BREAKING: DAN CAMPBELL CONDEMNS BRIAN BRANCH’S POSTGAME PUNCH — “NOT WHAT WE DO HERE.”
There was plenty for Dan Campbell to be upset about during the Detroit Lions–Kansas City Chiefs game in Week 6. But defensive back Brian Branch added another item to Campbell’s list right after the game.
Cameras caught Branch delivering a punch on Chiefs wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster at the conclusion of Sunday Night Football. That led to a skirmish between the two teams on the field immediately after the game ended.
Campbell made clear in his postgame press conference that he didn’t support Branch’s postgame actions.
“”Let me start with this,” Campbell told reporters. “I love Brian Branch, but what he did is inexcusable and it’s not going to be accepted here. It’s not what we do, it’s not what we’re about.
“I apologized to coach [Andy] Reid and the Chiefs and [JuJu Smith-]Schuster. That’s not OK. That’s not what we do here, and it’s not gonna be OK. He knows it, our team knows it. That’s not what we do.”
Branch delivered his punch on the receiver after the Chiefs wideout appearing to be offering his hand for a postgame handshake. Branch also didn’t accept a handshake from Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes just before the incident with Smith-Schuster.
Dan Campbell Delivers Clear Message on Brian Branch Punch
Football can be a frustrating game. But clearly, Branch crossed the line following Detroit’s loss at Kansas City.
It’s rare for head coaches and teammates not to support the players on their team. But Branch was so far over the line that, quite frankly, it would have been inexcusable to defend him.
Logan Thompson will be Capitals’ starting goaltender as Spencer Carbery says team is done with alternating starts
The Washington Capitals will continue with the goalie rotation they employed at the end of the 2024-25 season.
Logan Thompson will be the team’s primary starter heading into the 2025-26 campaign, while — unless anything unforeseen happens regarding Clay Stevenson in the coming days — Charlie Lindgren will back him up and get spot starts.
Spencer Carbery revealed the news after the team’s training camp skate on Friday.
When asked if the team would play each goalie practically every other game, Carbery was quick to distance himself from the setup they used for a large chunk of last season.
“I’m not going to commit to that, no,” he said. “I think, you know, Logan, with the year that he had, has earned an opportunity to get a good crack at being our starting goalie.”
Thompson was one of the best goaltenders in the NHL last season, winning 31 of his 43 appearances in net. The netminder finished fourth in Vezina Trophy voting after posting a 2.49 goals against average, .910 save percentage, and two shutouts. The Calgary native helped push the Capitals to first place in the Eastern Conference, stopping 26 more goals than expected,
Lindgren, while not posting numbers as impressive as he did in 2023-24, made huge saves when the Capitals needed him to and finished with a record of 20-14-3. Both right-handed catching goaltenders signed extensions during the season last year. Thompson received a six-year, $35.1 million deal while Lindgren put pen to paper on a three-year, $9 million contract.
“We feel great about Chuckie as well,” Carbery said. “So I think this will be a, you know, we’ll use both guys. We have two world-class goalies that we feel really, really good about. And shame on us if we don’t utilize both of them.”
Carbery hasn’t listened to Taylor Swift’s new album ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ yet, but ‘I wish I had’
Music superstar Taylor Swift released her highly anticipated new album ‘Life of a Showgirl’ at midnight on Friday.
Naturally, Capitals media came to head coach Spencer Carbery, a man of exquisite taste and polished brow, for a review of Swift’s latest LP after the team completed its morning practice.
The conversation, albeit brief, a little confusing, and featuring a lot of cross-talk, went like this:
Bailey Johnson: Do you have a take for us on the new Taylor Swift album?
Spencer Carbery: Did it drop today? I don’t. I wish I had.
Bailey Johnson: I didn’t think you would.
Tarik El-Bashir: That would have been… That would have been…
Spencer Carbery:
I saw that it was like… I saw her promoting it in some of the… yeah…Bailey Johnson: It’s a football crossover for you
Spencer Carbery: Yeah!
So, in summary and to the best of my understanding, Carbery wishes he listened and had an opinion for the media.
Across the music industry, reviews have been mixed for Swift’s Showgirl, though Billboard said the album “brings the bangers” and USA Today calls it “another triumph.”
What the media’s conversation with Carbery did reveal was how much he loves football and how he remains a diehard San Francisco 49ers fan.
As soon as the Capitals’ preseason game wrapped up against the Boston Bruins, Carbery tuned into the Thursday Night Football game between the 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams. San Francisco won the game 26 to 23.
“I was literally listening to it on the way home, and they had that they recovered that fumble. And yeah, that was pretty entertaining to [hear] it on the way home,” Carbery said. “It was good.”
