I am more likely to laugh at a movie than a book. I’m sure this is true of many people, and I’m sure there are a host of social-emotional reasons for this disparity, but I can think of at least one craft-based reason, too. In a movie, the moment of comic release comes and g...

Fantasy football is dying, and here's the proof. The hottest new way to spend the day after a game is to see which team is firing their coach, with the tiebreaker being how much of a buyout the fired coach will be paid. Well, that's the college tiebreaker. The pro tiebreaker...

In the top of the sixth inning of Game 2 of the ALCS, FS1 ran a surreal segment of play-by-play broadcaster Joe Davis demonstrating how to carve up a turkey live on air, in honor of Canadian Thanksgiving, which took place that day. Bird carving had already established itself...

Defector's newest podcast arrives next week: Only If You Get Caught is our latest show and it's all about breaking the rules. The first episode is out October 21.

Over the course of our first season, we will tell the stories of eight cheating scandals, both in and outside of sports. That is the first task of each episode anyway; the more interesting part of the show, the thing that makes it special and makes me feel especially proud of our work, is that each cheating scandal is also a window into something larger. The operating theory of OIYGC is that if you want to answer the questions that really matter about any given competitive framework—Who has power? Where are the lines of tension?—you have to understand why people break the rules, and how.

A baseball can be a weapon. It's harder than you might think. Held in your hand, there is a little give to it. But there's no give when you're hit by one, except from your body. It feels like a punch from a tiny hand, like a baby Mike Tyson that's chosen to hurt you. The po...

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 fake dead husbands, garnishes, athletic athletes, and more.

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Actresses are often tasked with doing a lot with just a little. There is no way around the fact that most movies are written by men, for men, about men, and as a result women usually figure into them in tertiary roles, as objects more than subjects in themselves. It's often ...

By now the rhythms of a typical Dodgers season are familiar: An offseason spending spree induces hysterics; a rash of longterm injuries and poor individual seasons puts a bit of a damper on the 162; they arrive in the playoffs, imperious as ever, ready to do damage. During t...

Some might say Mike Lucido peaked early. But, by god, what a peak. No high school player in the D.C. area got more attention in the 1970s than Lucido, a running back for the Annandale Atoms from 1970 to 1973. Lucido's heyday coincided with halcyon times for high school football in the area, filled with intense rivalries for Beltway supremacy. But with Lucido, Annandale (Va.) was the cream of the crop.

"Even if you didn’t really know the guy, if you were around here then, you felt like you did," recalled Dale Eaton, who’s been a part of the Northern Virginia high school football scene as a player, coach, and administrator since the late 1960s. "There was so much written about him."

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe.

This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Oct. 10.

Put your thinking cap on. It’s time for the Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Sala Wanetick, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Sala is a former advertising professional turned cheesemonger living just outside of Detroit. Her first book of crosswords is coming out this November; it is 40 Detroit-themed puzzles for all levels. Follow along on their Instagram page for the launch date.

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 from Oct. 15 to Dec. 1.

A few years ago, when the conversation over the racist nickname and racist iconography of the NFL team that maintained racist hiring policies longer than any other NFL team was a sad constant in the sports media discourse, I was embedding with the dictionary publisher Merria...

Yes that’s a clickbait headline, but I wouldn’t go vintage Buzzfeed on you if I wasn’t being earnest. So let me tell you about this coffee I had the other night. I’m eating out at a fancy Vietnamese joint in downtown DC. Since I don’t drink alcohol, I have to scan the back ...

Before I get to America’s leading football moron, here is a quick assessment of the college football landscape after Saturday's games. Every team is horrible except for Ohio State, which crushed 17th-ranked Illinois in Champaign yesterday. Unless Ryan Day manages to outdumb himself somehow, the Buckeyes are gonna bulldoze their way to a repeat. Every quarterback is ALSO horrible. Yes, that includes Arch Manning, who is now at the “get lavish praise merely for winning a game in which you failed to crack 200 yards” stage of bustdom that Bryce Young is currently enjoying. And Penn State has gone from merely disappointing to outright bad, which is good news for those of us (everyone) who’d like to see James Franklin shot out of a cannon.

I think that covers everything. Now let’s talk about North Carolina eating shit.

October is the time when baseball becomes a test of fan endurance. It's easy to spend a lazy July afternoon at your team’s ballpark with all of your worst drinking buddies. That’s entry-level baseball fandom. But are you willing to suffer the emotional trials of October, when your team’s games run into the wee hours and every pitch may as well be aimed directly at your left ventricle? What if you root for a team that NEVER wins in October? What if that team needed to win a decisive Game 5 in the LDS just for the chance to disappoint you on a grander stage?

Most importantly: What if the deciding game in question NEVER FUCKING ENDED?

PHOENIX — Now they were just showing off, treating the crowd to an encore. Jackie Young zigged and zagged to the rim. Chelsea Gray’s strange-looking heaves swished in. NaLyssa Smith pulled down all the right boards. Jewell Loyd popped into open threes from screens. The universe can sometimes be indelicate with its symbolism: A’ja Wilson slid across the paint to block DeWanna Bonner. The ball spun in the air and fell on Bonner’s head. Through it all, the Las Vegas Aces led, and led, and led, and led.

With a 97-86 Game 4 win over the Mercury in Phoenix on Friday night, the Aces won their third WNBA championship in four years to finish a Finals sweep and an unthinkable in-season turnaround. After beginning the regular season 14-14, they finished it on a 16-game win streak. Including the postseason, they won 25 of their last 28 games. 

For the second game in a row, the Milwaukee Brewers allowed a handful of first-inning runs en route to a loss. Unlike in Wednesday's close and competitive 4-3 defeat in Game 3, the Brewers in Game 4 would not have fared too much worse had they hired out their jobs to a squad...

One month after mass protests against the presence of the Israel–Premier Tech team at the Vuelta a España brought the race to its knees, the rest of the cycling world has picked up where Spanish protestors left off. It is impossible to rule the protests as anything other tha...

At the Phillies' 2025 home opener, we decided that it was our year.

As my friend Dana and I stood next to the giant balloon arch and let someone take our photo, people around us were feeling optimistic about "winning it all" and "getting a ring." Dana and I talked about how happy we were to be back, how good it felt to return to the ballpark we spend all summer in each summer, how fresh the grass smelled, and how grateful we were that the long offseason was over. This first game was against the Rockies, so it was also fun because we never doubted that the team would win. They did, 6-1.

In the immortal words of Comrade Xu, "There's no need to overcomplicate things." In discussing how the Philadelphia Phillies failed to beat the Los Angeles Thanos, that simple sentence explained in near-totality how stuff typically happens to and for people and teams. It's just sports, and in sports stuff happens.

But, and surely you knew a "but" was coming because why else do blogs exist, sometimes complicating things in the most drug-aided and byzantine ways is exactly what the moment requires. Especially in football, where the sport must make 17 games feel like 166 (the Phillies' final total) or 169 and counting (the Cubs). For that math to work, some complication is required. In rare cases this requires a near religious experience, but a Thursday night loss to the New York Giants will suffice in a pinch.

Rare indeed is the headline-and-dek combo worth noticing, or caring about. In many publications these aren't even written by the same person who wrote the actual blog; at any rate they're many hundreds or thousands of words shorter than the blog itself. Caring about the headline and dek is to some extent like close-reading the movie poster inside the multiplex. Probably it's better to just go inside the theater and watch the movie.

Possibly Economist culture correspondent Jon Fasman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is not solely to blame for the following combo, atop his baffling Thursday column about Johnny Cash:

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today we have a search for cool and cooling window treatments, a rehabbed Man Apartment, and a lecture about rugs.

Noe asks: 

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. Ray: Only a few assistants got fired this week, so the coaching bloodletting is either easing...

Thursday was not a great night to be a current or former Red Wings goaltender. John Gibson, traded for this summer to solve Detroit's longstanding net woes, debuted with one of the sickest-looking jersey/pads combos I've ever seen—and then promptly gave up five goals on 13 s...

In the play-by-play, this is how the Philadelphia Phillies lost the NLDS: With the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the 11th inning, Los Angeles Dodgers centerfielder Andy Pages bopped a broken-bat ground ball directly to the mound. Phillies relief pitcher Orion Kerkering bobbled the ball, scrambled to recover it, and—with still a lifespan's worth of time to toss Pages out at first base and end the inning—panicked. He tossed the ball to, or at any rate vaguely toward, home, where it sailed far past the glove of J.T. Realmuto. The Dodgers won the game, and thus the series, on a walk-off throwing error.

https://youtu.be/Qco9g7WLH1A?si=0VJFPbX4g7HoG6_s

I just assume that no one is paying attention to anything I say. It makes the anxiety easier to manage, and is mostly correct. So you can imagine my surprise when, last weekend, Drew posted that, on my recommendation, he and his family had watched and enjoyed Eli Yudin's very funny comedy special Humble Offering. While I would generally encourage people to go on continuing to pay me no mind, this was a worthwhile exception—What A Time To Be Alive, which Eli co-hosts and on which I've appeared a few times, is one of my favorite podcasts, and the special really is good, and it all made this week's episode possible.

When the NFL announced that Bad Bunny would headline this season's Super Bowl halftime show, it made all the sense in the world, because Benito Martínez Ocasio is probably the single most versatile man in show business. He's wrestled a match at WrestleMania, pulled double du...

This was the moment Jerry Jones could have cleaned the slate on his reputation as a brilliant businessman, Foghorn Leghorn tribune act, mirror addict and gaseous faildad, and as you may have guessed given his resume, he duffed it. We all had such high hopes for him too. In ...

PHOENIX — On paper, all the havoc of a basketball game becomes something neat and unfeeling. However spiritually untrue it seems, this is actually true: In Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, there was only one lead change. Nor was it really a lead change to remember: It happene...

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 world. Ugh. Awful place. Can’t recommend enough that you avoid it. I know I do. I am a man who craves distraction, seeing as how it’s my best chance of isolating myself from all of the bullshit out there. This is why I don’t watch the news. What kind of fucking lunatic wants to watch the news right now? They can’t even do the news right anymore! They fucked it up, just like they fucked up everything else!