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.
A New York City mayoral election is, definitionally, not anyone outside of the city's business. That this year's campaign, which ended in Zohran Mamdani's victory on Tuesday night, became everybody's business, and a big stupid national story, speaks to the effectiveness of M...
SAN FRANCISCO — "I don't think this will be an only good story," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said after being asked a question about whether his company, valued around $1 trillion, might bring some bad into the world. In other words: yes. His defense was that people should think i...
Tom Brady's post-playing career transition to "Weird Rich Guy" appears nearly complete. He announced on Tuesday that he had his old dead dog cloned.
Lua, a pit bull mix, died in 2023. Brady's new dog Junie, he revealed, is an exact genetic clone of Lua, whose DNA was preserved before her death. Like all normal pet owners, Brady announced his new dog via a press release to People magazine:
Recently, I have been watching a lot of tennis, and thus trying to learn about tennis. This, as it turns out, is very difficult, because tennis is not a sport that wants to teach you about itself.
If you do not have knowledgeable colleagues whom you can pester with technical questions, the best way to learn about a new sport should be through a well-executed broadcast that enables a correlation between time spent watching and things learned. This broadcast would ideally have an enthusiastic primary commentator who seems to like the sport and can explain both narrative context and what is happening; an analyst who can explain why things are happening with more knowledge than the average viewer; and, for the calculator casuals, some statistics that help the viewer contextualize all of the above.
Ja Morant and the Grizzlies were up 14 points on the Lakers at halftime of Friday's NBA Cup game. After halftime, Morant effectively stopped trying, and the Grizzlies went on to lose, 117-112. Morant ended with 8 points and 7 assists on 3-of-14 shooting.
After the game, a grumpy Morant spoke as if he'd been wronged by Grizzlies coaches, according to The Memphian's Chris Herrington:
Thousands entered Boise State’s arena on Monday night for the first day of the college basketball season. They arrived, I must assume, with high hopes. The Broncos are generally pretty good. They’ve won at least 19 games a year since the 2019-2020 season, and went 26-11 last...
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 Led Zeppelin, baseball grief, breaking into journalism, moving into college, and more.
Oh wow, it’s Election Day! Hooray for democracy, vote early and often, all of that shit. Election Day before sunset is always the slowest news day of the year, so let’s burn some clock off with your letters:
A little over three years ago, the greatest chess player of all-time lost to a swaggering young American grandmaster, self-ejected from an important tournament, and kicked off the biggest and strangest cheating scandal chess has ever seen. The story of Magnus Carlsen's quixo...
For three decades now, the director Kelly Reichardt has been making films about American escape artists: drifters and dreamers, rough sleepers and revolutionaries, full-of-it swindlers and disillusioned soldiers, plus more than a few ostensibly honest people caught up in the...
La Liga’s recent announcement that it was abandoning its long-in-the-works plan to hold a regular season match between Villarreal and Barcelona in Miami this December seemed to represent a victory of common sense over greed. The brainchild of league president Javier Tebas an...
At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It's a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a person might have. A world resolutely unworthy of knowing, except as a dang...
This World Series ended the only way it could, which was frenzied and late. The clocks turned back just a few hours after that; the next day was in another season, shorter and darker. The day after that, basically every MLB player eligible to do so, with all due respect to T...
The New Orleans Pelicans are 0-6 to start the season. Of those six losses, three have been by at least 30 points. No team in NBA history has accumulated three 30-point losses this early in a season.
The Pelicans rank 27th in offensive rating and 29th in defensive rating. They are playing "an unserious brand of basketball," longtime Pelicans reporter Will Guillory decreed Sunday evening. The players "seem to have given up on" head coach Willie Green, per Rod Walker at NOLA.com, who wondered if the coach's time was up. Green, the coach since 2021 and a holdover from a previous front-office regime, nevertheless kept his job during the offseason, which would have been the most natural time to replace him.
One of the underrated aspects of the last few years of Miami football is that, with the decline of UF and Florida State, the Hurricanes have in-state recruiting locked down. For the most part, this has paid dividends. Miami regularly boasts a slew of first-round NFL talent o...
Eleven years ago, when I was a college sophomore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I made an impromptu drive to Detroit with four friends for the express purpose of seeing Max Scherzer. It was his final home start as a Tiger, and while I'd be lying if I said I remembered much of the g...
So after nine weeks of the NFL season, give or take a shared and very valid dread at the condemned warehouse that is the Cowboys-Cardinals Monday night matchup, we can all agree that the only thing we can all agree on is that Dan Quinn really filled his trousers by not takin...
Manchester City has five players who have scored exactly one goal this Premier League season: Matheus Nunes, Phil Foden, Rayan Cherki, Tijjani Reijnders, and Nico O'Reilly. That makes for a five-way tie for third-most goals for the club, behind Burnley's Maxime Estève, whose...
Imagine you muster up the courage to finally do that thing you've been meaning to do. It's hard enough to overcome your own momentum to get out of the house, but once you've made the leap you might be confronted by the reality of a thousand unspoken rules and norms you never considered. One of the most stressful parts of trying anything new is the unspoken world of context and rules that people seem to just know.
When Josh Gondelman told me he wanted to play pickup basketball for his episode, I was fixated on the unspoken norms that underpin the idea. I have never played in a pickup basketball game, and I don't really have any desire to start now. But how the hell does someone learn what "first to 11 by ones and twos, call your fouls" means?
This puzzle was constructed by Hannah Binney, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hannah is a crossword constructor living in Cambridge, Mass. She began constructing in 2020, and she has had puzzles appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Universal, AVCX, and Puzzmo. When not constructing crosswords, Hannah is a particle physicist. She has an orange cat named Julius.
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.
