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 AirPods, T-shirt hoarding, Hitler’s dog, and more.

Your letters:

Though history no doubt dates back before 2006, we have to start somewhere, and we may as well start with Kimi Raikkonen. After retiring from that year's Monaco Grand Prix after his car suffered a mechanical failure, Raikkonen walked off the track and, still wearing his helm...

One of the most jarring parts of watching sports is the omnipresence of advertisements. The discerning fan can look past most ads and blur them into the background, which is a problem that jersey patches are intended to solve. If you watched, say, LaMelo Ball during, say, the one year that Mr. Beast's Lunchables knockoff sponsored the Hornets, you'd be confronted with that stupid little patch all the time.

So, this week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I went on a long journey with Alex Bazeley and Bobby Wagner of Tipping Pitches, wherein we ranked every single jersey sponsor by how evil they are. The home-and-home took us nearly three hours, and it's spread across both of our feeds. We did the East on Tipping Pitches and the West on NBR.

Ohio State beat Texas 14-7 on college football's opening weekend, spoiling Arch Manning's big debut and committing the most egregious of crimes against The Discourse: making people who bloviate about sports sound dumb. Truth be told, the score does not indicate just how much OSU dominated Texas, as the Buckeyes' QB, Julian Sayin, was put on training wheels for his first game. Manning did not look great. He struggled with OSU's defensive scheme, over- and under-threw multiple receivers, and really just looked overwhelmed and timid throughout. Even for the Manning skeptics, he played worse than expected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcGN5jyC2yM

It is not important and furthermore not anyone’s business how many times per day I fill out one of the little three-by-three squares at Immaculate Grid, or how many times I have done it since the site went online in 2023. I’m simply not going to be addressing that issue at this time, and feel […]

As wary as he has typically been about the dangers of novelty, Bill Belichick must have known that the extremely public pantsing that he and his new team endured on Monday night was a possibility. But even those among you who wanted his first game as the capo di tutti capi o...

Some people are fans of the Buffalo Bills. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Buffalo Bills. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: These assholes!

You’ll have a grand time solving our Monday crossword. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Alex Eaton-Salners and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.

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.

As Texas congressional districts go, the 21st is pretty easy to parse. The outline of it, which dips into Austin and enfolds a vast swath of the San Antonio suburbs, looks like a lumpier than average flightless bird, or a small-headed figure wearing a cape in a windstorm. It...

I can't remember exactly what I was doing when it happened. The morning had started normally enough. It was a Tuesday and I'd woken up before my alarm
—this part was not normal, and the subsequent consequences almost certainly ensure it will never happen again. I fed my cat and watered my plants. I made a cup of coffee. I washed the dishes I'd left in the sink overnight. Maybe it was then that I first started to feel...something in my back. It wasn't quite pain yet, or at least not a type of discomfort that was unfamiliar. I decided I needed to stretch. This I remember clearly; I tend to remember my mistakes.

I bent over, touched the floor, felt that something light up with the sort of pleasant unpleasantness of a deep stretch. There, I thought, fixed it. I stood up straight and very quickly realized that I had not fixed it.

Well shit, summer's over! We'll be trying to come to grips with that tragedy over the long weekend, and will be back to full blogging strength on Tuesday. Feel free to entertain yourselves here until then.

Some people are fans of the Washington Commanders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Washington Commanders. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Washington Commanders, and just when you and I were ready to leave all of the name discourse behind…

These are trying times for Millennial soccer fans. Signs of the passage of time and the effects of aging are everywhere you look. Our old idols of physical prowess, chiseled beauty, and rakish charm are now middle-aged men whose rounded faces and time-ravaged (or Turkenstein...

Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.

If the most recent entry of The Backlog focused on two games that were made to play with your friends, then this edition is about a game that can isolate you, consume your life, and leave you in a daze, wondering where the hours went and when the last time you talked to another person was. That's right, it's time for Crusader Kings III.

Thursday evening provided us with a moment that baseball does better than any other sport—taking two things that used to be special but now almost seem mundane, and then slamming them together in an alchemist's fever dream.

This particular moment came when Kyle Schwarber of the Phillies, owner of baseball's 21st four-homer game in history and the third this year, faced Atlanta infielder Vidal Bruján, the 61st non-pitching pitcher of 2025, in a showdown to see if there was any actual history to be made. There hadn't been a four-homer game since Nick Kurtz of The West Sac Nine did it...well, five weeks ago, but a five-homer game has never been done. Add in Eugenio Suarez' four-jack night back in April, and suddenly the four-homer game seemed nearly as common as the complete game shutout. This one could have been different.

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

On Monday, President Donald Trump put out an executive order directing, among other things, that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth make ready "a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment." The president also called for Hegseth to create a new "specialized unit within the District of Columbia National Guard, subject to activation under Title 32 of the United States Code, that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital."

Psychoanalyzing Jerry Jones is the safest and cheapest dollar there is to be made in all of sports punditry. The template is already there, and everyone uses it. He's old. He's powerful. He's competitive. He's spiteful. He's a megalomaniac with the tongue of an auctioneer. Check, check, check, check, and double check.

Thus, his decision to trade rather than sign edge rusher Micah Parsons is being painted as a radical departure in his business-doing mode because rather than give in and sign him himself at the player's preferred rate of compensation, he hate-traded him to Green Bay for useful but hardly Parsonsesque defensive tackle Kenny Clark and two first-round draft choices.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Ray Ratto and Israel Daramola will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.

Israel Daramola: It’s not quite autumn, but it is college football season. America’s favorite roux of bloodsport, campus pageantry, and shady bookkeeping returns in a moment of existential crisis for the sport, as playoff fever and corporate greed threaten to tear asunder the things we once held precious. Not content to make the bowl season meaningless, college football bosses' desire to expand the playoff field astronomically also threatens to devalue the regular season. 

Do mine own eyes deceive me?! Or did my colleague Barry Petchesky really write a garbage blog called "I Submit To You That Popcorn Is A Bad Movie Snack" on the website we co-own? What fresh heresy is this?

Usually, when someone has a take this hot, we present their take in a point-counterpoint where some reason and honesty can be added to the discussion. But Barry must have known how unfounded this blog was, as he did not give me the opportunity to reply. Well, guess what Barry? I can write my own blog! And in my blog I submit that you do not know what the hell you are talking about!

Drew is a professional, and so he can be counted on to deliver a pro-grade honking of "We're back" at the top of every episode of The Distraction. So you will have to believe me when I say that, this week, the big fella was grinning, downright bubbly, and quite literally clad in a new J.J. McCarthy road-white Vikings jersey when he said the line. Yes, we're back every week. But this week, especially, we are back.

Moments after losing to Taylor Townsend in the second round of the U.S. Open on Wednesday afternoon, Jelena Ostapenko did what she does best: freak out and make a scene. The 26th-ranked Ostapenko has a history of not taking a loss well, and after getting completely blitzed by world No. 139 Townsend in the second set for a 7-5, 6-1 defeat, it seemed likely that she'd reprise her patented drive-by handshake. Instead, she held onto Townsend's hand for an extra beat, then argued with her opponent for a half-minute as the crowd showered her with boos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH0oKK0YrTg&pp=ygUadG93bnNlbmQgb3N0YXBlbmtvIHVzIG9wZW4%3D

Doris Burke has been dropped from ESPN's top NBA broadcasting trio, according to a report from Andrew Marchand of The Athletic. Burke has been working in broadcasting since 1990, and has been at ESPN since 1991, working men's and women's college basketball, doing radio broad...

True to the spirit of America, the most catastrophic thing to happen at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month was not the attempted mass shooting in Atlanta of the agency's public health workers, but rather the sudden firing of its newly sworn-in director...

Unlike any other sporting event I've been to, the early rounds of the U.S. Open are non-linear in a way that is both stressful and exciting. While the main stadium is off-limits without a specific ticket, every other court grants attendees access on a first-come, first-serve...

Some people are fans of the Detroit Lions. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Detroit Lions. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Dan Campbell and some other stuff.

Consider the average movie theater visit. Before taking your seats, you purchase popcorn. This being the average theater, they sell popcorn in tubs ranging from "large" to "literally the size of your torso," and you being the average theater-goer, you purchase the torso tub,...

As part our Defector Meets Its Future Plaintiffs series, a gaggle of subscribers, accomplices, and other ne'er-do-wells were treated in some form or other to the magicks of Cubs-Giants, mostly to buy their future financial acquiescence. And what they got was one of the last charming bits of baseball whimsy: the non-pitcher pitching. In this case, Cubs backup catcher Reese McGuire.

Indeed, the evening across baseball was a festival of position players used as pitchers, as McGuire was one of four to be used in the ceremonially sacrificial role. It is not known by your typist if this is the most profligate use of non-pitchers in pitching roles in the sport's history, and we'll be damned if we're going to ruin a perfectly good morning looking it up, but moments like this are good for the game—more specifically, for that game.

In the fall of 2024, somewhere near the headquarters of Brazil's Environmental Military Police, an unending reverse-cascade of catfish began to climb the slippery rocks of the Sossego waterfall. The climbers were orange with thick black stripes, hence their nickname: bumbleb...

The Gallagher brothers stepped onto the stage in their hometown of Manchester, knowing all 80,000 of us wanted the same thing. It had been 16 years since Oasis had performed together—even longer since the brothers had anything more than a tense professional relationship—and everyone gathered there was hoping their notoriously volatile dynamic could hold together for the duration of this show.

They opened with “Hello,” the lead track off their second album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? The brothers stared out into the enormous sea of people wearing bucket hats and Adidas shoes, and simultaneously sang the song’s final lines: “Hello, hello. It’s good to be back, it’s good to be back.”

It wasn't my intent to attend back-to-back Phillies-Mets games. Over the past month there had been two separate, developing conversations about how it'd be great to catch some baseball, and eventually these two plans coincided on consecutive days. It's not a strategy I'd nec...