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! 

If the commenters of this site and also the Defector Twitch chat are to be believed, I have many problems, but there's one that haunts me every single day: I am terrible at finishing video games. Just an absolutely dog shit completionist, that's what I am. I played a lot of ...

Told one way, the story of Major League Baseball's steroid era is a fairly simple tale: Jose Canseco and the sluggers of the 1990s ate the forbidden fruit, forcing their peers and competitors to cheat. The alternative, for anyone who wanted to make a living playing baseball,...

If you can name just one current college hockey player, I bet it's freshman Penn State winger Gavin McKenna. After carving up the ice with the Medicine Hat Tigers and establishing himself as the likely top prize of the 2026 NHL draft lottery, the kid from the Yukon moved to ...

Marty Supreme’s title card is a stream of sperm swimming up a vaginal canal. They fertilize an egg, which becomes a white Marty Supreme ping-pong ball and soars down toward a primordial green table. Ball is life, indeed!  The progenitor of said sperm, 23-year-old Marty...

This week, like so many of you, the co-hosts of Nothing But Respect went to the movies and saw Marty Supreme. We both liked it a lot and found that it resonated with many discursive strands both within and adjacent to the basketball universe, so we decided to build an episode around talking about it. We invited movie critic and podcaster Eddie Averill on for what wound up being a pretty fun, arguably relevant episode. There are mild spoilers, but it's less a detailed run-through of the plot and more an NBR-style vibe discussion.

This is what the Defector staff enjoyed eating in 2025.

Objectively Mid Sichuan In Grenoble

The Colts did it. After beginning the season with a record of 8–2, Indianapolis has now been eliminated from the playoffs. It's a pretty exclusive circle of hell, where they've landed: Since 1990, when the NFL playoffs expanded to 12 teams, only three teams have missed the f...

When news broke this weekend that an elusive, endangered wildcat was spotted in Thailand for the first time in three decades, I rejoiced, obviously. What wonderful news that the flat-headed cat, which is estimated to have a wild population of just 2,500 in Southeast Asia, had not gone extinct in Thailand. The wildcat's presence was confirmed by remote camera traps, which recorded the cats 13 times in 2024 and 16 times in 2025 in the swampy peat forests of the Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary. What an abundance of flat-headed cats where there formerly appeared to be no flat-headed cats at all! What joyous news to close out the year!

And then I saw a better photo of the flat-headed cat, and my mood soured. The head of this cat did not seem so flat to me.

This is not the Brock Purdy you think you know. The Brock Purdy you know is a featureless, personality-deficient cipher, and entirely a creation of Kyle Shanahan's everything-but-the-quarterback football philosophy. That there might also be another Brock Purdy in there ...

These are the best days of Macklin Celebrini's life—not just so far, but likely forever. The world is all possibilities, without the vaulted ceilings of reality or the low chandeliers of expectations. In hockey terms, he is Auston Matthews without the crushing burdens of being a Toronto Maple Leaf.

He is not new to you, constant readers. He is currently on a seven-game scoring bender—five goals and nine assists in those games—and at the I'll-need-to-see-your-ID-son age of 19, his consistent persistence and occasional genius puts him on a list of teenagers who averaged more than a point per game, a list with wall-to-wall Hall of Famers. And not just outer hedge Hall of Famers, but the Hall of Fame of Hall of Famers, like Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Dale Hawerchuk, and Steve Yzerman, and active A-listers like Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid, and Steven Stamkos.

Maybe you've heard this one before: The Pittsburgh Steelers lost a game they were highly favored to win, against one of the dregs of the NFL, blowing their chance to clinch the AFC North title. Now, whether or not the Steelers make the playoffs will come down to their Week 1...

We're ending the month—and the year!—with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund accountant from South Orange, N.J. He was the captain of his high school soccer and track teams and can’t stop bragging about it. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space. He and his wife live in New Jersey with two human children and two cats. He hopes this puzzle will be more fun than a football in the groin.

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.

Naoya Inoue is boxing’s fixer. The peerless 122-pound Nippon warrior shows up after one-ring circuses soil the fight game, as last week’s hyper-moneyed breaking of Jake Paul's jaw surely did, to remind fans how pretty this most brutal of sports can sometimes be. On Saturday ...

Once upon a time there was a man who felt no fear. His name was Jacksonville. 

Things that scared other people did not scare Jacksonville. When Los Angeles came over, people said, "Watch out, those Chargers are tough!" 

This is what the Defector staff read and enjoyed in 2025.

The Trials of Gabriel Ward Murder Mystery Series, by Sally Smith

Brandy: Hello Kelsey, I hope you had a lovely Christmas.

Kelsey: Hello Brandy, if by “Christmas” you mean “the season finale of the hit show Heated Rivalry starring Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams which aired on December 26,” I sure did!! 

My mother sent me many beautiful gifts for Christmas, including lovely ones that she made herself. I will cherish them. However, she also sent one utterly confounding gift, which overshadows the others by sheer force of its strangeness.

It's a game, which is generally a good gift because I like games. I especially like ones that are easy to understand and do not have whole booklets of rules and requirements. When I first unwrapped this game, I figured it couldn't possibly be complicated because it was so small.

It is to our sorrow that even though the magnificent and manic Timberwolves-Nuggets hoop orgy started later and had a 50-point(!) overtime to sustain its value as post-holiday entertainment, the news of the day was earlier, far more mundane, and could not even cover you thro...

Game Of The Year is a designation that inevitably gets handed out several times a year, and not always with good reason. Recency bias can be a malign influence, it can be hard to stay objective in the moment, and the season moves so fast that it's difficult to remember what ...

I wasn’t sure, at first, that I wanted to read Heated Rivalry, or the rest of the novels in Rachel Reid’s best-selling “Game Changers” series. I had thoroughly enjoyed the first of Reid’s two standalone hockey romances, Time to Shine, which takes place in an imaginary world ...

For the third time this December, the San Antonio Spurs have beaten the otherwise barely beatable Oklahoma City Thunder. Each win showed off a different Spurs strength, with the first two being headlined by Victor Wembanyama's vertical pressure and the team's scoring depth, ...

This is what the Defector staff listened to and enjoyed this year.

From the Pyre, by The Last Dinner Party

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it.

I am no longer a full-time writer primarily because I work too slowly and the pay sucks. But a secondary reason is that my brain does not carve out hardline stances that make for good takes. For example: I don’t particularly like Christmas! But even with my humbug sliders maxed out, I could never reach the level of contempt that ur-crank Albert Burneko doled out for Santa Claus:

This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses, and to think of those less fortunate than us. So spare a thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of their own orifices.

All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's database of emergency room visits, all descriptions are verbatim, and all the people involved had a very bad time.

Happy holidays, pals! The site will be in low-power mode for the next couple of days, so feel free to entertain yourselves here while we warm our feet by the fire.

Onward!

Longtime elite gymnastics coach Al Fong has been suspended for physical and emotional misconduct by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, the organization created by Congress to investigate reports of sexual abuse and misconduct across dozens of Olympic sports. The suspension will last for five years, per the USA Gymnastics database of suspended and restricted people.

Fong's wife, Armine Barutyan, who also coaches gymnastics, has been suspended by SafeSport for physical and emotional misconduct. Her suspension, per USAG, is for one year.

You would think a miserable year would be inspirational for a true hater. In actuality, it was hard to hold onto petty grievances and curmudgeonly grudges when the world has tilted into disarray. There is no respite from our constant toiling in a dystopian nightmare. Who rea...

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 comparing and contrasting highway rest stops and malls and discussing NFL quarterback busts, plus knives, best-movie lists, and more.

Hello! Drew is off. I am your Funbaggist today. All hail the Funbaggist!

The Golden State Warriors have been positively meh-tastic this season, as if it has finally dawned on them that they really are old after all these years. Even if the game has not fully passed them by, the NBA's talent dynamics surely have. They are not yet awful in the way ...