This is what's going to happen in 2026, according to the Defector staff.

Kelsey McKinney

Sometimes blowouts can be fun. Especially when there are pesky narratives going into them that need to be dispelled with great force. One of the more annoying things about the coverage around Thursday's Indiana-Alabama game, particularly on major networks, was the pundits' u...

The Hammerstein Ballroom is a beautiful place to watch wrestling. The ring is surrounded on three sides by multiple tiers of scalloped balconies, blue with gold trim, a prestige-TV color palette. From the vantage point of the TV viewer, the audience looms over the action in ...

Thursday night's Mississippi-Georgia game was one of those seminally batshit evenings in a sport that generally likes to wallow in its own self-parodic seriousness, and not just because nobody could seem to figure out when it was supposed to end. The stage upon which the Reb...

The 2026 Olympic men's hockey tournament is not, in fact, a two-team tournament. There are several nations involved, I'm told, many with proud sporting traditions. But from the point of view of this American, Team USA has two goals in Milan: win the gold medal, and stop Team Canada from winning it. Here's the roster they'll try to do that with:

When Drew and I recorded this week's episode of The Distraction roughly a week before Christmas, we were aware of the risk we were taking. All kinds of stuff can happen in an ungovernable and deranged culture over the course of two weeks, even during the two weeks of the year in which the least tends to happen. But Drew was getting ready to go on a longish family vacation, and I was getting ready to make my annual pilgrimage to Maine for six freezing days of last-minute shopping and Amato's sandwiches; there were only so many options. And so we placed our bet that nothing in the remaining days of 2025 would change our assessment of this stupid, brutal, mostly awful, but ultimately survivable year.

Getting stuff stuck in your rectum is so 2025. Doing Looney Tunes–style violence to your groin is the new hotness. Below are some very real, very gnarly penis injuries suffered by Americans.

All descriptions are taken verbatim from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits:

We are once again faced with a fake-ass work week, so things will be a little slow around here until Friday. Take this opportunity to amuse yourselves in an open thread!

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.

The first round of the expanded playoff was, predictably, a bit of a dud. But hey, the second round is here and the games should get better, or at least we hope they will. The potential for blowouts still lurks, and who knows what effect a three-week break from football will have on some of these teams.

New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs has been charged with one count of felony strangulation or suffocation, and one count of misdemeanor assault and battery, according to Massachusetts court records. The charges were first reported by Boston 25 News. According to...

“I think this game is over,” said play-by-play announcer Elise Woodward during Monday night’s Michigan-Oregon women’s basketball game. You’re imagining, maybe, that an electric Syla Swords shooting night gave Michigan a 50-point lead at halftime, leaving Oregon head coach Ke...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — When the podcasters arrived, they bypassed the wide talk show armchairs. Instead, they sat at the edge of the stage, heads barely above the crowd of adoring fans in front of them, and let their legs dangle. It was as if we were all hanging out in their liv...

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.