Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about football, auto wipers, road trips, and more.
Whoa hey, I’m back! Let’s see what happened while I was away. Well, my family and I went to Germany for the holidays, only for me to immediately come down with a case of the barfing flu. Then we got stranded in Frankfurt for two days after New Year’s thanks to a missed flight connection, then I had to split my family into separate traveling parties just to get us back stateside before 2029, and then we bombed Venezuela. What an exciting time to be alive. And barfing.
This week's Nothing But Respect with comedian, writer, and actor Devon Walker was a fun, loose one. Topics discussed: Aaron Gordon's Dwyane Wade diss track "9 OUT OF 10"; the regrettable Kendrick Lamar GQ shoot; which SNL people can ball; the necessity of distinguishing a player's on-court swag from their off-court swag; which numbers are cool (55) and which are bad (anything above 40 "unless you have a good reason"); Veeze making fun of Tony Snell; and whether or not Tidjane Salaün's mini-surge is any of our problem.
Fans of Michigan State basketball and Tom Izzo's coaching style love to talk about how valuable his confrontational style is to the program. Any instance of Izzo stepping over the line, even getting physical with a player, is metabolized as a necessary ingredient to success. Izzo just loves to mix it up with his guys, we're told, and loves when they mix it up with him.
It's fair to wonder how spending several developmental years around a guy who loves nothing more than screaming in a huddle might affect some of Izzo's players once they graduate. For example, the four years Paul Davis spent playing for the Spartans may have something to do with the fact that he is now the type of guy to yell nasty shit at a referee, earning himself an ejection from the arena and a public reprimand from Izzo.
Here is a flowchart to determine whether you should be excited about the Japanese free agents coming to MLB this offseason.
Has your team signed one of them? Then hell yeah, brother, always root for your guys. The Chicago White Sox taking a swing on Munetaka Murakami was enough for my recently buried fandom to poke at least one finger out of the grave.
Right before the 2020 U.S. Open, Novak Djokovic co-founded a group called the Professional Tennis Players Association. The sport is governed by a handful of powerful institutions, which face little pushback due to scant labor organization. The PTPA was intended to advocate f...
As NBA honors go, Player of the Month is fairly Mickey Mouse. Being named either conference's best player over any given 12-game stretch is straightforwardly impressive, though not enough to get anyone outside of the online paramilitary wing of any team's fanbase to care abo...
There is no earthly reason for you to have kept tabs on the New York Jets in Week 18—normal people would have averted their eyes by Week 2—but the team made proper history on Sunday. Yesterday's 35-8 loss to the Buffalo Bills meant that the Jets went an entire season without...
You've got one job to do: the Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Madison Shultz, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Madison has too many hobbies. She spends most of her free time skiing, climbing, hiking, and rockhounding but started constructing crosswords in 2025 as a creative outlet and reason to stay inside more with her two cats. If you like this puzzle, you can find more of her work at her blog Crossword Curiosities.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.
Following Manchester United's comeback draw against Leeds on Sunday, manager Ruben Amorim said in a heated press conference that he "came here to be the manager of Man United, not the head coach," hinting at a power struggle behind the scenes. Less than 24 hours later, he no longer has to worry about that distinction, as the club finally cut ties with the Portuguese manager, ending a 14-month-long tenure that never got off the ground.
Black Monday used to be a sacred thing in the NFL, the traditional day for coaches who couldn't fix the poor choices of their bosses to be fired by those same bosses. But like everything else, it is a tradition often honored in the breach, and already the revolution against ...
The theme of the current era of Devils hockey is "frustration." They have a ton of talent, and where they lack they have moved boldly and decisively to address their holes, but something or other has always gone wrong. One year it might be a lack of goaltending; the next, it...
If the NFC South got the ending it deserved, then so too did the AFC North. The division's season finale couldn't quite match the pathetic reality of two 8-9 teams sitting at home rooting for two other losing teams to send them to playoffs, but it perfectly captured that whi...
In 1975, just three years after the release of the Kawasaki Jet Ski, the American crocodile was nearing extinction in the U.S. The nation's crocodile population, only found in South Florida, had dwindled to just 200 individuals, with 10 to 20 breeding females. The crocodiles...
Late Friday night, the United States launched airstrikes on Caracas, Venezuela, and military special forces landed, captured, and extracted President Nicolás Maduro. He was arrested and is expected to appear in a New York federal court within days on narco-terrorism charges....
Here is the only highlight I'm going to give you from Panthers-Bucs, because, frankly, it's what you deserve for clicking on a blog about the NFC South, thereby incentivizing the continued existence of the division when it ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history, or, barring that, launched into the Sun. It's the game's final play, as chaotic and unsuccessful and poorly thought-out as the division itself.
Enzo Maresca is out at Chelsea. Thus brings a close to another weird chapter in the weirdest club's recent history. The upside for the legion of Chelsea haters is that the particular weirdness and grossness of the club's present predicament provides ample material to further...
Twitter, also called X, the social media network owned and constantly used by the world's richest man as well as virtually every powerful person in the American tech industry, and on which the vast preponderance of national political figures also maintain active accounts, ha...
Sometimes blowouts can be fun. Especially when there are pesky narratives going into them that need to be dispelled with great force. One of the more annoying things about the coverage around Thursday's Indiana-Alabama game, particularly on major networks, was the pundits' u...
The Hammerstein Ballroom is a beautiful place to watch wrestling. The ring is surrounded on three sides by multiple tiers of scalloped balconies, blue with gold trim, a prestige-TV color palette. From the vantage point of the TV viewer, the audience looms over the action in ...
Thursday night's Mississippi-Georgia game was one of those seminally batshit evenings in a sport that generally likes to wallow in its own self-parodic seriousness, and not just because nobody could seem to figure out when it was supposed to end. The stage upon which the Reb...
The 2026 Olympic men's hockey tournament is not, in fact, a two-team tournament. There are several nations involved, I'm told, many with proud sporting traditions. But from the point of view of this American, Team USA has two goals in Milan: win the gold medal, and stop Team Canada from winning it. Here's the roster they'll try to do that with:
When Drew and I recorded this week's episode of The Distraction roughly a week before Christmas, we were aware of the risk we were taking. All kinds of stuff can happen in an ungovernable and deranged culture over the course of two weeks, even during the two weeks of the year in which the least tends to happen. But Drew was getting ready to go on a longish family vacation, and I was getting ready to make my annual pilgrimage to Maine for six freezing days of last-minute shopping and Amato's sandwiches; there were only so many options. And so we placed our bet that nothing in the remaining days of 2025 would change our assessment of this stupid, brutal, mostly awful, but ultimately survivable year.
Getting stuff stuck in your rectum is so 2025. Doing Looney Tunes–style violence to your groin is the new hotness. Below are some very real, very gnarly penis injuries suffered by Americans.
We are once again faced with a fake-ass work week, so things will be a little slow around here until Friday. Take this opportunity to amuse yourselves in an open thread!
Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.
The first round of the expanded playoff was, predictably, a bit of a dud. But hey, the second round is here and the games should get better, or at least we hope they will. The potential for blowouts still lurks, and who knows what effect a three-week break from football will have on some of these teams.
New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs has been charged with one count of felony strangulation or suffocation, and one count of misdemeanor assault and battery, according to Massachusetts court records. The charges were first reported by Boston 25 News. According to...
“I think this game is over,” said play-by-play announcer Elise Woodward during Monday night’s Michigan-Oregon women’s basketball game. You’re imagining, maybe, that an electric Syla Swords shooting night gave Michigan a 50-point lead at halftime, leaving Oregon head coach Ke...
SAN JOSE, Calif. — When the podcasters arrived, they bypassed the wide talk show armchairs. Instead, they sat at the edge of the stage, heads barely above the crowd of adoring fans in front of them, and let their legs dangle. It was as if we were all hanging out in their liv...
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking LLMs, bandwagon fans, and more.
Hello! Drew is still on vacation, so I will be fielding your questions this week. How fun!
