In a game where the Miami Dolphins went up 17-0 early, it looked like the Carolina Panthers were on their way to a second straight loss. Bryce Young had an ugly start, with a fumble on the first drive followed by an interception on the next. Luckily, Rico Dowdle came to do work on Sunday.

In his first start at running back in place of the injured Chuba Hubbard, Dowdle had 206 rushing yards on 23 carries and a touchdown, helping the Panthers come back to win 27-24.

We'll get to the "LOL Yankees" portion of the night later, but first: This postseason is for the rookie pitchers. After Cam Schlittler put on a show against the Red Sox, the New York Yankees got a taste of their own medicine on Sunday night when they faced Trey Yesavage, a 22-year-old who, in his fourth-ever career start, managed to outduel Max Fried.

Yesavage started the year in Single-A, where he made seven appearances before getting promoted to High-A, where he made four appearances before getting promoted to Double-A, where he made eight appearances and celebrated his 22nd birthday before getting promoted to Triple-A, where he made six appearances before getting promoted to the Majors, where he made three appearances before becoming Toronto's Game 2 starter in the AL Divisional Series. Busy year.

Navy survived a late comeback attempt from Air Force on Saturday, walking away with a 34-31 win. The victory brings the Midshipmen one step closer to winning the Commander-in-Chief trophy awarded to the team that comes out on top of the head-to-head matchups between the service academies.

If the win was not enough, Navy players received a visit from the government's foremost motivational speaker, Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of War if you enjoy corporate rebranding, Pete Hegseth. It's been a busy week for the secretary of swole, in-between deploying troops to various liberal hellholes around the country and conducting mole hunts within his own department, Hegseth notably demanded top generals fly to Quantico from around the world just to tell them it was time to nut up or shut up in the name of defending freedom from the tyranny of woke.

LAS VEGAS — An Aces game overloads the senses well before the game itself begins. The national anthem features indoor fireworks. Seats rumble from the bass of the speakers. There’s so much to look at, too much to look at, enough that you should brace yourself....

The United States Department of the Treasury has developed, to the brink of production, a dollar coin that features the face and likeness of President Donald Trump, according to a source within the Treasury who spoke with Defector, and as first reported by Politico. The die, a stamp that presses the design onto the coin,…

All the magic is happening at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in the Saudi capital's Boulevard City, a 220-acre retail and entertainment zone that contains a replica of Times Square and "500 electronic games for children." Since we last checked in, a couple of new names have been added to the festival lineup; the Whose Line Is It Anyway?–obsessed 11-year-old in me was distressed to see the addition of Wayne Brady.

But how are the comedians who have already performed enjoying the experience? Judging by the images of Kevin Hart shared on the festival's official social media accounts, he's having a great time:

The Israeli navy intercepted 41 vessels carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza and detained over 450 people on Thursday. The first boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla set sail across the Mediterranean toward Gaza last month, along the way picking up dozens more from Greece, Italy,...

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: Well, just when you think you have a handle on which teams are good and which are bad, you get a weekend like the last one. Starting off with my squad at Florida State, a team I mistakenly started to believe in. Tommy Castellanos was looking like 2010 Cam Newton and we were right at the goal line for a perfect rivalry game between undefeated Miami and undefeated FSU—and then what do ya know, a Mike Norvell football team forgot how to play the sport for a night. But hey, maybe Virginia actually is the best team in the ACC! I definitely don’t secretly suspect they’re going to totally dog it against Louisville Saturday, no sir.

Here is the challenge before you: Name a famous person who is 28 years old. Go ahead. No cheating, no looking it up. Off the dome. Pure, uncut 28-year-old naming. I bet you can’t do it. 

Zendaya? 29. Gracie Abrams? 26. Paul Mescal? 29. Hannah Einbinder? 30. You’re lower than dirt. You couldn’t name a 28-year-old if you tried. Look at yourself, scrabbling around in the dustiest corners of your mind for a well-known person who looks as if they contain the potent 28-year-old concoction of belief that they are never going to die with the creeping suspicion that they absolutely will die. Julia Garner, of Weapons fame? 31. Austin Abrams, of Weapons fame? 29. Josh Brolin, of Weapons fame? 57. Come on now, you’re embarrassing yourself.

You'd be forgiven if you'd never heard of Cam Schlittler before Thursday night. A lot of Yankees fans had not heard of Schlittler before he made his major-league debut in July. Not considered one of the organization's top prospects, and until surprisingly recently just anoth...

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. I suppose the fact that I w...

In the balmy late summer of 1924, people across the world prepared to receive the first messages from the intelligent alien civilization that was assumed to inhabit Mars.

To tune in to these Martian communications, the U.S. military imposed a period of radio silence on the nation that spanned 36 hours between August 21 and 23, coinciding with an unusually close pass between Mars and Earth in their orbits around the Sun. Martians, so the reasoning went, might capitalize on this moment of relative proximity—when the planets were a mere 34 million miles apart, instead of many times that distance—to reach out to their neighbors.

The playoffs started this week, and you have questions. Who’s the best team? Can I, a casual, start calling Aaron Judge a choker? Wait, they let a CANADIAN team take the one-seed in the AMERICAN League? Is that legal? And which team has the wettest guys on its roster, and why is it the Phillies? Those questions, and more, are the subject of the week’s Distraction episode.

This, citizens, is why you put your kids into youth sports and then spent all those extra hours yelling at other parents' children. This is why you bought all those unnecessary rounds at the tavern and needed to leave your car behind to get home. This is why you blocked out ...

PORTLAND, ORE. — Global capitalism begins with apparel. Slaves were brought to the American South from West Africa to do farm labor, and by the 19th century that largely meant cotton, a ubiquitous puffball that is easy to grow and aggravating to harvest. Seeds would be remov...

Elimination games don't get much more tense than Yankees–Red Sox Game 2. When Ben Rice homered in the first for a 2-0 New York lead, Trevor Story responded in the top of the third with two RBI of his own. When Aaron Judge got a two-out fly ball to miss Jarren Duran's glove i...

Baseball is at heart a guessing game. The batter guesses what sort of pitch the pitcher is going to throw. The pitcher guesses what the batter is guessing and throws something else. The batter guesses what the pitcher is guessing about what the batter is guessing; the pitcher guesses what the batter is guessing the pitcher is guessing, and so on, ad pitchclockium. For the sport to be fundamentally fair, a correct guess needs to be useful. Sure, the pitcher wins the battle two out of three times, on balance, but if the batter is right about what's coming and looks for it, he needs to be able to do something with it. If not, that's barely baseball. That's a public execution.

San Diego Padres setup man Mason Miller, for two days in a row after Wednesday's 3-0 win to even their series with the Cubs, may as well be wearing a black hood and carrying an ax.

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect is in fact two episodes, because what was initially planned as two half-sized chats blossomed into two full-size chats, and Harry and I wanted to make sure both guests stood out. The first episode, with Maitreyi Anantharaman, concerns the state of the WNBA playoffs, and while there is some now-dated Fever–Aces chat, I think that stuff is, A) good, and B) not that dated. Also the rest of it is really good, and it functions as a backdoor look at basically every Aussie in the league besides Ezi.

The second episode, with playwright Max Wolf Friedlich of JOB fame, concerns the psychic state of Knicks fandom, why it feels so great to root for bad teams, and his recent essay in i-D about working on the team that runs Lil Miquella, a bizarre AI influencer project that was ahead of its time (derogatory).

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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Hours after Napheesa Collier made a thorough, spectacular argument in favor of the idea that women should be paid to play basketball, the Las Vegas Aces and Indiana Fever supported their colleague's assertions by contesting one of the best and gnarliest games of the WNBA pla...

Nobody at Defector is making me write this. In fact, they'd probably prefer I didn't. But a few of our usual baseball writers are out today, and due to a series of fortunate events, I ended up at Game 1 of Red Sox–Yankees Tuesday night. Man, did you see how those losers blew it?

[Ed. note: Oh, I see what you're doing. Hilarious.]

The brown bear identified as Bear 32 at Alaska's Katmai National Park has been in the news a lot the last few years, and not for winning the park's annual Fat Bear Week competition. As with all high-level competitors, this is not usually a good thing. When the bear, nickname...

It's been a shade over 36 hours now since his purportedly mutual separation from the Texas Rangers and Bruce Bochy has not yet been hired as the new/old manager of the San Francisco Giants. Somewhere beneath the surface of the earth, conspiracy geeks are getting nervous and ...

Is Cathy Engelbert good at her job? First: What is her job? The commissioner of the WNBA represents the interests of WNBA ownership. Like any professional sports league’s commissioner, her job exists to absorb boos at drafts and trophy presentations. Unlike other commissione...

Smack! Pop! Crack! Woosh! Thump! Ping! Thud! Zing! Thwack! Whomp! Bam! BOOM!

These are the normal, old-hat sounds of baseball. But a new baseball sound just dropped, which is important and also good: puh-THUNK-CHIN-bing!

Well, they found a way to make Electronic Arts an even shittier company. In an move notable for its size, though certainly not its content, a group of investors—including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's firm Affinity Partners—have purchased EA for $55 billion. It's the second-biggest acquisition in video game history, after Microsoft's $68.7 billion absorption of Activision Blizzard, but unlike that monstrosity, which was subject to antitrust regulations, this feels like a done deal, a straight purchase of one of gaming's biggest and worst studios.

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Of the five players made available to reporters at the Clippers' media day Monday, Kawhi Leonard was the last one up. He slipped into a sweatsuit, sat down at the dais, and said, "I'm ready," as Law Murray of the The Athletic detailed. This was the first time that Leonard fa...

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 nuns, rope, human settlements on Venus, and more.

Your letters:

There's never been a better ad for St. Paul than Kirill Kaprizov's new contract. I think by this point in negotiations, most hockey observers assumed that the superstar winger would at least take a sip of all that the NHL had to offer and hit free agency at the end of the se...

The Indiana Fever are one game away from the WNBA Finals. They were not supposed to get nearly this far, not with Caitlin Clark, Sophie Cunningham, and several other key players watching from the sidelines and posting ill-advised AI art on Instagram. But the Fever won their ...