Any talent! The possibilities are nigh endless. I polled Washington City Paper staff and my colleagues suggested the following:

1. Making ethically dubious decisions that lead to federal government investigation
2. Misunderstanding what "pro bono" means
3. Stalling real estate development

Leave your talent suggestions in the comments or send them to us on Twitter. By the way, if your talent involves fireworks, you're out of luck. The site's FAQ recommends auditioners leave the pyrotechnics at home.

Pre-register to audition here.

Word out of Hyattsville is that Bill McGregor will announce he's quitting as DeMatha's head football coach today.

Such a move has been rumored for more than a week, but McGregor's exodus, if that indeed happens, will come as huge news in the local and even national high school football realm.

McGregor has posted a 280-39-3 record in his 29 years as DeMatha's head coach, and, according to his own web site, "over 350" of his players have gotten full football scholarships just since 1991.

Last season, McGregor had more of his ex-players active in the NFL (7) than any prep coach in the entire country.

But the job has gotten tougher in recent years, as the gridiron rivalry between DeMatha and Good Counsel took off and took on as many soap-opera-ish story lines as Friday Night Lights. (A coach character on the NBC series was, in fact, named "Coach McGregor.")

The rivalry's ridiculousness peaked with accusations leveled on local football message boards (but, much like this blog post, backed by no hard evidence) that a WCAC championship game between DeMatha and Good Counsel was fixed.

McGregor also had to live through a nauseating NCAA Signing Day recently, as the Stags' top prospect, Cyrus Kouandjio, committed to Auburn as the national television cameras rolled, then withdrew that committment and signed with Alabama.

No word yet on a McGregor replacement. If, that is, a replacement is necessary.

McGregor has not yet responded to a message left at his DeMatha office.

I've been intrigued by Dancel's gridiron giving penchant ever since Good Counsel changed the name of its home stadium to Dancel Field. I told Bernie Dancel he reminded me of Joe McCoy, a character in "Friday Night Lights" who's spent tons of his own money on the Dillon Panthers. And Dancel, like McCoy, happens to be the father of a star quarterback: Zach Dancel of Good Counsel is ranked as the top rated QB in the state of Maryland for the class of 2011, while J.D. McCoy (pictured here) is the blue-chip prospect for the Panthers.

I didn't have room in the column to go over all the local references that have shown up on "Friday Night Lights" since the show debuted on NBC. The Panthers' wild and crazy fullback in the early days of the program was named "Riggins," and clearly modeled after John Riggins of the Redskins. And when Riggins puts together a highlight reel to send to college scouts, it includes a clip of him bowling over an opposing safety downfield, and he and his buddies and his buddies agree it looked like "Brandon Jacobs running over Laron Landry." And then there's Coach McGregor, a character billed as a high school coaching legend while he served as Coach Taylor's brief replacement at Dillon a couple season ago; around here, we've got DeMatha's Bill McGregor, who has long been ranked among the best prep coaches in the game. One sign of the real McGregor's standing: Nine of his former players at DeMatha were on NFL rosters last season, something no other high school coach or team in the country could claim. The Riggins, Landry and McGregor similarities aren't an accident: "Friday Night Lights" executive producer Peter Berg is pals with Dan Snyder, and sits in the Redskins owner's box at FedExField on game days for years.

Any relations between the Dancels and McCoys, however, are coincidental. The McCoy story line already appeared onscreen before Zach Dancel threw a pass for Good Counsel.

I also didn't have enough column inches to get too much into how heated the Good Counsel/DeMatha rivalry has gotten since Zach Dancel led the Olney school to its first WCAC football title last season, capped by Good Counsel's 14-7 win over DeMatha in the conference championship. What a drama!

DeMatha backers, who are only used to finishing seasons with titles, were crushed to find out after the game that Zach Dancel had been getting personal quarterback training from Chris Baucia, DeMatha’s longtime offensive coordinator, who runs a side business with football camps and one-on-one tutelage of QBs. 'Course, Baucia had also been teaching kids from schools all over the area. But the rancor was such that Baucia, as I reported in the column, was banned by the school from helping Dancel or any QB from another WCAC school. Applications to the recent summer camps run by Baucia's training school, called the QB Factory, included the following disclaimer: “No Player may be accepted or attend this program if they attend a WCAC Private School. DeMatha Catholic HS has deemed this a conflict of Interest and will not allow Coach Baucia to train a player that attends a WCAC high school.” Among the things I didn't get into, however, is that since the loss to Good Counsel, DeMatha's followers have come up with all kinds of theories on why they didn't come out on top this time. Everything is on the table. My favorite rumor is that the WCAC title game was fixed. Yup, some Stags fans are actually convinced that money exchanged hands and caused their team to not have a fair chance at beating Good Counsel on that November day in Annapolis.

Wowie! I've been a big high school football fan for a long time, and I've never heard anything quite like that before; "Friday Night Lights" writers have never concocted a story line so wacky as a fixed high school football game. Then again, Good Counsel and DeMatha now play high school football at a level that I know very little about. Who needs NBC's fictional football show when we've got this kind of theater being played out on fields in our own backyard?

The next episode of the Good Counsel/DeMatha football rivalry/soap opera comes on Friday, October 8, under the lights at...Dancel Field.

MMA booster Luke Thomas

The king of ultimate fighting promotions, UFC, makes its local debut tonight at the Patriot Center. UFC boss Dana White says at least 7,000 tickets have already been sold for the show, which will be televised on Spike TV.

Luke Thomas calls the Fairfax card "arguably the most significant combat sports event since Tyson fought at what was once the MCI Center."

Thomas should be proud. The way I see it, nobody's as responsible for making DC an MMA stronghold, or for putting this area on Dana White's radar, as Thomas. But you'd have to get Thomas in a rear naked choke before he'd take proper credit for UFC's setting up shop here.

"I can't in good conscience take credit for the UFC's arrival," Thomas tells me. "They should pat themselves on the back."

Thomas, a Brookland resident, runs the popular MMA website, bloodyelbow.com, and was hosting an ultimate fighting radio show, MMA Nation, weekends on WJFK-FM long before the station went all-sports. I don't share Thomas's views about the level of artistry or science involved in ultimate fighting — to my lay eyes, it's light years behind boxing in those terms, and I've never gotten beyond the fact that the feature finishing move in MMA is called a "rear naked choke."

(AFTER THE JUMP: A gratuitous "human cockfighting" reference? Does somebody snowboarding for America make your butt water, too? Rink is rigged to keep Ovechkin and the Russkis from winning gold? Gratuitous Pete Townshend kiddie-porn reference? No "Pictures of Lily" at Super Bowl halftime? Reason #1047 why the media despises Dan Snyder? Et tu, Marv Albert?)

But if you listen to Thomas's radio show you know right away he believes everything he says. He'll be on WJFK with live broadcasts from the Patriot Center throughout the day today talking up the UFC card, and will host a post-fight show on the station. "It's the first time MMA has ever been covered by radio like this in the DC media market," Thomas says. "A true and powerful milestone."

Everything ain't rosy for MMA as UFC makes its local bow. The biggest star in the sport, heavyweight champ Brock Lesnar, bowed out with some sort of internal health problems that his camp is playing coy about late last year, just as he was taking UFC and the whole ultimate fighting realm further into the mainstream than it had ever gone. Lesnar will find out how long it'll be before he returns to the octagon, or if he ever will, this week.

Thomas, however, says MMA in general, and specifically around here, will survive with or without Lesnar.

"MMA is here to stay in DC," Thomas says. "And it's only going to get bigger."

John McCain probably won't be showing up in Fairfax. (Media man-law requires that every ultimate fighting piece include at least one reference to McCain's "human cockfighting" description of mixed martial arts from the last century.)

***

Ultimate fighting isn't the only athletic endeavor I'm too old for. Check out this write up on the L.A. Times outdoors blog of the injuries suffered by snowboarder and Olympic hopeful Kevin Pearce:

Pearce had been training in the halfpipe at Park City, Utah, for this week's Olympics qualifier at Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, and was knocked unconscious when he caught his toe-side edge while landing a cab double cork.

Why, of course he caught his toe-side edge while landing a cab double cork! How else would the kid have been hurt other than from catching his toe-side edge while landing a cab double cork!

Good god, do I hate the Winter Olympics, where rich people land cab double corks for you and me and all of America! And now I learn that Olympic hockey, the only reason to put up with the whole nationalist shebang, will be diminished greatly this time around: Smaller, NHL-sized rinks will be used for the first time in Olympic history, the only point being to slow down the play and give the North American players a chance to hear their anthems in Vancouver next month.

On the traditional big rink, Alex Ovechkin and his Russian buddies — fellow Caps Alexander Semin and Semyon Varlamov and the most stocked Olympic squad since USA's Dream Team in basketball — would surely skate to gold.

As Al Michaels would say: DO YOU BELIEVE IN HOME COOKING!?!!?!

***

And what about being bludgeoned by blurbs for the Who throughout Saturday's WRC-4 playoff broadcasts for the band's upcoming Super Bowl halftime gig? I'm surprised by the choice, since there are a whole lot pages in the Who songbook that, because of Pete Townshend's past foibles, and the recent protests those foibles inspired, he and Roger Daltrey won't be touching during their mini-set:

The Kids are Alright
Pictures of Lily
It's a Boy
I'm a Boy
It's Hard
Slip Kid
Little Billy
Young Man Blues
Imagine a Man
Cousin Kevin Model Child
A Legal Matter
When I Was a Boy
Real Good Looking Boy (Yes, the Who put out a song with that title AFTER Pete's wayward Net surfing, and threw it on their latest greatest hits package.)

I can't see how the Who can get offstage, however, without playing "See Me, Feel Me" – "touch me" references and all.

***

The wondrous Norman Chad admits in today's Washington Post that his 2009 "Team of Destiny," the Detroit Lions, let him down: "They won one more game than the Rams," he wrote, "which is akin to having one more girlfriend than Harvey Fierstein.

Chad has, for years, averaged more laughs per column inch than anybody in newspapering. Why his genius isn't more celebrated by the Post and the rest of the world escapes me.

***

Dan Snyder hates the media. The vicey versey's also true. From the New York Post's Phil Mushnick:

Marv Albert didn't call Westwood Radio's Giants at Redskins, Monday night, Dec. 21, because his deal allows him to miss some broadcasts, and he chooses to skip Skins' home games because club owner Dan Snyder put the visiting radio booths near the end zone, making accurate calls impossible. Snyder made luxury box seats out of the former radio booths.

Before games in D.C., Giants' radio man Bob Papa has apologized to his audience for uncertain calls that are coming. "Our position is now low, end zone," Papa said, Friday. "It went from bad, to worse, to ridiculous."

***

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

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Leave it to NBC-4 (or if you prefer WRC-TV), operators of the worst local news site, to slap a story with some real news value with a sexist headline. The station follows the Nickles-Cheh story with a piece headlined: "D.C. Catfight!"

First Nickles referred to Cheh as an angry woman. Now, a local news channel throws up another sexist cliche. Wendy Rieger needs to start a protest. Wait, is she still working there?

The story's first graph is just as lame (typo included):

"D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles readlly did it this time.  He's uncovering the hellish fury of a scorned woman, after his comments last week about D.C. council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3)."

All of this sweet prose  is just a way to give us the news that Councilmember Kwame Brown has called on Nickles to apologize:

"Councilmember Cheh deserves an immediate apology from Peter Nickles for calling her an ‘angry woman’ and saying her comments were ‘stupid.’ This is just another example of how the Attorney General has stepped over the line and stooped to the lowest levels. Councilmember Cheh is a respected lawyer and professor whose opinion about the law I have the utmost respect. She is fulfilling her responsibility to ensure the integrity of government."

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

So over that on WRC, Lindsay Czarniak did her sports report Sunday night without ANY visible Skins logos on her person. (Fact.)

So over that Sonny Jurgensen didn't tussle with Jim Zorn in his postgame interview. (Fact.)

So over that starting this week, the Virginia Lottery has changed first prize for its $20 Redskins scratch tickets to two (2) Redskins season tickets, and second prize to four (4) Redskins season tickets. (Fiction!)

Butt seriously:  What kind of buffoon is going to pay $20, the most heinous sum in the history of lotteries, for a chance to win Skins season tickets that pretty soon won't be worth $20? Commercials for the scratch tickets ran throughout the Redskins radio broadcast yesterday, and the uglier the game got, the more absurd the prizes  seemed. Who wants ANYTHING associated with the Redskins right now?

Coming soon to a courthouse near you: Dan Snyder sues lottery winners who turn down their Skins season tickets. (Fiction.)

But, good god, are the 2009 Skins over. (Fact.)

(AFTER THE JUMP: Skins' suckage is the lead local story? The national newspeople take break into Tiger Woods coverage to dump on the Skins? Jurgensen takes it easy on Zorn? Sam Huff can't stomach Albert Haynesworth? Will Haynesworth make everybody forget Dana Stubblefield? Bad news is good news for extremeskins.com? Who is this "Synder" fella? Nats get swept again? The Nats Tragic Number is down to what? It's hockey season?)

"There's no way to overstate just how bad this is," said anchorman Craig Melvin to open the evening news broadcast at WRC, a place where news employees actually work for Dan Snyder and are known to wear their fealty to the Skins owner on their shirtsleeves. (Czarniak told the Tony Kornheiser Show last week that somebody above her, either station management or Dan Snyder, forced her to wear Redskins clothing on the air.) Several minutes of doom and doomer about the loss in Detroit followed on WRC.

Fox 5 also led off its 10 o clock news with the Skins: "Disappointment, anger frustation..." said anchor Will Thomas. "Keep going!" co-anchor Maureen Umeh chimed in.

Earlier in the day, Jurgensen also seemed at a loss for words during his post-game locker-room interview with Zorn. The Hall of Fame QB dropped the attack-dog style he'd used on the Redskins coach in recent weeks. There was no fight left in Zorn.

"We must change," Zorn told Jurgy.

At the exact moment that Zorn and Sonny were moping it up on Dan Snyder's radio station, WTEM, the Detroit Lions players were being shown on national TV walking around the perimeter of Ford Field accepting fans' congratulations like they'd all just broken Cal Ripken's streak.

***

The Redskins are a national cause for concern, too: NBC interrupted its FedEx Cup golf tournament broadcast to alert viewers that the Lions had won for the first time since 2007.

"It'll be a long week for the Redskins," said the NBC anchorwoman.

***

There were some fantastic radio moments between Skins play-by-play man Larry Michael and color commentator Sam Huff during yesterday's WTEM game broadcast when the neo-Stubblefield, Albert Haynesworth, made his first sack of the season and stayed on the Detroit turf. Huff is tired of the $100 million man's slothful demeanor on gamedays.

Michael: Haynesworth is down!

Huff: He's tired...

Michael: And he has not moved!

Huff: Tired

Haynesworth was eventually taken off the field by medical personnel on a cart.

***

Drama can be good for business: Dan Snyder's message board, extremeskins.com, is claiming its all time record for traffic was broken after the game by a factor of 1 and a half.

As soon as a thread expressing all the bad feelings was closed, another one was started. Typical was one titled: If You Shared an Elevator With Dan Snyder Tomorrow...........What would you say to him?

"I'd fart," said the poster Arkawi, the only guy to get in before moderators shut down the thread.

The traffic flow at Snyder's web site was no doubt helped by the traffic tie-up at Snyder's sports talker, WTEM-AM. For whatever reason, host Al Galdi took a paltry amount of callers in his two-hour or so post-game show, despite running out of ways to say that the Redskins had lost early into the program. One of the few listeners who managed to override WTEM's filibuster and get on the air railed against the owner and tagged Vinny Cerrato as Snyder's "personal sock puppet."

WJFK, meanwhile, didn't even have a postgame show to let fans decompress. Instead, the area's newest sportstalker aired a live broadcast of the Pittsburgh Steelers/Cincinnati Bengals game.

Via email, WJFK boss Chris Kinard explained his station's programming choice: "By contract with Westwood [One, an NFL syndicator], we have to carry their late afternoon game. It's part of the deal to carry Sunday and Monday Night Football. We had a postgame last week when the Ravens game was blacked out locally, and will do expanded pre and post coverage whenever possible."

Kinard, who says he also noticed how few callers were allowed on WTEM after the game, promises to let fans vent to their heart's content today.

"We're going to open the phone lines all day," he says. "Should be interesting."

***

The Washington Post dealt the Redskins owner the lowest of blows yesterday. From an introduction to Michael Wilbon's Sunday column in support of not firing the coach: "Jim Zorn is Daniel M. Synder's sixth coach."

"Synder!"

Somewhere along the way, for reasons I'm not sure of, "Synder" became the go-to nickname for hardcore Redskins fans when mocking the team's owner.

"Schottenheimer" was spelled correctly in Wilbon's piece.

***

Nats lose! Nats lose!

Swept away...again. This time by the Atlanta Braves. At 52-103, the Road to 100 Losses is but a memory.  If I'm carrying the one correctly, the Nats' Tragic Number, guaranteeing the team the worst record in the Majors, is down to two — any combination of Washington losses or Pittsburgh Pirates wins, and our team's got the top draft pick all over again.

Good thing it's hockey season!

***

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On this date in 2005: Get your Tragedy Hats!

None of the Redskins marketing endeavors under Dan Snyder dropped the jaw faster than the "Redskins Flag Hat" that went on sale on the team's web site and at FedExField at the beginning of the 2005 season.

For $23.99 plus shipping where applicable, Snyder would sell you a Redskin baseball cap with a red, white and blue Pentagon stitched on the side to tug the heart strings and stir more nationalism at a time when the country was already crippled by an oversupply. The hats were a great way, according to the radio ads that ran on the sports stations owned by Snyder, to "commemorate Sept. 11."

The punch line: The proceeds weren't earmarked for any charity or cause. Unless you consider the owner's wallet a charity or cause.

Genius!

***

(AFTER THE JUMP: Bankers going for Michael Vick haters? Bob McDonnell, you lie? Boswell basking in the afterglow of his Snyder bashing? DC Divas become video stars? A bump in the Nats' Road to 100 Losses?  Jaycee Dugard jokes?)

It didn't take long for signs of the Michael Vick influence on the football season to show up. The first commercial coming out of the first pregame show on NBC this season was for Wachovia. It featured a woman and her car full of dogs, and had her talking about how she needs to save money at the bank so she can make sure her dogs are cared for.

Coincidence? Heck no!

***

Sticking with notable commercials: Virginia governor wannabe Bob McDonnell ran his new campaign spot again and again on WRC after the Steelers/Titans broadcast.

In the commercial, McDonnell is seen walking down a suburban street while being followed by a cameraman as he lists a litany of political goals for the Commonwealth. To capture the football crowd that would be watching the spots, at one point in the ad McDonnell's son interrupts the boilerplatitudes by throwing the candidate a football and asking with a big smile and an excited shriek, "Dad, how 'bout a game?"

McDonnell answers, "You're on!"

But then he keeps walking down the street and talking politics! The commercial ends with McDonnell and his family standing together at the end of the street for no good reason.

Bottom line: There is no game!

If you tell your son, Game on!, and then there is no game, how can you expect Virginia voters to trust anything you say, Mr. McDonnell? How?

Answer the question!

Butt seriously: You've never seen a lower-aiming, dumbassier ad than this one.

***

Tom Boswell came off the top rope and landed on Snyder earlier this week. In his washingtonpost.com chat yesterday, Boswell told readers, "I've never had such near-universal positive reaction to a tough column."

Pretty soon, you could hold a convention of Snyder's supporters on a golf cart. Oh, wait. Maybe you already can.

***

Albert Haynesworth seems like a real funny tough guy. In an interview that aired yesterday on WTEM, the Redskins' only major offseason acquisition was asked if the size of Giants' running back Brandon Jacobs worries him. It doesn't.

“What is he, 250 [lbs.]?" Haynesworth said. "I weighed 250 when I was in the 10th grade.”

But here's Jacobs dominating Skins' safety Laron Landry last year. "That's getting run over!"  yells John Madden about the hit, which is far more brutal than when Bo Jackson's famously gelded Brian Bosworth in a "Monday Night Football" game. Jacobs' hit was enough to get writers of the NBC TV show "Friday Night Lights" to reference it in a script last season. In a scene where some characters are watching the highlight tape Dillon High fullback Tim Riggins sent to U of Oklahoma scouts, the guys all agree he looks like "Brandon Jacobs running over Laron Landry." (God, I miss that show! Come back soon!)

***

In case you missed it: The most viral sports column of the year, on so many levels, comes from Mark Whicker of the OC Register, perhaps the only employed writer on the planet who found inspiration for giggles in the Jaycee Dugard kidnap/rape/impregnancy/enslavement.

Read his non-apology, too. And the comments! It'll take all day, but it's worth the time.

Funny is hard, and damn if I don't hear a time bomb ticking every time I try to get chuckles here, what with New Media's typing demands and aversion to paying gatekeepers. But how many folks had to sign off on Whicker's words before they actually showed up in print?

***

I was in Delaware for vacation recently.

Few states like gambling the way Delaware likes gambling. There are casinos at the fairgrounds in Harrington and at Dover Downs, where there's also horse racing.

All the talk while I was there was about the feds siding with the NFL to crush Delaware's attempt to bring in single-game football betting.

Scads of evidence of the local love for wagering were available at Kupchick's, a nice, low-key restaurant in Lewes, Del. On the bulletin board, the results of the recent Travers Stakes from Saratoga were written in magic marker above the daily dining specials. There were stacks of fliers on the counter with instructions on how to enter the deli's Suicide Pool for this NFL season, entry fee and all.

So I asked the guy behind the counter what he thought of the appeals court's ruling that stopped the state's gambling pursuits. I guessed he would.

"Somebody made a phone call," he says. "They had to help Vegas."

I'm with him. No other explanation makes sense.

***

The DC Divas lost the Sup-Her Bowl, but the First Ladies of Women's Football* are featured in a new video I discovered on youtube. It ain't ever gonna be Soulja Girls — I was the only one to have seen the video according to the Youtube counter last night, and as of this morning the count was up to just six views — but, I gotta say, the song's catchy. Sing with me: "I like football..I like it a lot...I like girls that play...and even when they're not."

This thing deserves double figures in views!

***

Nats win! Countdown to 100 Losses™ stalled at 8!

***

*Dan Snyder really did trademark "First Ladies of Football" for his cheerleaders, a clear affront not only to women's football players, but also to the guy cheerleaders in his troupe. But not surprising. Snyder's amusement park chain, Six Flags, has also tried trademarking "Daycation" and "You Are Here." He likes claiming ownership of things™.

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