Are we as sure as we think we are that Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua has filled his school's institutional diaper by carrying on about the Fighting Irish being excluded from the college football playoff? Or is this just college football fans, and mostly tho...

How do you mend a broken three-chambered heart? This question tailed me as I wandered lost and lonely from the burrow of the frog I once loved most ardently. It is true she endeavored to devour me, rend me limb from spotted limb, and yet, in my eyes, she had been perfect. Ma...

I’ve learned a few things about buying a house. I haven’t learned anything firsthand—because, you know, millennials, California, inflation, etc.—but I know that stuff is always breaking and that you can go crazy trying to calculate the long-term benefits of paying a little bit extra on your mortgage every month. I’ve also heard that you have to sign approximately one million documents, and that “no one” reads them. 

Our friends-of-a-friend in today’s story must have heard the same thing, because they didn’t sweat the details when they were signing all those papers. When landscaping “requests” start to arrive from the sellers, our buddies have to take a crash course on tulip care, real estate law, and conflict navigation. 

My more rationally minded colleague Lauren has attempted to make sense of the Anaheim Ducks' first-place start, and to investigate whether they are actually a good team or not. This is fine, for those of you interested in things like "cause" and "effect" when it comes to res...

In late July, before a game against the Boston Red Sox, Bryce Harper sat slumped in a chair in the Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse, a baseball bat in hand. Philadelphia was the latest stop on Rob Manfred’s leaguewide speaking tour; ahead of a CBA negotiation that virtually e...

The front-office decisions that brought Derik Queen to New Orleans were indefensible, so ham-handed that even the counterpart in the trade reportedly couldn't believe that the offer was real. Pelicans execs Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver gave up a first-round pick in a loaded 20...

On Tuesday morning, Red Bull Racing officially announced that Helmut Marko would be stepping down from his position as Red Bull motorsport advisor, which the 82-year-old Austrian had held for two decades. His exit comes shortly after the sacking of former team principal Chri...

Of all of the ways Liverpool's no-good season could have gotten worse, I don't know if anyone expected this. On Saturday, after the Pool Boys blew both a 2-0 and a 3-2 lead to freakin' Leeds United, Mohamed Salah, who had been benched for three straight matches, fanned the f...

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 washing tacos in the dishwasher, Indiana, pizza cutting, Isaiah Likely, and more.

Your letters:

The year is progressing along in its ramp-down process, according to the calendar. Fittingly, and justifiably, given the gulf between the iron-fisted thrall of winter and the honey-laden proceedings of the rest of the year, this is a process whose inputs and outputs must thu...

Barry Petchesky, editor of this website, assured you only yesterday that you would not have to think about the Indianapolis Colts again this year. The Colts had dropped a third straight game, their quarterback's leg was tragically kerploded, they'd lost control of their divi...

On Friday, fans of corporate consolidation rejoiced as Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it had reached a deal to sell its movie studio and streaming businesses to Netflix for $72 billion. That was not altogether surprising news, given that Netflix's rival bidder Paramou...

"People were writing poems," Patricia Lockwood tells us. Also: "People brought you cabbages." In her hands, events don't unfold in the usual way, with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, we seem to come upon people and things doing what they always do, their actions and g...

The Chiefs are no longer getting away with it, and maybe the Eagles aren't either. The defending Super Bowl champs are still leading the NFC East with an 8-5 record, but anyone who has watched this team closely will be forced to admit that the eternally pessimistic Eagles fans have a point this time—something is clearly not right here.

The Eagles lost their third straight game on Monday night, dropping a 22–19 overtime snoozer to the Chargers. Pretty much everyone who participated in this game came out of it embarrassed, but none more so than Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, who this morning finds himself the personification of everything that has felt lacking about this Eagles' season.

Sunday was bittersweet for Buffalo Bills fans. Yes, Buffalo rallied in thrilling fashion to beat the Bengals with three fourth-quarter touchdowns, and the snow made for a festive atmosphere. But there must’ve also been some tears in the crowd too, because this was the last h...

The video of any great goal is a rich text that offers the viewer countless details to plunge into and enjoy. One of my favorite aspects are the players' reactions. There's so much to read into the body language of a scorer and their teammates after the ball hits the net: th...

It is once again time to get mad about a college football playoff bracket. Every year ESPN and its TV show, made by a committee that talks ball while on break from planning the human instrumentality project, design a 12-team playoff seemingly beholden to no rules, no standar...

Next year marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the start of the War on Terror. The totalizing and disastrous effects of American intervention in the Middle East followed a familiar trajectory: righteous vengeance and prolonged victimhood; creeping guilt and doubt about the...

The Baseball Hall Of Fame in its principal role as the parent company of BondsBeGone International has concluded at long last that the pretense of considering Barry Bonds is no longer worth the bother. In electing Jeff Kent (and good for him, I guess) while banishing Bonds, ...

Treat yourself to our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Aidan Deshong, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Aidan is a college student originally from Los Angeles. He isn’t a huge sports fan, except for golf, which he thinks is the best thing ever. (Crosswords are a close second.)

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. 

The last time I wrote about the Colts, it was following last year's season-ending fumble/trick-play-meltdown combo that took them out of the playoff picture for good, and I promised you that "this will be the last time you have to think about the Colts this year." I secretly...

Plan the parade. Kiss your sweetie on the mouth. Send a local street urchin to acquire a goose for the feast. The Chiefs' bullshit is no longer working.

For a little while, it looked like the Chiefs' bullshit was still working. An 0-2 start was an encouraging sign for those of us who do not want devilry to enter into their sports-watching experience. But then the Chiefs won five of their next six games, all by comfortable margins, and doom was once again on the horizon. The possibility of this stupid, boring, under-achieving team Mr. Magoo-ing its way into another Super Bowl was real. Things have shifted dramatically since then, however, and the Chiefs are now 6-7 following last night's 20-10 loss to the Houston Texans, by far their most dispiriting of the season.

Well, Notre Dame sure showed the Pop-Tarts Bowl, by cracky. If they can't be in the big-money tournament, by gum, they're not going to lose money playing straight men to a gigantic breakfast side dish.

In fairness, we only assume they would have gone to the Pop-Tarts Bowl because that's where BYU, another rejected suitor for the college football playoff, ended up. But let's be fair. It could have been the Cheez-It Bowl, the Tony The Tiger Sun Bowl, the Kinder's Texas Bowl, the Wasabi Fenway Bowl, or the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl brought to you by Dre and Snoop Gin And Juice. There isn't a condiment, a barbecue sauce, a high-sugar cereal or high-sodium smack cracker, or a hangover kit in a can that wouldn't be proud to have Notre Dame on its billboards.

In the end, Lando Norris held his nerve, and his lead. Three drivers came into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with a chance to win the championship, but it was Norris who did exactly what he needed to: a podium would guarantee a championship win, and a podium he achieved. He beat ...

Figure skating is a fundamentally cruel sport. A full regular season or tournament structure gives top athletes a bulwark against variance. But a figure skater's biggest competition comes only every four years; over the course of a single year, they will, if they are fortuna...

The Indiana Hoosiers are the last undefeated team in college football, and will have the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff thanks to their 13-10 win over Ohio State in last night's Big Ten Championship Game. Anyone waiting for Indiana's dream season to end will have to wait a little longer.

Winning a conference title may not mean as much as it used to in the pre-playoff era, but try telling that to anyone associated with this team, which has only two conference titles in its entire history, the most recent coming in 1967. And 13-10 may not be the scoreline anyone wants to see in a matchup between the top two teams in the country, but try telling that to Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who won the game with the throw of the season and then gave an all-time great postgame interview.

Liverpool's horrible season got worse on two different fronts on Saturday. The day started with the Reds coughing up a 2-0 lead against relegation battler Leeds United, ultimately drawing 3–3 with yet another fragile performance. It ended with club icon Mo Salah absolutely torching his manager during an impromptu postgame press conference.

Salah has been on Liverpool's bench for the last three games, only earning a 45-minute cameo during a 1–1 draw against Sunderland. Standing in front of a gaggle of reporters, Salah said that he's been made a scapegoat by the club, that he no longer has a relationship with manager Arne Slot, and that his time at Liverpool may well be coming to an end this winter.

I started going back to the 1970s last winter because I was convinced everything and everyone else was, too. This was not a good time, and I was very much Not Having A Good Time in it; in retrospect, the decision to cope with the dread I felt at anticipating several brutal y...

On Friday, after an interminable procession of songs, skits, interviews, and speeches, including Donald Trump accepting a knock-off Peace Prize, FIFA's 2026 World Cup draw ceremony finally did the only thing anyone actually cared about. (If that sentence sounds somewhat familiar, there's a reason, and it's that FIFA has unfortunately settled on a bloated format for the draw, made only more bloated by the sheer Americanness of this edition.) With just over six months until the start of the tournament, and with six spots still left to be decided by various playoffs in March, the general skeleton of the first 48-team World Cup has been sorted out. Here it is:

https://twitter.com/FOXSoccer/status/1997020788864721278

The passage of time remains undefeated: LeBron James's double-digit scoring streak is over. James's run of putting up 10 or more points in every game since Jan. 5, 2007—George W. Bush was the president! The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't even exist yet!—is not one of the ...