Yesterday Army played Navy in college football for the 127th time. For a long time this annual contest pitted two of the top teams in the country against each other, but you almost certainly don’t remember that unless you are in your 80s. The people watching from the student...

It is not the biggest problem facing the NBA, and it is not really the Oklahoma City Thunder's fault, but it is unfortunate that the best team in the sport is such lousy television. It's more accurate to say that the basketball that the Thunder play is absolutely masterful, ...

Michigan men’s basketball came into Saturday night’s game riding an impressive streak. The Wolverines had beaten six straight opponents by 25 points or more, and most of the teams they walloped were pretty decent! Four are currently in the Kenpom top 45 even after getting sh...

Sherrone Moore, who only two days ago was the head football coach at the University of Michigan, was arraigned in an Ann Arbor courtroom Friday on charge of third-degree home invasion, a felony, as well as misdemeanor counts of stalking and entering without permission. 

Moore was arrested Wednesday night and jailed in Washtenaw County, Mich., after an incident at the residence of a coaching assistant with whom he’d had what Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Kati Rezmierski termed “an intimate relationship for a number of years.” (The name of Moore’s assistant was not used in court today, and will not appear in this article.)

On Wednesday, Real Madrid hosted Manchester City in a portentous Champions League showdown that, for the home team, promised or threatened to mark a definitive before and after. Win, and Madrid could credibly claim the result as a turning point, when a devastatingly talented...

The promise of Grand Slam Track was alluring. Track athletes have long struggled to make money; the quadrennial cycle of the Olympics brings attention to the sport in erratic bursts that are difficult to sustain between Summer Games. After the Paris Olympics, several track s...

There are only so many ways to surprise in the construction of a murder mystery, which is why the set-up of Wake Up Dead Man is understood from the start and goes so far as to cite its sources: Here is a locked room murder, a la John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, and, as we...

It seems that it is no longer a good time to be one of Bill Belichick's special guys. Following the old-timer's disastrous first season at North Carolina, changes are underway. According to multiple reports, Belichick is firing offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens and special teams coordinator Mike "Nuke The Gays" Priefer.

Kitchens and Priefer were among the cadre of washouts and football sons for whom UNC became a work program under Belichick. Kitchens was the Tar Heels' offensive coordinator during Mack Brown's final season in charge, but survived Brown's firing and was allowed to keep his position under Belichick, no doubt due to their long-standing relationship. Priefer, on the other hand, was entering his third year of unemployment when Belichick came along and offered him a lifeline.

For a few years, Maggie Nelson was everywhere. The celebrated autotheorist is the voice of, if not a generation, a meaningful corner of one; her 2015 memoir The Argonauts is one of the rare unifying must-reads of the millennial intelligentsia. Nelson is omnipresent within he...

Audi Crooks wastes no time. Eleven games into Iowa State’s season, the 6-foot-3 junior forward is the nation’s leading scorer, averaging close to 28 points per game while playing less than 26 minutes per game. Her best performances can somehow be both clinical and overpoweri...

Podcasting is a "next man up" business. Not in the way that the NFL is—no one is actually getting injured out here, although thinking about human-induced climate change after last week's Peter Brannen episode did bum me out a little bit—but the show must go on even when the booked guest calls in feverish and groggy on the day of the show. Luckily, Drew is on a texting basis with Matthew Coller of Purple Insider, which meant that we not only could still talk NFL this week, but could do so with one of the elite emergency podcast quarterbacks, a returning champion guest whose football knowledge goes far beyond the grim NFC North team which he and Drew care about the most. We barely even mentioned the Vikings in this one, because there was too much other ball to talk.

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.

This is not the best Buffalo Bills team of the 2020s. They’ve gotten dusted by the likes of Atlanta and Miami. They have a negative turnover differential. Their passing game is often inert, especially in the face of oncoming blitzes. They still don’t have a viable WR1, cycling through a gallery of slobs—Brandin Cooks, Mecole Hardman, Curtis Samuel—in a fruitless attempt to get more production out of that room. They’ve lost two vital interior defensive linemen to IR. They even lost their kicker for the season. Everyone still hates the offensive coordinator, and no one trusts the head coach.

Halfway through the second quarter of a Dec. 1 game between the Phoenix Suns and the hosting Los Angeles Lakers, the Peacock streaming network broadcast returned from commercial and threw to Robbie Hummel for an update. Hummel, a Purdue University legend who briefly played in the NBA before turning to broadcasting, reported from the Suns bench that coach Jordan Ott had spent the previous huddle telling Mark Williams to continue to "win the race" against his man every time. Hummel delivered his report while wedged next to the actor Austin Butler, whom play-by-play man Noah Eagle razzed Hummel for not knowing about before checking in with Derek Fisher from the Lakers bench.

There's a new documentary about Diddy in the wake of his recent criminal trial, in which he was sentenced to 50 months in prison after being found guilty of procuring sex workers. The documentary, titled Sean Combs: The Reckoning, has gotten a lot of buzz due to the fact tha...

University of Michigan head football coach Sherrone Moore was arrested Wednesday, hours after the school issued a statement announcing he’d been fired for what was termed an "inappropriate relationship with a staff member.” 

Details of exactly what crimes Moore, 39, is accused of committing remain vague at this time. According to The Athletic, cops in Pittsfield Charter Township, Mich., were summoned to the home of a “female Michigan football staffer” yesterday afternoon. The Pittsfield police issued a statement last night to ESPN and others saying the officers were “investigating an alleged assault” at that address. Moore, who was not named in the statement, was subsequently arrested by police in the nearby town of Saline. The Athletic story says the arrest was part of the same assault investigation, and Moore was handed over to Pittsfield law enforcement.

A remixed version of "Meet The Mets" played at the ballpark in Queens before every home game in 2025. But when fans arrive next year, that song will have a much more literal meaning, because they'll be stepping up to greet unfamiliar faces who have filled the void where long...

Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios are participating in a Battle Of The Sexes match this month in Dubai. Somehow, the sentence I'm about to write is even more dispiriting than the one that precedes it: Kyrgios and Sabalenka spent a half an hour on Tuesday promoting this match on Piers Morgan's show.

https://youtu.be/GgGa0EOSiUs?t=808

It's the most wonderful time of year, and we at Defector are proud to bring back our series discussing some of the most, uh, available holiday movies.

Sabrina Imbler: Thanks so much Kelsey and Alex for trudging through this “film” with me.

Are we as sure as we think we are that Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua has filled his school's institutional diaper by carrying on about the Fighting Irish being excluded from the college football playoff? Or is this just college football fans, and mostly tho...

How do you mend a broken three-chambered heart? This question tailed me as I wandered lost and lonely from the burrow of the frog I once loved most ardently. It is true she endeavored to devour me, rend me limb from spotted limb, and yet, in my eyes, she had been perfect. Ma...

I’ve learned a few things about buying a house. I haven’t learned anything firsthand—because, you know, millennials, California, inflation, etc.—but I know that stuff is always breaking and that you can go crazy trying to calculate the long-term benefits of paying a little bit extra on your mortgage every month. I’ve also heard that you have to sign approximately one million documents, and that “no one” reads them. 

Our friends-of-a-friend in today’s story must have heard the same thing, because they didn’t sweat the details when they were signing all those papers. When landscaping “requests” start to arrive from the sellers, our buddies have to take a crash course on tulip care, real estate law, and conflict navigation. 

My more rationally minded colleague Lauren has attempted to make sense of the Anaheim Ducks' first-place start, and to investigate whether they are actually a good team or not. This is fine, for those of you interested in things like "cause" and "effect" when it comes to res...

In late July, before a game against the Boston Red Sox, Bryce Harper sat slumped in a chair in the Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse, a baseball bat in hand. Philadelphia was the latest stop on Rob Manfred’s leaguewide speaking tour; ahead of a CBA negotiation that virtually e...

The front-office decisions that brought Derik Queen to New Orleans were indefensible, so ham-handed that even the counterpart in the trade reportedly couldn't believe that the offer was real. Pelicans execs Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver gave up a first-round pick in a loaded 20...

On Tuesday morning, Red Bull Racing officially announced that Helmut Marko would be stepping down from his position as Red Bull motorsport advisor, which the 82-year-old Austrian had held for two decades. His exit comes shortly after the sacking of former team principal Chri...

Of all of the ways Liverpool's no-good season could have gotten worse, I don't know if anyone expected this. On Saturday, after the Pool Boys blew both a 2-0 and a 3-2 lead to freakin' Leeds United, Mohamed Salah, who had been benched for three straight matches, fanned the f...

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 washing tacos in the dishwasher, Indiana, pizza cutting, Isaiah Likely, and more.

Your letters:

The year is progressing along in its ramp-down process, according to the calendar. Fittingly, and justifiably, given the gulf between the iron-fisted thrall of winter and the honey-laden proceedings of the rest of the year, this is a process whose inputs and outputs must thu...

Barry Petchesky, editor of this website, assured you only yesterday that you would not have to think about the Indianapolis Colts again this year. The Colts had dropped a third straight game, their quarterback's leg was tragically kerploded, they'd lost control of their divi...

On Friday, fans of corporate consolidation rejoiced as Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it had reached a deal to sell its movie studio and streaming businesses to Netflix for $72 billion. That was not altogether surprising news, given that Netflix's rival bidder Paramou...