frankly, all the former really does is confirm that Doug Gillett is better looking and more hip than I am.

I had counted on obtaining an advantage from the fact that I am so nondescript of appearance that I likely could not be picked out of a police lineup by casual acquaintances, but, clearly, the inability to stand out in a crowd was not going to be quite the benefit that I had hoped. Accordingly, I had to rely on my writing sample.

Although some bloggers broke the rules and submitted multiple writing samples, I stayed within the established parameters and, hoping against hope, crossed my fingers and submitted The Last Will and Testament of Orson Swindle. In retrospect, I should have gone with my attack on Mike Greenberg's metrosexuality, which at least had the virtue of revealing my manly impatience with girly twerps who were willing to trade in their masculinity for a high-dollar hair gel.

So, yeah, I am so totally not making it into this bracket.

I'm going to get bounced from the blogger N.I.T. in the second round.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, but what is a fellow to do . . . compliment Holly on her polka dots, perhaps? Left with no other recourse, I am forced to play my trump card:

That's my son, Thomas. He's four years old and he just finished his first season of tee-ball. Yes, he wears the number 34 and, yes, he knows who else wore that number . . . and, yes, I have an identical T-shirt that says "Thomas' Dad" on the back.

Ladies, I'm a decent, kind, intelligent guy with a sense of humor whose willingness to commit is reflected in the fact that I've been married to the same woman for nearly 10 years and I go to my kid's tee-ball games. I'm the guy your mother hoped you would end up with and I fit the description of the guy all of you say you want.

If I don't make the field, ladies, every one of us will know that every one of you is lying.

Go 'Dawgs!