D.C. Sports Bog

I mean, of all the NFL players in the world, look at who made it to the front page of NYTimes.com on Tuesday. Simply incredible. All that was missing was the glamor shot of Leigh Torrence.

Other stuff that happened:

* Obviously you already know about this, but the Send Mark Zuckerman to Viera campaign was a huge success. Congrats to Mark, and to the many Internet types who helped make this happen. Chico has more.

* Now the National Review is blogging about Redskins rap videos from the '80s. With help from The Gormogons.

* And from there, straight to the Wang jokes! MASN goes with "A Wang Worth the Wait" as its headline. Nats.com chooses "Nationals 'aggressively pursuing' Wang." And Nationals Enquirer says "the Nats have made just one upgrade for the 2010 starting rotation: Jason Marquis," which is why "the Nationals are looking to pay for Wang." Can't wait to hear Tony Plush's take on this one.

* Some guy walked four miles through the snow, then paid $74 and rode 19 miles in a cab to get to Sunday's Caps game. That's...well, why not. Read his story at CapsBlog.

(There are a lot of numbers here, and some of the key ones are buried later, so here's the news: Friday's Caps game on CSN absolutely slayed the network's record for the most-viewed regular season game, beating it by 33 percent. Sunday's game on NBC drew as many D.C. households as last season's playoff opener against the Penguins on the same network. But more people still watched the game in Pittsburgh.)

At least some media members were surprised that the fantabulous Penguins-Caps game on national television during Super Bowl Sunday didn't draw a bigger national rating than 1.3. "We expected a tad better on Super Bowl Sunday, didn't you?" Puck Daddy asked earlier this week.

That said, the 1.3 tied NBC's season-high for an indoor game, equaling the rating for a Penguins-Flyers game last month, according to Puck the Media. That's why the Penguins are on NBC every week, and for all my blathering about bias, that's a decision I would never question. You put the Cowboys on Monday Night Football, and you put the Penguins on national anything.

As you'd expect, the local ratings in D.C. were considerably and impressively higher. Sunday's game drew a 5.3 in this market, equal to about 123,000 households. That's the same rating NBC drew for Game 1 of the Pens-Caps second-round playoff series a year ago. And it's massively higher than the D.C. rating NBC got for the Caps' only regular season network appearance a year ago, a 1.9 for another meeting with Pittsburgh.

(AP file)

On Jan. 13, the Caps came back from three goals down to tie the Florida Panthers on the road, and then secured a win in the shootout. Quintin Laing took eight shifts, totaling about six minutes of ice time, during the win. It was the eighth time he had dressed in 11 games since returning from injury. And then?

"And the next 13 I've had a good seat for," Laing joked after Tuesday morning's practice.

Indeed, the winger was a healthy scratch the next time his team took the ice. The Caps put up six goals against Toronto in that game. All four lines seemed to be clicking. And as Washington put together the longest win streak in franchise history--14 and counting heading into Wednesday's game at Montreal--the lines have remained intact, leaving Laing watching from the press box.

Which means, as his team has attracted perhaps unprecedented national attention, Laing has disappeared from the public eye. Aside from being named as a scratch, he hasn't been mentioned in the press for about a month, according to Nexis.

Now, Laing is no benched superstar; he's a 30-year old career minor leaguer who's still happy to be in the NHL. But that hasn't stopped teammates from describing his attitude during this winning streak in remarkable ways. I'm not sure I've ever heard a pro athlete praise a teammate as effusively as Brooks Laich did Tuesday morning.

Chatting at 11:30, I guess. Submit questions here.

As you can see, below, there have been plenty of outstanding Snovechkin sightings over the past few days. I'll award best-in-show to the above example, sent to me by one of the m members of Pummeler, the anti-Crosby band. Of course.

It's in Laurel, and it took about two hours to create. And, most awesomely, the lettering is actually colored with red wine. Doesn't get much better than that.

Which is not to say others didn't try. Some fine work, all around.

I've transcribed more Redskins radio interviews than almost anybody alive, but LaVar Arrington's response to Clinton Portis Monday afternoon is well beyond my powers to communicate. You simply have to listen to the second segment yourself. (Download the audio here.)

Saying Arrington was passionate doesn't do it justice. Saying his voice was raised doesn't either. I don't think I've ever heard sports-talk radio quite like this, and I reckon you haven't either.

Again, the words can't come close to describing the emotion involved, but because this is what I do, I'll include some lengthy highlights. Obviously, this all started when Portis told the NFL Network that LaVar "didn't want to be in D.C. any more. He gave back $15, 20 million to leave D.C., because he felt like he wasn't the main money guy, because everybody was getting [paid]....It was like whoever gets the money was the captain."

Arrington took this as an affront to his leadership skills and as a suggestion that he was all about money, and so the bomb went off. I'm going to do this in chronological order, and I'm going to skip some stuff because otherwise you'd be here all day, and I'm going to use headlines to make it easier to read. Here's what he said.

I mentioned last month that Clinton Portis will appear in Wale's music video for "Pretty Girls." Turns out Fred Smoot beat him there, with a cameo for both Smoot and his Rolls-Royce Bentley in Wale's "My Sweetie." See the still above, and see the full video below.

And let me be the first to say that if you're going to call yourself Wale Ovechkin, you better deliver No. 8 in a music video at some point. No, not Mark Brunell.

(Via @dcsportsjam, @FireDanSnyder and @tabibonney)

(Photo by Reuters, editing by Ian Oland. Follow his twitter feed.)

A few observations:

* Our number of voters was virtually cut in half this week. This is the sort of week you learn who really wants it, and who lets a little snow stand in the way of a vote in a meaningless college basketball poll. Some of you just don't have that fire in your sternum.

* What the heck, we'll publish it anyhow.

* The remaining voters finally shook things up. Richmond made a massive climb, from ninth to fourth. Old Dominion dipped from third to fifth. Virginia dipped from fifth to seventh. The actual 11 teams did not change.

* The top six teams each have at least 16 wins, and no more than 7 losses. That's pretty impressive.

* The week ahead promises more excitement than a blizzard in July; George Mason faces both VCU and Old Dominion, while Virginia faces both Maryland and Virginia Tech.

* Nationally, Georgetown remains seventh in the AP poll, eighth in the coaches', and eighth in RPI. Maryland is on the verge of busting into the rankings, at 29th in the AP poll and 32nd in the coaches'. Virginia Tech and Richmond are also receiving votes.

* It was a good week in RPI; Richmond jumped eight spots to 31st, Old Dominion jumped 10 spots to 36th, and Maryland jumped five spots to 44th. William & Mary is 51st, VCU is 52nd, Virginia Tech 62nd and Virginia 94th.

Here are the totals. We have team, record (through Sunday's games), points and first-place votes. Last week's standings are found below, and there's more hilarity even further below.

1. Georgetown (17-5) 349 (28)
--Next: Tuesday at Providence, Sunday at Rutgers.
--After Obama, Biden and Pelosi have attended recent games, Georgetown looking to switch West Virginia to a home game to attract Robert Byrd, next in the line of succession. (Ivan Snyder)

2. Maryland (16-6) 310 (8)
--Next: Wednesday vs. No. 7 Virginia, Saturday at Duke.
--Gary Williams will motivate team with chip-on-the-shoulder "The Washington Post is out to get us" mentality, following the paper's closure of its College Park printing press. (Mike Steele)

I've tried to write a few sentences of introduction to this sensory masterpiece about seven times, and each time I've had to press delete. Really, there are no words that could do this justice. You just have to revel in it yourself. We can each enjoy this in our own way.

(Via Terl)

(Embarrassing: I posted the exact same video about three years ago, and was equally amazed then. This is what it feels like to get older, I guess. Gimme another year, and I'll be smothering our young whippersnapper bloggers with sarcasm and disdain.)

Let's first acknowledge that NBC could have muted its announcers and instead broadcast Sunday's Caps-Pens game to the soundtrack of monks chanting "OV for MVP" and nuns singing "Unleash The Fury," and a certain subset of Caps fans would still have been convinced that the broadcast favored the Penguins.

Let's also acknowledge that it's not much easier for me to objectively review the network's performance than it is for many Caps fans. I'm not a fan, of course, but I care about the Caps, and I don't care about the Penguins. I know many of the Caps in a way I don't know any of the Penguins. So objectivity's pretty hard to muster here.

That said, knowing in advance that Caps fans would complain about the wretchedly biased announcers, I watched the game live, and then watched most of it again on DVR, attempting to determine if such bias existed. My general conclusion: there were a lot of very fair comments and even-handed observations. But there were also enough puzzling moments to allow Caps fans to keep their anger simmering. I'll recap, mostly with an eye to the Sid vs. Ovi story-line. Again, I'm not really attempting an objective recap of the coverage, but more an understanding of what makes Caps fans mad.

Sid's Valor

Both Ovechkin and Crosby, it goes without saying, were fabulous. Crosby's goals came earlier, which gave the announcers more time to praise Sid without the pressure of analyzing a game that was going down to the wire. Still, some of their early words about Crosby seemed absurd, even given the circumstances.

"Doc, you could see this coming into the rink today," Pierre McGuire said after Crosby's first tally. "This guy wanted to prove a point. He wasn't happy with the Penguins game yesterday."

(2005 photo by Toni L. Sandys - TWP)

The football season ended on Sunday, and it was fitting that Super Bowl Week would serve up one final Clinton Portis feud. He's had a lot of these lately. (See below.) Portis would likely argue that the media are to blame, seizing on the slightest of quotes and taking them out of context, turning the innocuous into the villainous. But when it keeps happening and happening and happening...well, I don't see the same trap enveloping Ladell Betts, anyhow.

So during Portis's appearance on the NFL Network set--the same appearance in which he admitted he asked coaches to bench Mike Sellers--the tailback was asked what has changed from the Clinton Portis who played in Denver to the Clinton Portis of today.

"The Clinton Portis in Denver was young and fun, not a care in the world, 20, 21 years old, I was having fun," Portis responded. "I had Shannon Sharpe, I had Rod Smith, I had Ed McCaffrey, I had Al Wilson, John [Mobley], I had all these guys who showed me the ropes and brought me along and carried me and helped me out.

"And coming to D.C., it was like all of the sudden in D.C., some of the players feel like it was a money situation, who getting the money is a captain," he continued. "LaVar Arrington was the man in D.C. when I arrived, and all of the sudden LaVar felt like it was competition, and he left D.C. He didn't want to be in D.C. any more. He gave back $15, 20 million to leave D.C., because he felt like he wasn't the main money guy, because everybody was getting [paid]. Laveranues, myself, Deion was still getting paid, so he even had input. So I think it was just the wrong attitude, and I think for some of the beliefs that was funneled through, it was like whoever gets the money was the captain."

Hmmm. Um, ok. You know, I don't think that's exactly what they were asking. And in fact, the follow-up question was about whether Portis's game has changed since the Denver days, which is what they were wondering in the first place. Not about a retired linebacker now working in media.

As for LaVar, being a soft-spoken and reserved retiree, he had no comment.

Psych! Ha! As if!