The Greater New York Football Playing Area has enjoyed the invigorating sensation of firing a coach nearly every year for the last decade and change—2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2024—which, for all the other things it suggests about the quality of NFL footba...

After losing to West Virginia on Saturday, the Buffaloes are officially out of contention for the bowl games this year. Despite the 29-22 final score, the game was never really in doubt for West Virginia. The Buffs have been one of the worst teams in the Big 12 this year, a team sprinkled with top talent but not enough for any consistency.

https://youtu.be/maLAGb2HBqA?si=MmUbMnTwCXw0QOaR

It's time to take Sunderland seriously. Coming into the season, I never imagined I'd be saying that, even if I felt that the Black Cats were not going to be easy relegation fodder. That's just the nature of promotion to the Premier League. Moving on up may come with a lot of...

Insofar as there is any small thing in baseball, one pitch is as discrete as it can get. If you are a good pitcher—at one point, say, the best relief pitcher in baseball—you can work around a first-pitch ball, even when trying to close out the ninth inning of a game. If you ...

Our grotesque slob of a president attended the football game Sunday between the Detroit Lions and the Washington Commanders, held at the far-flung hell-hole of a suburban stadium that Commanders owner Josh Harris is in the process of abandoning. The occasion was the team's a...

No crossword’s as sweet as ours. This puzzle was constructed by Ryan Judge, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Ryan is a recent college grad, full-time Trader Joe's crew member, and freelance crossword constructor who lives in Pittsburgh with his girlfriend and tuxedo cat.

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. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1.

Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were placed on administrative leave in July while the league investigated them for potentially violating MLB's gambling policies. The league was looking into whether or not Clase and Ortiz had been purposely throwing...

You know the deal with Gus Johnson. He’s the play-by-play guy who cried miracle, the man for whom no third down conversion is insignificant. Tell Gus Johnson that your happy hour special includes dollar oysters and you’d better not be standing next to a windowpane.

There’s great danger in being such an excitable play-by-play guy, because what happens when you ARE calling something remarkable, perhaps even historic? Well, if you’re Gus Johnson, you experience what I can only describe as a kind of late-stage puberty. Listen for yourself:

It wasn't so long ago that the Washington Commanders were named after a racial slur. Thanks to Donald Trump, that slur might end up being the second-most offensive moniker to be associated with the team.

According to ESPN, Trump wants the Commanders to name their new stadium, which will be built on the site of the old RFK Stadium, after him. ESPN's report describes "back-channel communications" between the White House and members of the Commanders ownership group during which Trump's wishes were communicated to the team.

You picked a bad weekend to fly. Over 1,500 flights in the US were cancelled yesterday, and over 1,200 over them have already been cancelled this morning. One of those may have been yours. You’re stuck at airport right now, staring up at the Departures board and seeing nothi...

The focus of the Anti-Defamation League has become entirely warped. Support for Israel was always part of the organization's goals, but typically that was nested within a broader declaration to fight back against hate or discrimination. As seen from the recent removal of the...

The Los Angeles Dodgers had a parade Thursday to celebrate their second straight World Series victory. The Colorado Rockies, working the other end of the baseball alley, knew that they had to respond, if not in kind then in volume. And so they did.

Yes, the Rockies acknowledged the Dodgers' place at the cutting edge of the new baseball with a nod to a 14-year-old movie about a 23-year-old season that ended in a first-round playoff loss. It did not take the worst team in baseball a full week to trump the best team in baseball with an equally jaw-dropping and equally on-brand moment, but you avert your eyes from Rockyball at your own peril. You watch them at your own peril, too, which tells you the strength of their weakness.

As the parent of an 18-month-old, I’ve been reading a lot lately. That is, if your definition of reading includes thumbing through sheets of increasingly careworn and spittle-soaked cardboard, reciting the 30 or 40 words that compose each tale from memory, and pausing innume...

While the man inarguably does his research, we must assume that Al Michaels did not read this story when it ran two and a half weeks ago. If he had, he would have called in sick for Thursday night's Raiders-Broncos game, and so might have spared himself having to c...

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.

Israel: We got our first edition of the college football playoff standings and hoo boy, it’s time to get MAD ONLINE. The main takeaways from the first bracket are that the SEC and the Big Ten are swallowing up all the real estate, the Big 12 makes a decent show of it, and literally no one has any respect for the ACC, which is a huge blow to Miami’s chances. 

Earlier this summer, ESPN made the confounding and ultimately disastrous choice to build its NBA Finals broadcasts around the stentorian yowling of Stephen A. Smith, a man who neither knows ball nor cares for it. You could have deduced that from watching him work the desk or, even more starkly, plug away at a solitaire app on his phone during the best game of the series. One might consider Smith's omnipresence on ESPN's broadcast alongside his naked disinterest in the thing being broadcast, and wonder whether this was as cynical as he could get.

No. It could get worse, as shown by this grotesque new AI ad Smith cut for Solitaire Cash, a solitaire-branded app that belongs as a notable new entry in mobile game hell:

I'm writing specifically about the Edmonton Oilers at the St. Louis Blues on Sportsnet on Monday night, but in broad strokes that will apply to any game you're watching.

First Period

A jury in Washington, D.C. today found a local resident not guilty of misdemeanor assault, a charge he earned by spectacularly and hilariously chucking a large sandwich into the chest of a Border Patrol officer in August.

The state attempted to charge Sean Charles Dunn, the heroic chucker of the hoagie, with more serious crimes, but was forced to settle for a single misdemeanor charge after a grand jury refused to indict him. Dunn's victim, a Border Patrol agent named Greg Lairmore, was struck by the sub after being dispatched to Washington D.C. to help carry out the Trump administration's pointless and fascistic crackdown of the city. After confronting Lairmore and giving him a little of the old business, Dunn whipped an entire Subway sandwich into the officer's chest before leading him on a foot chase.

Late in this week's episode of The Distraction, after Drew, returning champion guest Rohan Nadkarni, and I talked about local politics, lamentable trends in sushi roll naming, and the Miami Dolphins, I explain "gooning" to Drew. A Funbag question started it, Drew repeatedly asked for more elaboration, and a sprawling and excellent new Harper's story on the subject had armed me with plenty of unpleasant information to share on the topic. I would have bet that we'd get through the lifespan of this podcast, even if it had gone on for another few decades, without having done any of that. I would have lost that bet.

When Zohran Mamdani upset Andrew Cuomo to win the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, it led to a lot of histrionics. The usual fear tactics against a young Muslim democratic socialist had failed to torpedo his campaign, and the rich were getting desperate. In ...

Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland died by suicide on Thursday in Texas, according to law enforcement. He was 24 years old.

Frisco Police said they got a call late Wednesday night from the Texas Department of Public Safety, asking them for help finding a vehicle they had been pursuing that had entered the city. Per the police statement, state troopers found the crashed vehicle, on southbound Dallas Parkway near Warren Parkway, but Kneeland wasn't inside. While officers looked for him, police said they learned that Kneeland had "expressed suicidal ideations."

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.

The exact midpoint of the NFL regular season has always been annoying to pin down. The bye weeks make it so that teams haven’t all played the same number of games this time of year. And the advent of 17-game season means that an individual team’s season can never be cleanly divided in half. And then the average content grinder jumps the gun and files a “midseason report” right after Week 6. Get the fuck out of here with that, Mr. Timelord. We know that a proper midway point for the NFL season doesn’t exist. If it did, there’d be a shitty, Pro Bowl-themed event dropped into it.

Have you watched the Miami Heat this season? They're doing weird stuff, and it's mostly working. Weeks after the Grizzlies fired Taylor Jenkins, they also let go of several staffers, including first-year assistant Noah LaRoche, who then joined Miami. LaRoche was the architec...

Of all of the top teams in Europe, Barcelona under manager Hansi Flick is the most addicted to the offside trap. The high-risk, high-reward defense has been Flick's trademark as a manager, and Barcelona has, by both design and necessity, adopted it with striking intensity. F...

Disney is bouncing out of its gambling partnership with Penn Entertainment, the operator behind the crummy ESPN Bet sportsbook platform. The unholy partnership, forged in 2023 between the wheezing multinational entertainment conglomerate and the trumped-up regional racetrack...

To say Deliver Me From Nowhere isn’t for everybody is to exaggerate its actual appeal. The Bruce Springsteen biopic isn't even for all Springsteen fans. But aging dudes with daddy issues, which could be a redundancy: have I got an admirably boring portrait of the mega-artist as a younger man for you! And me! 

Deliver Me is adapted from Warren Zanes's 2023 nonfiction bestseller about the recording of Nebraska. The movie opens in 1981, as Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White, is onstage in Cincinnati with the E Street Band. He's finishing up The River tour, the 11-month, 140-show journey that hit 13 countries and made him a global superstar. The movie seeks to show how fame and Freudian foibles almost crushed him.

New York City has Mamdani fever! Our new mayor-elect made it official on Tuesday, after a savvy final push where Zohran spent the last month frequenting every bake sale and garden club and hip restaurant and Washington Square Park content creator. He even spent Halloween weekend club-hopping to every cool nightlife spot in the city, or as we New Yorkers call it, an Eric Adams Wednesday.

As we celebrate Mamdani week, it's important to remember that he is the hip-hop candidate. Not just because of his former rap career, though we'll get to that. It's the way he has used rap in interesting ways to establish his candidacy. From going to Wu-Tang shows to shouting out Dipset, he has the taste of, well, your typical Brooklyn hipster, which is yet another bit of smart politicking. With that in mind, let's toast to Mamdani with the songs that represented his run.

Earlier this year, on a cold Sunday in January, I walked into an antique store in a Washington D.C. suburb. When I go to a shop like this one, I'm not looking for chairs or lamps. My interests are a little more specialized: a collectible whiskey decanter shaped like the Superdome, for instance, or a 1976 tabloid spread about Watergate witnesses who died under strange circumstances.

Now I was on the lookout for other important historical artifacts. And this place, West Howard Antiques in Kensington, Maryland, had a ton of them: sports yearbooks, posters, and all kinds of political ephemera, stuff with slogans like "Youth for Kennedy" and "Jimmy Carter 76."

In July, the Guardian reported that the NWSL had quietly allowed its policy on the participation of transgender players, established in 2021, to expire. The scrapped policy used the testosterone levels of transgender players to determine their eligibility to play in the leag...

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

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