Danny Jolles is sitting in front of a camera in Los Angeles wearing a black Jayden Daniels Commanders jersey and a burgundy hat with the team’s throwback rallying cry, “hail.”
He’s touched every corner of the DMV and bleeds Burgundy and Gold, so putting him in the same vein as fellow actor and Commanders fan Matthew McConaughey is a problem.
“He’s not a D.C. sports fan,” Jolles said. “And it kind of annoys me…he just kind of picked our team randomly. And I don’t like it.”
It’s a small distinction, but it’s a bigger deal to Jolles, which tells you everything about his fanhood. The comedian and actor 鈥� known for his roles in Hacks, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert 鈥� has been based in Los Angeles for more than a decade and he first landed in my social media algorithm after the Commanders’ run to the NFC Championship Game in January 2025.
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He is also, by his own description, a D.C. sports fan in the fullest sense of the phrase.
Not just a Commanders fan. Not someone who bought a bandwagon starter pack assembled from marquee franchises.
All of D.C. sports. Always. Including the UFL’s D.C. Defenders.
“When the USFL or XFL, or whatever they’re calling it now, whenever that thing starts up, and they go, ‘Do we have the D.C. Defenders?’ I go, ‘That’s my team,'” Jolles said. “I’m not well. There’s no decision in my mind of who to root for. I root for the Washington, D.C. team.”
Born Into It
If being a D.C. sports fan is an illness, it’s hereditary.
“My dad said we root for D.C. Sports,” Jolles said. “I said you got it. That was it. No discussion, no debate.”
Jolles grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia, but makes a point of establishing his full DMV credentials: born in D.C., first couple of years in Maryland, then Northern Virginia. He touched every part of the region, and the region left its mark.
And he shares my (correct) assertion that Baltimore is its own entity and absolutely not a part of the DMV.
“I don’t think we need to have a rivalry, but I definitely think we’re not Baltimore,” Jolles said. “Love Baltimore, enjoy Baltimore, great place, hung out in Baltimore 鈥�听but different sports town.”
“I听just never understood anybody who’s like, ‘Oh, I’m an Orioles fan, but I’m a Commanders (fan)…What’s wrong with you?”
He came of age without a baseball team, rooting against the Orioles on principle and waiting for the Nationals to exist. When they finally arrived, he was already all-in.
And more than a dozen years into a life in Los Angeles 鈥� where, he says, he’s among roughly 20 D.C. sports fans who have “assembled” to support each other and their teams 鈥� he hasn’t wavered.
‘The Greatest Casualty’
Ask Danny Jolles for his biggest D.C. sports heartbreak and he doesn’t go where you might expect.
Not the years of the Capitals’ early playoff exits before the 2018 Stanley Cup. Not the Wizards, who have never been competitive enough, in his words, to really hurt.
He goes to Robert Griffin III 鈥� the knee, the mismanagement, the whole spiral 鈥� and he gets genuinely sad about it.
“We did have a generational guy, and we blew it for no reason, stupidly,” Jolles said. “I just always have such…that’s probably my greatest heartbreak. It’s wrong. And I just always like 鈥� I just feel so bad when I see him sometimes.”
Griffin infamously reinjured his right knee in Washington’s first-round playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks in January 2013, and the situation around him unraveled from there. For Jolles, the grief isn’t really about wins and losses. It’s about what he perceives the franchise did to a person.
“He’s the greatest casualty of that situation,” Jolles said.
The Greatest Season
The flip side is the Nationals’ epic 2019 World Series run.
And context matters here: Jolles was born in 1987, which means Washington’s last two Super Bowl titles 鈥� in January 1988 and January 1992 鈥� landed when he was either an infant or a 4-year-old. He never got to fully feel those.
The 2018 Capitals’ Stanley Cup is the only championship he absorbed as a conscious adult fan 鈥� until 2019 came along and rewrote everything.
“2019 Washington Nationals is the greatest run ever,” he said. “That season was a magical ride.”
He ranks it above the Capitals’ Cup precisely because of how it felt in real time. Every round seemed like it might be the last. Every win felt borrowed.
“The whole season we were playing catch up,” he said. “It was such a chaotic, wild ride of just like, the amount of times it was like, ‘What a run. Hey, it ends today.’ And then it just kept going.”
The Nats famously started that year 19-31, clawed to a 93-69 record, entered the postseason as a wild card team and won the whole thing in improbable fashion, culminating in a come-from-behind Game 7 victory in Houston over the Astros to win a championship series in which the road team won every game and Washington got to celebrate its first World Series title since 1924.
Still Out There Fighting
Jolles watches and keeps track from afar, all the while arguing with people in L.A. who don’t even know what a Capital is.
But he maintains the Caps are Washington’s best-run organization, he’s cautiously optimistic about the Commanders and is even bullish on the Wizards’ rebuild on the heels of the NBA’s first string of three straight 64-loss seasons.
“I talk myself into anything,” he said. “That’s what I do.”
So when his gaze turns eastward, he’s not looking for neutrality in his sports coverage.
“You’re 蜜桃视频app,” he said. “We all know what we’re here for. I don’t need you to pretend you’re down the middle.”
For Jolles, that’s the whole point of listening to local voices over national ones.
“I want to hear my guys,” he said. “I like to hear my people personally, that’s me.”
He even has a model for what’s missing from most broadcast booths 鈥� a third voice, there strictly to keep things loose. He points to in the Monday Night Football booth alongside Al Michaels and Dan Fouts.
“That was a good idea, I stand by that was a good idea,” Jolles said. “Just wrong person.”
The question of what D.C. fans actually want from their sports coverage in a fast-changing media landscape is the subject of a 蜜桃视频app series I’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks. Jolles, it turns out, was a fitting place to start asking.
Jolles hosted his own sports podcast, Everything But the Scores, built on the premise that the stories around the game are a valuable complement to what happens on the field. The research load of a one-man operation prompted him to discontinue it but he said he’d revive it tomorrow if someone gave him “an ounce of money.”
Jolles closed out the interview with an unprompted declaration: if his comedy and acting career ever opens a door into D.C. sports media, he’s walking through it immediately.
“That,” he said, “would be the peak of my career.”
蜜桃视频app may have just found its West Coast correspondent.
Danny Jolles is a comedian and actor based in Los Angeles. He can be found at and on social media .
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