D.C. Sports Bog

Daniel M. Snyder stood in a FedEx Field concourse Tuesday afternoon, wearing casual slacks, a Redskins parka and football gloves, and helping distribute around 3,500 turkeys to Prince George's County residents.

It's the sort of event that can help humanize an owner, and I suppose it did, to some extent. One man called out Snyder's name so effusively the owner blushed. Another older woman reached in for the sort of awkward hug we've all been a part of while leaving Great Aunt Bertha's. But as noted below, his post-turkey interaction with the media was sort of uncomfortable and brief and unenlightening, like interviewing a press release in a parka.

About two hours later, after news had broken of Abe Pollin's death, Snyder called into his own radio station - ESPN 980 - and did more to humanize himself than thousands of turkey giveaways could ever accomplish.

"When I was a little kid, we moved to New York for a while," Snyder remembered. "We had an uncle that passed. We lived with my grandmother. And we moved in, and my father was working a little bit in New York, and we would go across the street and get the newspapers that came out in the middle of the night when [the Bullets] were playing Seattle. [ellip] It goes way back. I mean, if you're a Washingtonian, you have to have loved Abe Pollin."

It's the sentiment of the day, and Snyder expressed it well. But it's harder to remember that there was a time - a time that continued until about five minutes before his death - when at least some fans had less kind words for Pollin. They complained about his salary scale. They complained about him changing the team's name and colors. They complained about personnel decisions. They complained about the championship drought.

"Unfair criticism," Snyder said at one point in the interview.

For the second time in recent weeks, Redskins owner Daniel Snyder addressed the media during a Tuesday charity event, this time a Thanksgiving food basket giveaway at FedEx Field.

A large group of media members gathered around Snyder in a stadium lobby while about a dozen players and hundreds of corporate volunteers handed out 3,500 turkeys to Prince George's County residents in the stadium concourse.

"The community of Prince George's County is just so important to us," said Snyder, who had spent more than an hour handing out turkeys and interacting with the public. "And obviously with FedEx Field here, we're just happy to give back, and this year we're doing a little bit extra, as everyone should nowadays."

NBC's Lindsay Czarniak then asked the only questions of Snyder.

"Dan, talking to people in the community here, they know what a big difference you make," she began. "And this is the same community that wants to know that you guys are gonna make changes and that is starting to lose faith in the organization. What do you say to them about that?"

The past week of Wizards' soap operettas could have perhaps easily been avoided if the players who were throwing bombs at anonymous teammates would have just been more specific. Then we needn't have worried about exactly who was mad at whom, who wasn't talk to which locker mate, who thought which teammate was beefing with which friend of that other guy who's dating the girl from across town's sister's neighbor's plumber's mailman's masseuse's sleigh driver's best friend's mother's daughter's mother. Or whatever. Let's review the messy chain of events that finally led to differences resolved.

(And for the record, it goes without saying that what I really think should happen is players should stop ripping each other in the media. I'm just joking with the rest of this.)

(I also think it's beyond bizarre that DeShawn Stevenson showed up to LeBron James's after-party last Wednesday. But this isn't the time for asking those questions, I guess. Original images via D.C. Fab; editing by Mister Irrelevant.)

Wednesday: Comcast SportsNet airs an explosive interview with Antawn Jamison, in which he calls out his teammates, real bad. Chris Miller asked Jamison if the new offense was part of the problem. Jamison's response:

"Nah, that's excuses. Don't make excuses. There's no excuse. You know, we had a meeting before the season got started, and coach sat everybody down and said this is what your role is and this is what I expect. And I've been seeing a lot of guys not living up to their roles. It's just guys got to check their egos at the door, go out there and the most important thing is to win."

Ok, so we're not sure who's egos have been left unchecked, but since this critique seems sort of general. I can let that slide. Then, however, Miller asked about The Night of Flying Honeydew, when Jamison someone threw a fruit platter in Indianapolis and Jamison launched a post-game locker-room rant. His answer:

The big national media folks are covering my favorite little indie band, and so I'm going to react with the usual mix of prideful satisfaction over the validation and immature resentment over them not totally getting it. The Wall Street Journal sank its teeth into the Burgundy Revolution this week, under this fairly provocative headline: "Are the Redskins Losing Washington? Another Bad Season and Continued Missteps Are Loosening a Disparate Region's Ties to Its Team."

I'm even going to quibble with the headline. Maybe I'm living in a warped bubble of passionate sports bloghood, but to me this Revolution stuff has been mostly about anger, not apathy. If people didn't care so much, they wouldn't be so upset.

Also, "another bad season" feels wrong to me. They weren't bad last year, and they weren't bad the year before. Over the past five seasons, the team went 37-43 with two playoff appearances. They've been the definition of mediocre; the badness is pretty new.

Anyhow, three things that were interesting from the story, and two substantive complaints.

Declining national popularity

These three sentences are the most striking in the piece.

A Harris Interactive poll taken in 2003 put the Redskins at No. 6 in the NFL in nationwide popularity. In the most recent poll taken earlier this year, they had fallen to No. 17.

"It's very possible that the ownership of this team has ruptured themselves in a way with the fans where a lot of them are through," says John Riggins, a former star Redskins running back who has been openly critical of the team's current owner, Daniel Snyder.

Many Redskins fans still consider their franchise to somehow rank with the NFL's most prestigious franchises, but 17th nationwide is their lowest Harris ranking in at least a decade, and that ain't prestigious.

On the other hand....

Welcome back to another year of local college basketball voting. Due to Redskins fans complaining about the front office, and then somehow finding their way to my blog, and then my traffic numbers going up, we now have easily the largest voting pool in Atlantic 11 history. To start, there were 109 voters eager to judge the difference between William & Mary and Morgan State.

As always, the 27 Division I schools in D.C., Maryland and Virginia are eligible. With so many voters, several of whom appear to be bad at filling out online survey forms, every single school managed to attract at least one vote. Bear in mind that with this many voters, I can't possibly monitor for horrific voters, so some bad apples might slip through, like whoever voted for Liberty, which is 1-4 with a win against Southern Virginia.

This is the poll's fourth year; the previous crowns were won by Georgetown ('07 and '08) and VCU ('09). And by the looks of things, longtime friends Georgetown and Maryland will be battling it out for early-season Atlantic 11 supremacy. Not on the court, though. Duh.

Since last year's final poll, American, Radford, VMI, Mount St. Mary's and UMBC fell out of the rankings, while George Washington, Virginia, Richmond and William & Mary entered. Seven different teams received first-place votes. Bear in mind that five Atlantic 11 teams made the NCAA tournament last year, and 12 played in some sort of postseason tournament. Would that we're even luckier this time around.

Here are the totals. We have team, record (through Sunday's games), points and first-place votes. Last year's final standings are found below. More of the hilarious pithy comments will appear at a later time.

I don't usually brag and boast, but I'll make an exception right now: there might be no person better qualified to copy and paste the embed code for this video of Vernon Davis curling than your author. Think about it: From September through December of 2005, I covered Davis as the Maryland football beat writer, and two months later, I spent the entire month of February covering Olympic curling in Pinerolo, Italy.

Has anyone ever covered Vernon Davis and curling in such close proximity? Highly doubtful. Plus, I used to live two blocks away from Vernon Davis's grandma.

(If you doubt my curling chops, See here, for example, in which I attended an Italian cover band's Dire Straights performance with the New Zealand curling team. Man, those were the days.)

Anyhow, for reasons unclear, the AP moved a two-minute video introduction to curling, starring Vernon Davis.

"I'm a hybrid athlete, I think i can do almost anything if i try," he says before taking the ice.

"I'm a big curling fan, I'm the biggest curling fan you'll ever find," he says at the end.

Aren't we all, Vernon.

I'm having a hard time figuring out whether Joe Theismann thinks the Redskins' play-calling system is good, bad or medium. I guess the system has its positives and its negatives, its supporters and its detractors, its highlights and its lowlights. And sometimes you just never know who's on which downward sloping side of the team's play-calling trapezoid.

So, Joe, do you want to clarify your position, maybe?

"It's horrific!" he said on his ESPN 980 show Monday morning. "Horrific! Terrible! Stupid! Dumb! Everybody's got something that they're responsible for. It's like having three people run an organization, and not one person capable of making one decision. You have one person in charge of the passing game, you have one person in charge of the running game. That is the most absurd, ridiculous thing I've ever seen, and we see the results of that when you see the Redskins burn timeouts....

"And that's coaching, to me. That is coaching. Not getting the plays in, if there's a problem with plays, whatever it is, the communication to the quarterback has to be, such that if he looks at a clock and you haven't given him a play yet, then he goes ahead and runs it. I mean, Jason has got to have that flexibility. If the coaches don't give that to him, then they are missing the boat.

"But I am so sick and tired of watching us burn timeouts and not have them at the end of the game. You think we wouldn't have liked to have had at least a couple of timeouts at the end of that football game? It changes everything you want to do. When you have the ability to stop the clock, plus the two-minute warning, it changes things that you can do. You can throw the ball down the field a little bit more, if by some chance you get protection. But I just sit and I scratch my head: 10 minutes to go in the fourth quarter, timeout. I'm thinking, what is going on?....

(By Jonathan Newton - TWP)

After Sunday's 7-6 thriller, the Cowboys are now 5-1 all-time against the Redskins in one-point games. (The teams have also tied twice.)

The "1," though, is fairly well-remembered, and makes lots of Washingtonians' lists of the greatest Skins-Cowboys moments of all time. That would be the 14-13 Monday Night miracle in 2005, full of all those Mark Brunell and Santana Moss heroics in Dallas.

The Cowboys had been dominant throughout that game. The Redskins had been thoroughly inept on offense, and still had a doughnut late in the fourth quarter. Man, do I love doughnuts. But Moss scored with about four minutes left, and then caught the go-ahead touchdown with 2:35 on the clock, just six fewer seconds than remained when Patrick Crayton reached the end zone on Sunday.

"You have to learn to close the show, and we didn't do that," Cowboys coach Bill Parcells said after that 2005 game. "When you let a team hang around, that can happen."

"A 13-0 lead is not enough," DeMarcus Ware said. "There is never enough. Even if we are up all the way to the end, we need to play the whole game."

"We had the opportunities to end the game, and put it out of reach," Drew Bledsoe said. "You just can't let them hang around."

Which is what you usually say when you lose in such heartbreaking fashion. When Larry Michael asked a distraught London Fletcher about Sunday's loss during the Redskins Radio Broadcast Network post-game show, he chose not to use that old cliche.

Things that are depressing: D.C. sports imploding.

Things that are more cheerful: D.C. sports personalities gnawing at each others' necks.

And thus, enough with the Redskins and Wizards for a minute, and let's get back to Kornheiser vs. Wise vs. Kornheiser. It's a heckuva lot more fun.

Michael Wilbon was on 106.7 The Fan's LaVar and Dukes Show Friday afternoon, and Chad Dukes wisely asked him about D.C.'s hottest sports feud.

"Mike, I gotta ask you about a situation you are very close to," Dukes began. "We've become friends with Mike Wise; he's a great dude, I really like him. I love your show with Tony Kornheiser and enjoy reading him. This rift of theirs, you know both of these guy, they are talking about it on the radio. What is your take on all that?"

"I have two words," Wilbon responded: "STEEL CAGE!!!"

I was glad to hear Vinny Cerrato discussing the perils of having an aging offensive line without much depth during his ESPN 980 radio show last week. I was encouraged to hear him note that having such a line was one of the problems with the 2008 Redskins. And I was--I don't know, pick a word, stupefied? dumbstruck?--that the thing that got him talking about aging offensive lines was, yes, that's right, the Cowboys.

This all happened when Cerrato--wearing his Official Media Person hat--was interviewing ESPN's Ed Werder about what to expect from the Cowboys, which is just unspeakably bizarre to begin with. Cerrato brought up some of Dallas's injuries.

"The biggest concern, obviously, is the injury to Marc Colombo, which forces Doug Free, a former fourth-round pick, to make his first career NFL start, and disrupts the continuity that they have had on their offensive line," Werder said, as the dramatic irony music began in the background. "He has started 41 consecutive weeks next to Leonard Davis, so I think that's the biggest challenge they face going forward, is that when they put their team together the thing they had the biggest concern about was the lack of depth on their offensive line. And I think if they try to help Doug Free too, much then they sort of expose another guy who seems to be suffering from the advance of age on the other side, and that's Flozell Adams."

Now, this has to be hitting close to home already. If I was hosting this show, I would be rifling through my notes for a new topic. Ask Werder about Bill Belichick. Ask him about the playoff chase. Ask him about the weather in Nova Scotia. Just don't discuss the perils of having an aging offensive line.