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. It’s 11:00 p.m. and I’ve ju...

The United States invaded Venezuela late Friday, in a mission called "Operation Absolute Resolve." The invasion, which resulted in the abduction by Army Delta Force commandos of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, reportedly was the culmination of months of planning. A grou...

Darryn Peterson, freshman at Kansas and top prospect in the 2026 NBA draft, has something keeping him off the floor. Those deeply invested in either this Jayhawks season or Peterson's NBA future might find themselves close-reading the cryptic remarks of Kansas head coach Bil...

On Wednesday in Minneapolis, masked government agents apparently representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surrounded a stationary vehicle stopped in the middle of a residential street. One of them demanded that the driver "get out of the fucking car," and yanke...

Stevie Nicks famously sang the line "Lightning strikes / maybe once, maybe twice." But on Tuesday night, Tampa Bay exceeded Ms. Nicks's expectations, lighting up the night with four goals as they beat the league-best Avalanche to extend their win streak to eight games. It w...

Last month, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss decided to make Tony Dokoupil, then the host of the network's three-hour morning show, the new lead anchor on CBS Evening News. In any other circumstance, it might be hard to figure out how this promotion was issued to a guy wh...

What combination of ingredients might make for spectacular mess of a story? The 1970s? A big party in an industrial loft? What about a long rope, one kiloleter of lager, and the desire to make a gesture so grand it will impress the woman of your dreams. Get ready, y’all. We haven’t seen hijinks as misguided as these since the infamous night burger fiasco.

The hours since John Harbaugh was binned in Baltimore have dragged comfortably into double digits and are easing towards actual days—not a long period of time by normal standards, but long enough that he has already been crowned the best available choice for whatever coachin...

Each time Matthew Zipple, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University, releases a mouse that was born and raised in a laboratory into the green expanse of a field, he is amazed. He transports the mouse in a paper cup, lays the cup on its side in the grass, and takes off the...

I had over a year to prepare for Hiroshi Tanahashi's retirement, yet during his final match on Sunday, I couldn't get myself to believe that his career was about to be over.

It's not that I'm unfamiliar with the concept of the big wrestling retirement show. In fact, the last few years have given fans a larger number than usual of these spectacular, supposedly definitive conclusions to legendary careers. Keiji Muto, Sting, and John Cena all starred in the exact kind of show that Tanahashi headlined in front of a sold-out Tokyo Dome this weekend. But Tanahashi was different, even at the end. And rather than write a permanent conclusion to his pro-wrestling tale, he stepped out of the ring at the Dome and right into the toughest challenge yet of his life in the business.

Ever since Lane Kiffin decided he couldn't win a championship at Ole Miss and departed for supposedly greener pastures at LSU, his former team has done its best to prove him wrong. In the face of the coaching chaos heading into the playoff, the Rebels have run over Tulane, b...

The Trae Young era in Atlanta appears to be over, and not in a way that will leave anyone happy. The Hawks and their diminutive point guard—who can be a free agent this summer or exercise a $49 million one-year option—didn't agree to a contract extension in the offseason, l...

Kim Mulkey's weekend started out OK: The Baton Rouge crowd greeted her with applause on Thursday night as she held hands with Lane Kiffin and paraded the school’s new football coach around the court. (To assess the passage of time, consider that Ed Orgeron was the football c...

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.

https://twitter.com/David_Ornstein/status/2008115668223394276

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...