photo courtesy UDC

The UDC Firebirds are 9-1, with the only loss coming last month to D-1 and Atlantic 10 squad Duquesne.

It's not too early to start buzzing about a return to March mini-Madness: In 1982, UDC won a NCAA D-II national title with a team that was coached by Dunbar alum and local playground legend Willie Jones and featured a future NBA first round pick (Earl Jones of Spingarn) and a second-rounder (Michael Britt) on its roster.

UDC basketball had fallen a long, long way from those glories by the time Jeff Ruland arrived in 2009. The program had been hit with so many NCAA penalties, injuries, and transfers that the NBA veteran had trouble even fielding a full squad his first year as head coach.

I went to a UDC/Apprentice game in January 2010 and saw something that neither I nor Ruland nor, most likely, any of the other few dozen spectators in the UDC gym that day had ever seen outside of a pickup game: UDC played with only four guys.

The Firebirds had only five players eligible for the game, three of which were walk-ons, then lost a guard to injury in the first half. The squad spent the rest of the day playing four-on-five. The box-and-none defense was Ruland's only option. It was a hideous display.

UDC got crushed.

After the game, Ruland, a local favorite from his days as a Bruise Brother with Rick Mahorn and the Washington Bullets, told me the five guys who started "are all I got" for the rest of the season. The athletic department shipped a soccer player over to add a body. The team finished with a 1-20 record.

But this year, Ruland's got a quorum, and his roster is led by talent cast off from major basketball programs.

Nigel Munson, a former DeMatha star who played the 2006-2007 season at Virginia Tech and tried unsuccessfully to transfer to George Washington, is now a senior at UDC. He watched the infamous "Man down!" Apprentice game from the UDC bench, dressed in street clothes and with his broken arm in a cast.

The leading scorer is Brandon Herbert, a Baltimore product who left the troubled Binghamton University program in 2009 and was at West Chester for a time before joining Ruland at the Van Ness campus.

UDC hits the court again on December 30 at 2 pm at home against Dominican College.

Another sign of progress: Admission to the Dominican game, which was free back when the Firebirds were playing four guys at a time, will cost you $5.

Mike Shanahan

But as cruel as the standings have been to Shanahan's reputation as a coach since he got here, the recent box scores have been kind.

On paper, it sure seems like the team he's fielding, and even winning with in the Meadowlands, is nameless and headed for nowhere. You'd have to go back to the replacement Redskins that played during the 1987 NFL strike to find a roster with so few notable athletes or so bleak a future.

No quarterback on the team should be here beyond this season. John Beck and Rex Goodman are just latter-day Ed Rubberts and Tony Robinsons.

None of the top three receivers against New England or the Giants by yards—Donte Stallworth, Jabar Gaffney, Santana Moss, and David Anderson—will be around much longer. (Anthony Allen, anybody?)

They're all ancient enough in football years to be cast off just for age at season's end.

Perhaps someday one of the top two rushers in both games—rookies Roy Helu and Evan Royster—will make a name for themselves. But for now they're far from household even in the home market.

On the other side of the ball, the box score ain't too pretty, either. The Redskins' leading tackler against New England and New York, as it is week after week, and the only candidate for postseason honors, was London Fletcher.

He will be 37 years old before the next training camp opens.

Taking it all in, and Shanahan's coaxing a dominant performance out of this bunch of Redskins against the Giants could be mentioned alongise the Scabskins' win over the Dallas Cowboys on Monday Night Football some 24 years ago.

Joe Gibbs' reputation as a genius was etched in cement after that game. So was general manager Bobby Beathard's, for putting together a better roster of replacements than anybody else in the league.

Yet, it's worth noting that almost nobody who took the field for the Redskins that night was still around when they made it to the Super Bowl.

What does current GM Bruce Allen do again?

Oh, right.

Via a pop-up ad on my laptop, I learned yesterday that the catchphrase for the Obama 2012 presidential campaign is still: "Are You In?"

Of course, Donovan McNabb, another guy from Chicago who swept into town on a platform of change and was handed the second-most important job in the Nation's Capital–Washington Redskins quarterback—was already the focus of a campaign using that same pitch.

The Redskins' "R You In?" blitz didn't work real good.

Since adopting the slogan, in fact, the team has lost more seats than congressional Democrats did in the mid-term elections: A reported 10,000 seats were ripped out of FedExField in the offseason.

And McNabb failed to energize the base and after just one term he was sent packing to make room for a guy from Brigham Young.

Uh oh.

"And, yes, and you can have a college degree..."

When I heard via the Louisville Courier-Journal that Joe Jacoby had gone back to school and was getting his sheepskin today, that's the sentence that popped into my head.

That's because whenever I hear anything about Jacoby, among the most beloved and successful Washington Redskins of all time and a cornerstone of the Hogs, "And yes, and..." pops into my head. No matter the subject.

For all that Jacoby accomplished on the field during a career that lasted from 1981-1993— four Super Bowl appearances (three wins), four Pro Bowls, two first-team All-Pro selections— if Redskins fans had to pick one Jacoby moment, it would be his opening lines in a legendarily awful 1983 TV commercial for Theater Vision, a local big screen television retailer famous for its low-budget advertising campaigns.

The ad, like all TheaterVision ads from the early 1980s, paired the biggest pro athletes in the area and the worst production values in Christendom. Jacoby, dressed in dark polyester shorts, white socks and tight yellow T-shirt and looking like he'd just walked off a practice field because he had just walked off a practice field, stammered his sales pitch to big screen customers: “And, yes, and you can have this set here—50-inch, four-foot-screen—for as little as $895.” (Tragically, all video of Jacoby's TheaterVision commercials has been removed from YouTube.)

I asked Jacoby about the commercials last winter, just after Theater Vision went out of business:

“It is amazing how the commercials live on,” says Jacoby, now an assistant coach at Shenandoah University. “I didn’t know what I was doing. You see what I was wearing? That’s because nobody told me what to wear. I just showed up in [shorts and a T-shirt], and they told me what to say and we started doing the commercial. My daughters get out a tape of that now and then to make fun of the old man. They can’t believe I ever had hair.”

The should-be-Hall of Fame tackle says he doesn’t remember how he ended up shilling for Bessell’s shop.

But he remembers what he got paid: “No money. Just a big-screen television,” Jacoby says.

Jacoby says he never even set up the TV in his townhouse. It was too big.

“Theater Vision got its money’s worth out of that ad,” he says. “People still tell me that that commercial was terrible. Yeah, it was terrible. But I guess it did its job, because it was memorable, too.”

Jacoby now coaches the offensive line at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va.

He told the Courier-Journal this week that he decided to go back (through correspondence courses) to the University of Louisville, where in 1980 he left still 30 credits shy of a degree to pursue a pro football career, after years of feeling sort of phony telling his children and the student/athletes playing ball at Shenandoah U. about the importance of an education.

From the Courier piece:

“How could I keep saying that when I didn’t have my degree?” Jacoby asked.

That changes Friday night. Look for a 6-foot-7, 280-pound guy who’s 52 years old.

He’ll be walking on stage at the KFC Yum! Center to accept his bachelor of science degree in workforce leadership at the University of Louisville commencement.

So, congrats to Jacoby for setting a fine example. It'd be a better story if he studied theater on his return to campus, but still...

Now, all that's left for him is a stop in Canton. Because, let's be serious, it makes no sense at all that Joe Jacoby isn't in the Hall of Fame.

Or, rather: And, yes, and Joe Jacoby really should be in the Hall of Fame.

Yet another sign of the Washington Redskins' reduced hold on the hometown: Big businesses are scheduling events during Redskins games.

Time was, the city had a reputation for shutting down on any Sunday afternoon whenever the Redskins were playing.

But all week long, WJFK-FM has been promoting an appearance this Sunday by Brooks Laich of the Washington Capitals. He'll be at Ted Britt Ford in Fairfax. There'll be autograph signings and free pizza from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

At the same time of Laich's meet and greet and eat, the Redskins will be playing the New York Giants. That's an NFC East rival.

Who among us ever thought we'd see a day when a hockey player trumps the Redskins around here?

'Course, maybe it's the free pizza.

Which brings up yet another kick in the pants for the Redskins: The free grub, according to all the announcements, comes from Papa John's Pizza.

That's the "official pizza of the Washington Redskins."

Ouchie.

Photo via Redskinskidsclub.com

Fantastic interview on The Mike Wise Show on WJFK-FM this morning with Lamont Peterson, the new world junior welterweight champion.

Peterson came to the studios with brother and fellow pug Anthony Peterson and trainer Barry Hunter to relive Saturday night's fight, in which Lamont took away Amir Khan's world title belts.

Early in the interview, Wise, who wrote a column in the Washington Post calling Peterson's win the "sports story of the year," replayed Hall of Fame ring announcer Michael Buffer's call of the score cards after the fight, ending with the crowd at the Convention Center drowning him out as they realize that Peterson, a hometown kid and huge underdog, was the new world champion.

Lamont, humble and nice as always, said he'd been visualizing winning a world title for 17 years, ever since he and Anthony started boxing with Hunter as little kids. The moment was a lot like he always dreamed it would be.

"The way I imagined it, it was with Michael Buffer, in my hometown," Lamont said.

The guests also recounted the bizarre tale of showing up at the George Washington University Hospital emergency room in the wee hours after the fight for an unscheduled checkup because of the pounding he'd taken over 12 rounds.

When he walked in, Lamont said, hospital staff looked at his banged up face and were "Like, 'What the heck happened to him?'"

But before he could say, "You should see the other guy!" the other guy showed up.

The equally beat-up Khan and his posse happened to choose the same hospital at around the same time for the same reason. And two guys who'd shared a ring a few hours earlier ended the night sharing a waiting room.

Maybe Wise is right. Lamont Peterson could be the story of the year.

Photo via MovieGoods.com

Vincent Abney

On kiddie football's biggest stage, Abney was a bigger boy among boys, scoring on 50-yard and 8-yard runs in leading his Marshall Heights Bison to a 34-6 rout of the East Bay (Calif.) Wildcats in the Pop Warner Super Bowl for Pee Wees (no more than 12 years old or 120 pounds).

This comes after Abney scored all his team's points in last week's semifinals to put the Bison in the championship game.

Marshall Heights, completing a 15-0 season, is sponsored by the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, which claims to be one of only two municipal rec agencies in the entire country to have a Pop Warner charter.

To celebrate the Super Bowl win by a city-run squad, Mayor Vince Gray is throwing a pizza party at 5:30 p.m. at the John A. Wilson Building.

Also invited: Members of the Beacon House Falcons, another powerhouse kiddie football outfit under the DPR umbrella.

Alas, the Falcons aren't flying quite as high, having lost to the Sweetwater (Fla.) Ravens, 13-7 in double overtime in the Pop Warner Jr. Pee Wee (11-and-under, 105 lbs. or less) Super Bowl. The squad ends its season 14-1.

Not invited to the downtown bash, but bringing home hardware to our area nonetheless: The White Oak Warriors, a Silver Spring dynamo that edged the Virginia Beach Mustangs 34-30 in the Super Bowl for Jr. Midgets (13-and-under, 135 lbs. or less).

Marshall Heights, Beacon House and White Oak have all won Pop Warner national titles in in recent years. It's as if, while nobody was paying attention, the D.C. area became to kiddie football what Taiwan once was to Little League Baseball.

"...and new champion of the world..."

With those words, ring announcer Michael Buffer set off a crazy celebration inside the Convention Center on Saturday night. Nobody needed to hear Buffer say anything past "new" to figure out that the local kid, Lamont Peterson, had taken all the junior welterweight title belts from overdog Amir Khan.

Peterson's win came via a wacky split decision.

Take away that wackiness, and it was a great night for D.C. All sorts of boxing royalty was in the house, which was packed and buzzing.

Before the bell for Peterson/Khan, you could see promoter/six-time-world-champ/tabloid fave Oscar De La Hoya greeting Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, an '80s icon and longtime lightweight champion. Mancini changed boxing by permanently knocking out Duk Koo Kim in the 14th round of a nationally televised 1982 fight from Las Vegas. Kim went into a coma and died shortly thereafter, and 15-round fights, long the standard for championship bouts, were outlawed and 12-round limits were put in place.

During the main event, De La Hoya sat next to middleweight champ-for-life Bernard Hopkins ringside, and both shouted in disgust and disbelief when referee Joe Cooper, whose menu favors home cooking, deducted a second point from invader Khan for pushing in the 12th round, thereby giving the match to local Peterson.

Cooper's rulings got a different reaction from all the D.C. fighters on the premises. Riddick Bowe, who looked much older than his 44 years, joined Mark "Too Sharp" Johnson, the first black featherweight world champ and a recent inductee into the Boxing Hall of Fame, and current Great American Hope heavyweight, Seth Mitchell, in standing and screaming for the hometown boy from beside the ring. Former D.C.-based champs Sharmba Mitchell (no relation) and William Joppy were nearby and also rooting on Peterson.

The pricey seats up front were loaded with generic casino types, unseasonably tanned men with their teeth capped and hair plugged being hung onto by women whose breasts didn't look much like God's work.

Pakistanis with "Team Kahn" garb were all over the place, cheering on Khan, a Brit of Pakistani descent. And though they were far outnumbered by Peterson backers, the visitors held their own against the locals in the noisemaking department, and their dueling "DC"! and "Amir!" chants throughout the fight enhanced the gladiatorial vibe.

I was thinking all night about watching Lamont spar with brother Anthony Peterson when both were teenagers, and their training facility was the furnace room of Lincoln Junior High School in Columbia Heights. I talked to the Peterson brothers again after they turned pro, and they told me their goal was to bring a title fight to DC with one of them in it.

That happened on Saturday, and the whole world was watching, at least that portion that subscribes to HBO. Making the story even sweeter, Barry Hunter, the trainer who took them in as kids and was working them out back when I first met them in the junior high basement, was still working Lamont's corner. What a story.

Even with my biases, I scored the fight 8-4 for Khan by rounds.

Lucky for me and Lamont, my scoring didn't count. I love boxing.

Steve Czaban

Czaban, longtime co-host of the afternoon drive-time show "The Sports Reporters," began with a rant about Snyder staying invisible during the Trent Williams and Fred Davis pot suspension saga and having Mike Shanahan do all the talking for the organization.

The fans deserve more, Czaban said.

"I hope the owner is heard from," Czaban said. "It's like there's a dead rat in the restaurant. I don't want to hear from the chef saying, 'Oh, I'm sorry." No, I want to hear from the owner who says, That's unacceptable and we're not going to let that happen again!' That's not healthy."

When co-host Andy Pollin and guest and fellow ESPN-980 staffer Thom Loverro briefly defended Snyder's no-show in WeedGate, Czaban got angry.

"Any other owner in this league woudn't be hiding under the sheets right now!" Czaban fumed. "Every other owner has a better ear for customer relations! I'm not the one who had to take 10,000 seats out of my stadium to avoid blackouts! He did! He can't just disappear and say, `Oh, I'm afraid to go out there because I'm stung by the criticism!' He's got to learn how to own a team, and be involved in a way that's not meddling that he needs to find if he's going to run a decent team! Otherwise, it's gonna be a long string of celebrity coaches that failed, or dictators that he's totally detached from, or back in and meddling with guys like [Jim] Zorn! He'll never get it right! Right now he's got a dictator who is detached from accountability running his football team into the ground! He's afraid to even get out in public!"

Loverro again interrupted to say that Snyder might be content with Shanahan's stewardship of the Redskins.

Czaban wouldn't have it.

"He's two games behind Zorn!" Czaban exhaled. "He's run through three quarterbacks and he's just had two stars suspended for weed use! Yeah, he's doing a great job! Doing a heckuva job, Brownie!"

Czaban's long anti-Snyder riff was noteworthy for its volume and because he would seem to have a lot to lose. When Czaban speaks his mind, after all, he does so on a station owned by Snyder's radio outfit, Red Zebra Broadcasting, which bought the former WTEM in 2008.

Czaban now also has a morning show on the Snyder-owned SportsTalk 570-AM.

But management clearly has Czaban feeling comfy expressing himself in the workplace. Just like Czaban always did before Snyder took over.

Even the boss would have to admit that Czaban's monologue was great radio.

Vincent Abney (#9) takes it to the house in Pee Wee championships. Photo courtesy of Pop Warner

If Andrew Luck really is gone by the time the Redskins get a turn in the next NFL draft, maybe they can use the pick on Vincent Abney.

Sure, he's a little kid — scouting reports and Pop Warner rules put Abney at less than 12 years old and no more than 120 pounds.

But still.

Yesterday afternoon, Abney scored all his team's points and dominated on both sides of the ball like a latter-day Sammy Baugh in the Marshall Heights Bison's 23-0 rout over the New Haven (Conn.) Steelers in the semifinals of the Pee Wee division of the Pop Warner Super Bowl tournament in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

Abney had touchdown runs of 30, 70 and five yards, , and added a sack of the New Haven quarterback.

The win puts Marshall Heights, a team sponsored by the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, into Saturday's title game.

Marshall Heights now takes on the East Bay Wildcats (CA) in the Super Bowl finals.

The other D.C.-proper qualifier in the Pop Warner tourney looks like it's also rolling to a title.

Also yesterday, the Beacon House Falcons earned their way to the finals of the Jr. Pee Wee (11-and-under, 105 lbs. or less) with a 12-8 triumph over the Tustin (Calif.) Black Cobras. Beacon House, another DPR team, will meet the Sweetwater Ravens for the national championship.

The Pop Warner championships are broadcast by ESPN.

Marshall Heights and Beacon House teams have both won national championships in recent years, as have other kiddie squads based within the city.

The other area representative in the Pop Warner extravaganza, the White Oak Warriors from Silver Spring, crushed the Brookline-JP Patriots 31-0 in the semis of the Jr. Midget (13-and-under, 135 lbs. or less). White Oak goes against a Virginia Beach team in the title game.

But, back to Marshall Heights and Beacon House. The continued success of D.C.-proper youth football programs under the DPR-umbrella means we have to keep asking the questions: Why is D.C. high school football so lousy lately?

Also, should DPR take administration of D.C. public school football?

And, finally, does Vincent Abney have an agent?

How big a deal is Saturday's Khan/Peterson fight?

Jim Lampley's coming to town for it! That's how big!

And top this: Michael Buffer's doing the announcing! We get to hear "Let's get ready to rumble!" live!

Oh, right. Buffer's pretty possessive and he's got good lawyers: What I meant was, We get to hear "Let's Get Ready to Rumble!™" live!

But still. This is big, people.

The media blitz for the fight, in which Amir Khan will put up his IBF and WBA Junior Welterweight belts against betting underdog but prohibitive sentimental favorite Lamont Peterson, kicked into high gear this week.

Both combatants are doing lots of local radio. Oscar De La Hoya, top dog at Golden Boy Promotions, which is promoting the fight, scheduled an appearance with Mayor Vince Gray. De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins, the formerly eternal middleweight champ and now light-heavyweight belt wearer, are both billed to attend the weigh-in on Friday at 2 p.m. at the Carnegie Library near the Convention Center.

Khan and Peterson, obviously, will also be in the house. A big contingent of British hooligans/Khan rooters and a bigger contingent for Peterson, a local kid who used to train in the furnace room of a Columbia Heights junior high, will be there too. The weigh-in is open to the public and free, so if you show up you better be ready to rumble! Oh, heck: Ready to Rumble!™

Even before the hype machine hit overdrive, the fight was selling itself pretty dang well. According to a source with the promotion, as of this morning ticket sales were already "well over 6,000" for the 9000-capacity venue.

In other words, D.C. really is ready to rumble!

Dang, there I go again: Ready to Rumble!™

(Buffer really does go after folks who say his copyrighted catchphrase without paying him. Which is weird. But dang if it ain't awesome!)

This kills me. One of my lifelong friends recently happened upon a huge bong in the possession of his college-going son, a fabulous kid who he'd never known to smoke pot. I was very impressed at how angry my buddy got at his boy and why: Not at all because he had a bong in the house, but because he left it out. He's a couple years younger than Davis and Williams, and if anybody's gonna get mad at these guys for getting caught with dirty pee pee, stupidity seems to be the only offense worth harping on.

The Great Dan Steinberg had an awesome post yesterday mocking those now playing the "character" card. The bogger retells the tales of many of the Redskins arrested for more serious and dangerous malfeasances when the team was headed by Joe Gibbs and, to hear today's fans tell it, the organization was allegedly all about "character."

Back to me: Steinberg's post got me thinking about a story I did back in 2001, a retrospective on all the no-goodnicks the Redskins brought in in just one year during the allegedly saintly Gibbs years, via the 1985 NFL Draft.

Scads of character guys taken in that same draft found themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Tight end Terry Orr got sent to prison for bilking former teammates, including Art Monk, Brian Mitchell, and Raleigh McKenzie (another member of the Redskins' '85 draft class), out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in an elaborate con scheme.

Pro Bowl defensive back Barry Wilburn was arrested around the same time as Orr got locked up, after D.C. cops ran him down near Dupont Circle for allegedly committing armed robbery on pedestrians.Wilburn had previously been popped by the NFL for cocaine and by Fairfax County police for driving drunk and subsequently driving with a suspended license.

It didn't make it into my column, but Dean Hamel, a defensive tackle, got arrested in 1986 at Rocco's, a nightspot owned by fellow Skin Curtis Jordan. The AP's account of Hamel's alleged dirty deed said he was put in custody after being "accused of punching a woman, identified only as 'Stacey' by Fairfax City police." The alleged punchee claimed her jaw was broken by the DT's fist.

But the real evil doer of the Crass of '85 turned out to be Raphel Cherry, a college quarterback at Hawaii who the Redskins drafted in hopes of converting him to a safety.

That didn't work out. Neither did Cherry's marriage. In December 1998, Jerri Harris Cherry was found dead on her couch in Jacksonville, Ark. The courts found she'd been choked to death by husband Raphel Cherry shortly after serving him with divorce papers.

Good god.

Now can we get back to talking about two guys busted for weed, please?

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Back in 1996, I wrote a column for Washington City Paper about the only goal I ever had: I wanted to hit a home run in softball.

A real home run.

Not an inside-the-park thingee any punch-and-judy swinger will occasionally get out of a good bounce or an inept opponent. I wanted an outside-the-park, over-the-fence, going-going-gone 300-plus-foot job, like only the big boys hit.

At the time, I'd never hit a real one, after more than a decade of playing on the same team. And with each season the warning track was getting further and further from the plate for me.

But, as I wrote, an Oregon company named DeMarini had just introduced a high-tech —or, to my mind, magic —bat called the Double-Walled, which, for $300, made the longball seem possible even for slugs like me. My buddy Gary, a friend since high school who I'd been playing in leagues with for years and who was similarly sick of living a homerless existence, shelled out the bucks.

The advent of the DeMarini, I wrote, kept hope alive that I wouldn't go to the grave having never touched 'em all.

I got a call at home shortly after the story was published. The guy on the other end said his name was Harry Thomas Jr., and that, yeah, his dad was the D.C. Councilman. Thomas said he'd read my story and was just the guy to help. He said he was a slo-pitch batting coach.

Until that call, I didn't know there was such a thing as a hitting coach for slo-pitch softball.

With just a few trips to the batting cage with him, he said, he was sure he could teach me how to hit a tater, just as he'd taught a lot of other guys who shared my dream.

Thomas was very nice, and really seemed to care about me leaving the yard. He said he'd do it all gratis, too.  All I had to do was show up.

I thanked him but said no thanks, using the journalistic ethics of taking a freebie as my crutch. Really, I was just too ashamed at my age to get professional coaching to play a beer-league game.

Besides, by then the DeMarini had arrived in our clubhouse.

I've thought about that call from Thomas every now and then over the years and giggled at how earnest he was and how much he wanted to help.

Especially when I read that the guy who wanted to teach an old fart like me how to hit a softball pro bono had allegedly filched $300,000 that was supposed to be used TO TEACH KIDS HOW TO HIT A BASEBALL!!!!

I can only hope that all the kids who also never got hitting lessons from Thomas had access, as I did, to a $300 magic bat.

I retired from slo-pitch around 2003 after hitting my second homer. I can die happy.

But what about the children?

As reported in this space earlier, former Redskins d-lineman Phillip Daniels has been posting on the message board Extremeskins this week asking fans to help him rig a player-of-the-year poll back home in rural Georgia.

Daniels' followers listened and tried, yet the burgundy and gold faithful apparently got outrigged by the locals.

Daniel's cousin, running back Chris Brown from Seminole County High, was among six players in the popularity contest run by the sports section of the local newspaper, the Albany Herald.

The election ended at 5 p.m. on Thursday and Brown lost to Mason Worsham, a quarterback from Westwood School. According to the newspaper Worsham got 51 percent of the votes, to Brown's 46 percent. More than 20,000 votes were cast.

That number's greater than the newspaper's daily circulation.

Take out Brown and Worsham, and the other four players in the Albany Herald poll only got about 600 votes combined.

Many of the Skins fans who voted again and again for Brown on Daniels' orders were peeved that their plan didn't succeed.

"The poll was rigged," said extremeskins poster brandymac27, sans irony.

And while Danny Aller, the Herald's sports editor, said he was surprised that a group from D.C. led by a former Washington Redskins player got involved in stuffing the ballot box, the practice itself was hardly shocking.

In the heat of the competition, Aller told me he doubted Daniels effort would succeed "unless he gets a couple hundred more people to start making calls."

Area schoolboy football fanatics usually did a good enough job fixing elections all by themselves, Aller said.

"We saw big numbers in our polls all season," he said. "It's a big deal here. Teachers are known to give out homework assignments like 'Do your reading and math, and vote for so and so for player of the week!'"

Now he wants something in return.

Daniels, who now lists his hometown as Chicago, went on the fan board yesterday with his regular handle —pd93—and started a thread called "Phillip Daniels Needs Your Help!!!"

Despite the three exclamation points, Daniels wasn't asking for anything as important as organs or dollars.

No, turns out he just wanted fans to stuff the ballot box so his kin would win the Albany (Ga.) Herald People's Choice Football Player of the Year contest.

Daniels asked folks to make sure Chris Brown, a running back from Seminole County High, finished atop the Georgia paper's poll:

I'm not getting enough votes for my cousin Chris Brown who is up for Player of the Year. I know that there are thousands for Redskins fans on here so please go and vote for him. I will put the link at the bottom so please go sign in and vote. You can vote once every hour and the deadline is tomorrow at 5pm. Coming back from a major injury with a chance of never playing again and doing what he did this year, he deserves this award. The only way he will win is for you guys to help me out. My hometown is small and we are a bit outnumbered with other cities. Thanks to all who will help him out. Good kid who will be playing D1 football somewhere next season. I always hate coming on with non Redskins things but I really do want him to win this because he deserves it and the newspaper that is doing this has feature the guy that is winning twice and none of the other guys so you know what's going on there.

And the regulars at ExtremeSkins responded massively. All day long, one poster after another who'd never heard of Daniels' cousin before this scheme commenced was posting that they'd voted again and again for Brown, just as Daniels had told them to.

As of 10:52 p.m. last night, Brown had more than 8,206 votes.

Not bad turnout in an election run by a paper which as of June 2008 had an estimated circulation of less than 20,000.

But along the way something popped up that Daniels, who is a native of Donalsonville, Ga., didn't expect: Somebody else was stuffing the Albany Herald's ballot box, too. For another kid in the race.

And doing a better job at it!

The voting bloc for Mason Worsham, quarterback of the state championship squad from Westwood School, wasn't only keeping up with the  outrigging the ExtremeSkins horde. At 10:52 pm, the big board showed Worsham with 8,437 votes.

So, Brown and Worsham got 16,643 votes between them.

The other four candidates on the ballot had 558 votes combined.

By last night, Daniels' returned to ExtremeSkins with obvious desperation.

"Are there any other Redskins sites that we can put this on to help out[?]" he posted. "Let's get everybody involved."

Albany Herald sports editor Danny Aller, reached at work late last night, says he wondered why his paper's website was so slow all day.

"I was trying to post a comment here and I couldn't get on for five minutes, because the site was so busy," Aller tells me. "I couldn't figure it out."

When I told Aller about the poll-rigging scheme launched at ExtremeSkins, he figured it out.

"Oh, OK! Somebody called me today and said a lot of people were having problems voting for Chris," says Aller. "I told him I had just voted for both Chris and Mason, just to check and make sure everything was working, and it was working for both. So he says, 'Hey, it's not me complaining! It's Phillip Daniels of the Redskins who's saying there's problems voting for Chris!' I'm saying to myself, 'Phillip Daniels? Huh? Why would somebody from the Redskins be talking about this?'"

Good questions, Mr. Aller.

There's still time to get your votes in: The Herald's poll closes at 5 p.m. today.

Stay tuned for returns!