Against all odds, something special is happening in Phoenix. The Suns began the season without a first-round draft pick, and with a roster stocked almost entirely with variously limited shooting guards, assorted castoffs, and for some reason the Charlotte Hornets' entire pos...

This time of year will exhaust even the deepest teams. The NHL is taking a three-week break in February for the Winter Olympics, but they didn't expand the start or end of the regular season. As a result, the schedule is crunched, and you could really see the effect over the...

The Los Angeles Clippers and point guard Chris Paul are splitting up. The team is awful. They've lost five straight and eight of nine, and their last three wins—they've only got five total, in 21 games—have come against the Hornets, who are crud, the Mavericks, who are crud,...

I gotta admit, I’m terrible about introducing myself to my neighbors. I’m much more likely to chat with someone who lives on the next street over than on my street. And when the people who live right next door are engaging in potentially chaotic behavior—like blowing their leaves onto the street in front of our place, or attaching something to the shared fence with screws that poke through the wood on our side—I put all my energy into convincing myself that I didn’t see anything. Sure, I’m conflict avoidant, but I’m also a Scorpio. If I allow myself to notice my neighbors’ offenses… baby, you’ve got a feud going! 

This week’s gossip features some friends-of-a-friend who picked up on some tension in their neighborhood and decided to wade right into the heart of it. 

The male comedians are going through something. I know, I know, but this time I'm not referring to the obvious ones who have lost their minds through some excess of steroid abuse and podcast appearances. I'm talking about the more thoughtful class of male comedy: Nathan Fiel...

It is 64 days until the first hockey game of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and the main hockey arena is still under construction. A test event, to determine whether the ice is good enough to play on, has already been pushed back. While provi...

Several months ago, I received a text from my friend Giulia with news that every former musical theater nerd yearns to hear: she had an extra ticket to see a Broadway show. Namely, Chess: The Musical, starring Lea Michele, and did I want to go? Yes, I said, yes, I will, yes!...

Gerald Bourguet, the PHNX Sports reporter who was fired for tweets that accurately laid out right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's beliefs, published a video Monday detailing the aftermath of his firing. It's a horrifying story about what happens to a reporter's life after getting caught in the gears of the conservative grievance machine.

Bourguet's video opened with words for his former employer:

What's a college football season if you don't end it covered in shame? This year was even more shame-drenched than usual, especially if you held the most heralded position on the field: head coach. This season saw more mid-season coach firings than ever before, a knock-on ef...

So far on Only If You Get Caught, the stakes of the competition in most of the situations we have talked about have been limited to winning and losing games. This episode, something much more significant is on the line: true love.

At first blush, a form like reality TV and a show like The Bachelor might seem like an odd subject for a show about breaking the rules. How is it even possible to cheat on a show where the mechanics of competition are simply trying to get the lead to like you? The more cynical-minded might ask, Isn't this all scripted by producers anyway? This episode takes a larger structural look at the show by considering the central concept of the Right Reasons, a mildly coded way to profess that a contestant is on the show out of a genuine quest to find love rather than a cynical attempt to juice their personal brand.

As the new Red Bull Racing upper management remains unwilling to hire a priest to exorcise whatever has been haunting the team's second seat since Daniel Ricciardo departed in 2018 (not dead; simply living his best post-racing life, noticeably bearded and dirt-biking), reaso...

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 trash days, dying in Australia, old man rock, and more.

Your letters:

On Sunday night, fans of French soccer club Nice confronted and reportedly assaulted players at the club's training grounds, hours after the Ligue 1 side lost its sixth straight match. According to a report from The Athletic, around 400 "ultras" showed up to the Nice trainin...

This episode of Nothing But Respect originated from a piece of internal Defector lore: Our colleague Ray Ratto possesses a bounteous and largely unpublicized trove of knowledge about NBA officials. This trove will occasionally reveal itself when someone complains about a call in Slack, only for Ray to respond by hitting them with some Gediminas Petraitis esoterica. He's been loath to write much about it, so we figured we would bring him on the podcast to talk it through.

Here on Nothing But Respect, every week is Rays Week. The three of us traced the history of referees as empowered art critics, groused about the creep of technologification into the practice, and laughed at the formal bios listed on the NBA Officials website. This was a really fun one!

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe.

This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on November 26.

Given his age when he first came to the world's attention and assuming continued good health in the intervening decade and change, Marine Todd would be in his late 30s today. That would be if he was a real person, though, and Marine Todd was the invented hero in a classic bi...

Pat Fitzgerald, a coaching retread with lots of dirt in the grooves, is about to get another Big 10 gig. 

Among the bigger stories on the latest Bloody Sunday for college football coaches was Michigan State’s allegedly imminent hiring of Fitzgerald, the allegedly disgraced former Northwestern coach. The rumors swirled immediately after MSU fired Jonathan Smith, who went 9-15 in his two years in East Lansing, and Fitzgerald's hire became official on Monday.

Deni Avdija, in his sixth NBA season and second with the Portland Trail Blazers, is suddenly a monster. Sunday night he put up a crazy triple-double against the invulnerable Oklahoma City Thunder, in an encouragingly narrow and competitive home loss for the Blazers. Avdija s...

If McLaren manages to stumble its way to a Drivers' Championship victory in the final race of the Formula 1 season, it will not be for lack of trying to lose. Las Vegas saw McLaren intruding on Ferrari territory with a devastating double disqualification; on Sunday in Qatar,...

As a close observer of an NBA franchise that has spent the past few decades in various states of putrefaction, an exercise I like to undertake from time to time is to consider which of the 30 NBA teams faces the bleakest medium-term future. This excludes most teams presently...

Jacksonville Jaguars move to 8-4 record on the season with another big win this week. Unimportant people gape in slack-jawed amazement. Many have asked me, "How did we get here?" Well it all started right where you would think—in Week 1. That's when the Jaguars scored a big win over Carolina Panthers, holding Panthers star Rico Dowdle to only 12 yards of rushing. Ever since then the Jaguars have been on a rocket ship to the moon. Meanwhile, Rico Dowdle remains trapped in his humdrum life, each new day a disquieting echo of the last. 

"Hi, Mr. Dowdle?"
"Hi, I'm Mr. Dowdle. You can call me Rico. Rico Dowdle."
"Welcome Rico. Or Mr. Dowdle, haha."
"Haha. Either is fine. Rico, or Mr. Dowdle. Rico Dowdle."

It does not take long to assess Lane Kiffin's time at LSU, and not just because it hasn't begun yet. He has decided yet again to see how far into the campfire he can stick his face, and this time has chosen a bessemer furnace to test his hide. Put another way, Kiff...

Can you sense that it’s time for our Monday crossword? This week's puzzle was constructed by Kelly Richardson, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Kelly is a northern Michigander who loves running, stand-up paddleboarding, and traveling. In addition to constructing crosswords, she is a regular contributor to her hometown newspaper, the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

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. 

George Best was once the only man from Northern Ireland to make a stir kicking a ball in America. But now the NFL is rife with Irish kickers. Last season Jude McAtamney hit a FG for the Giants. (It went less well for him this year.) And on Sunday Charlie Smyth joined him with a successful kick of his own, joining Neil O’Donoghue in the growing fraternity of Irish-born NFL kickers.

Smyth was previously just another guy in the booth at Super Bowl 59. During a break, announcers on the UK Sky Sports broadcast brought him in for a chat. They introduced him as a member of the New Orleans Saints—he’d spent the year on their practice squad, and signed a futures contract for the following season—and “a big fan of the NFL.”

I didn't consider the possibility of failure enough when I was developing this show. For the last episode of the season I was supposed to have a conversation with Ronald Young Jr., he had been wanting to spend time learning piano and do a small show for his loved ones. But the week I was supposed to record with Ronald he emailed me to admit that he hadn't learned the song on piano, he never had the recital we'd agreed he'd do, and he wasn't ready to record with me.

I freaked out for a few hours. I knew I still had to deliver an episode, and I had no idea what to do. I considered spinning up a new episode with myself as the test subject; "Could I learn to play football in like three weeks?" But after sleeping on it, I decided to ask Ronald if he'd be willing to chat with me anyway — but this time, about failure.

Try as he did, Aaron Rodgers was not able to avoid having his own Brett Favre Moment. Any 41-year-old quarterback with decreasing mobility takes a big risk by participating in an NFL game, and on Sunday Rodgers's age caught up with him all at once.

The Steelers were nursing a 7–3 lead as the second half of their game against Buffalo got underway, and the plug was pulled after one play. Rodgers, playing with a broken left wrist that kept him out of the previous game, fumbled the ball after getting blind-side smashed by Joey Bosa on the Steelers' first snap of the half, and the Bills took a 10–7 lead when Christian Benford scooped up the loose ball and returned it for a touchdown. While the Steelers were losing the lead for good, Rodgers was reeling on the turf, blood dripping from the bridge of his nose.

A person is going to get hit in the nuts from time to time. This is a normal hazard of living in the world, which is filled with stray blows in contact sports, waist-high furniture in dark rooms, out-of-order turnstiles, rowdy pets, and small children with timeless senses of...

After absorbing as much attention as he possibly could, college football coach Lane Kiffin has made a decision: He will leave Ole Miss after six seasons and fill the vacancy at LSU. In response to Kiffin's departure, Ole Miss has named defensive coordinator Pete Golding the ...

The Dallas Mavericks set a miserable task for No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg. They constructed a tall, unwieldy roster without enough shooting or ball-handling, then told a power forward-sized 18-year-old to play the point. For the first fifth of the season, that went about...

As a publication, we haven't felt the need to check in with Bill Belichick and North Carolina since October. There are only so many jokes to make about a mediocre college football team as it plays out the string, and how much more is there to say, really? Let's give it a try anyway. It could be the last chance.

The string has been officially played out: The Tar Heels were trampled on Saturday by NC State, 42-19. UNC finished the season with a 4-8 record, and will not be bowl-eligible for the first time since 2018, which was Larry Fedora's final season. Here's a brutal series of stats about this year's team, via the Raleigh News & Observer: