The Protect College Sports Act passed another procedural vote in the Senate yesterday, by a 70-21 margin. It will clear a few more procedural steps this week before going up for a final vote, at which point it is expected to pass and be sent to the House. In the meantime, it continues to mutate into a worse and more exploitative version of itself.
More than 35 amendments were added to the PCSA yesterday, and one in particular stands out. Republican senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville amended the bill to sharpen its language on how NIL spending would interact with the proposed salary cap for players. The bill now explicitly states that vaguely defined NIL money earned by players would count against a given program's spending cap on players, which would be set at $48.8 million.
Ireland and Israel are, at least for now, set for some really weird soccer matches. Unfriendlies, you might say. Their national men’s teams have a home-and-home series scheduled to open this weekend, only there are no home games for either side. Both matches will be played in Central Europe: one in an empty stadium, the other with only Israeli fans. The top story in Ireland these days, sports or otherwise, is that the games will be played at all.
“I think we all agree we shouldn’t be in the position where we have to play the game,” John Martin, head of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), said last week.
And Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrimsson said he’d personally polled all his players, and "none of us feel comfortable playing in these games."
Sisi is a Volvo Ocean 65 racing sailboat. She is fast as hell and built for sickos. She is not a comfortable luxury yacht, I assure you. Sisi is a frightening, angry, 72-foot, 12-ton sea monster.
Sisi, owned and operated by an Austrian company called Kora Yachts, is u...
A baseball season is very long and offers plenty of time for everyone involved to forget the stuff they would rather forget. For that reason among many others, it would make a great deal of sense to have long ago consigned Team USA's performance in March's World Baseball Cla...
If José Mourinho bringing a printout of questionable fouls from the Madrid derby to a press conference was an objectively funny maneuver from the Special One, the resulting fallout is bewildering, convoluted, and a little bit pathetic from everyone involved.
It seems that ...
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 flawed domes, office condiments, life on one leg, and more.
This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I were joined by returning champion Eamon Whalen. Eamon just published a big profile of Nick Shirley in New York magazine, and we spent the first half of the show talking about the particulars of the story, the broader implications...
Adam Wingard opens his new movie, Onslaught, with a brainrot history of the military industrial complex, a slipshod compilation of combat footage, political speechmaking, and behind-the-headlines conspiracizing that (semi-)convincingly situates the origins of the American ce...
The Detroit Tigers announced Monday that their ballpark will henceforth and forever, or until the naming-rights deal runs out or some more banks merge, be known as Fifth Third Park. "When you look around, it's so much more than where the Tigers play baseball," Ryan Gustafson...
When I called up my grandfather Irwin Miller last fall, I asked him if he felt his age. “Uh, no, probably 94,” he said, laughing as he shaved off three years. “The body feels 97, the head doesn’t, thank goodness—I think my memory’s pretty good.”
I call my grandfather Papa, and his memory was more than pretty good considering he was born before the Great Depression. Last November, I wanted to ask him about a big moment in his life: the year he graduated from his New Orleans high school and set out on his own.
“Growing up in Louisiana, LSU was the only college I thought about,” he told me. His first day was unceremonious: “My folks drove me to Baton Rouge, they dropped me off and said, ‘Good luck and goodbye.’ That was the way things were in those days.”
This past weekend, Ed Sheeran performed his first concert since decrepit Patriots owner Robert Kraft stuck his hand up the singer's ass and made him respect Israel. The culturally Irish but politically English musician played with no openers and a new backing band Saturday night in Philadelphia, because all his previous supporting acts abandoned him after his craven decision to drop pro-Palestine rapper Macklemore from his U.S. tour, at the behest of Kraft and other NFL stadium owners. During Saturday's show, Sheeran read a prepared statement presented as an apology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OInyzsqLvKg
Sheeran delivered everything you'd expect from a person in his position: equivocating, meaningless bullshit that was most likely written by someone else. A partial transcript:
Gable Steveson, the hottest UFC prospect in years, who arrived at the promotion with a past marked by a sexual assault allegation, got knocked out by a nobody in 12 seconds on Saturday in Los Angeles. Dana White sure knows how to pick ‘em.
Steveson, an NCAA legend and Olymp...
On July 13, California state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that he would lead a 12-state coalition in mounting a supposedly bold legal challenge to the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery mega-merger. The deal had cleared every previous legal hurdle, but the sta...
Laz Díaz has had enough of baseball. The veteran umpire will wrap up a three-decade career this week, will hang up the mask and the chest protector, and will bid good riddance to the sport. Major League Baseball offered buyouts to umpires earlier this season, and seven veter...
Sometimes a recipe leads you astray. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Sometimes a bad recipe will leave you with no recourse. You simply have to accept that you wasted all of your time and all of those precious, precious ingredients, on someone else's poor hand...
For all of his flaws as a manager, and there are plenty, José Mourinho always provides clubs the full José Mourinho Experience. The Special One instantly becomes the center of attention wherever he goes, no matter the circumstances, and while that might overshadow his players, it also puts all of the spotlight and the pressure on the manager. In the past, this has been an issue as Mourinho gets carried away with playing up the gimmick, but for a club like 2026–27 Real Madrid, coming off of a season in which two of its players fought and one of them was FORGETTING THINGS, perhaps Mourinho's gravitational pull is exactly what it needed.
Take, for example, Sunday's derby between Madrids Real and Atlético, a 2-1 win for the latter at the Metropolitano over the 10-man visitors.
It is generally agreed that the Miami Dolphins are the worst team in professional football not named the Ottawa Redblacks. In fairness, the Dolphins could go 0-13 in the NFL, just like the Redblacks have in Canada, based on all the things they have not done, are not doing, a...
Have a seat and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids.
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 AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with atwo-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know the general contours of Defector's origin story. I'm one of a handful of co-owners who joined the company after it was founded, so my knowledge of the specifics was fuzzy and basically limited to what people ...
It takes an open mind to engage with China Miéville’s work. A writer for whom the already cliched phrase “genre-bending” is even more banal, Miéville has never opposed the designation of genre writer. As much influenced by Oliver Onions, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karl Marx, Miév...
Over the weekend, The New York Times published an investigation into DraftKings. The upshot of the investigation is that this obviously exploitative and profit-driven company exploits its customers in the pursuit of profit in all the ways that you might have feared. The stor...
If you found yourself tuning in late for Sunday's matchup between the Eagles and Titans in Nashville, you may have had a number of burning questions: Has Jalen Hurts been replaced with sack of flour? Is Cam Ward the truth? Why is my television showing me slow motion replays of someone getting their feet hosed down?
The heat was a problem for the Titans, as temperatures in Nashville hit the mid-90s and the region was under a heat advisory, with meteorologists citing a heat index up to 108 degrees. Fox's game crew reported that the turf at Nissan Stadium reached 157 degrees in the third quarter.
Caleb Williams was going to score a touchdown. Anyone watching from home, or inside of a thoroughly drenched Soldier Field, knew it was about to happen. The Chicago Bears were trailing Minnesota by an ugly score of 6-3 in the fourth quarter when Williams, boxed in all game b...
The beauty of college football is that there are so many teams, and so many bad coaches, that inevitably, a play that would otherwise have a one in a billion chance of happening actually has quite a good chance of turning into reality. For proof let’s go to Nashville, where ...
I guess the addled corpus of Lee Corso was the only thing keeping ESPN’s college football arm from shedding every last trace of dignity. Because if you tuned into the four-letter network's College GameDay program yesterday morning, you were treated to this profoundly nauseating minute of unwanted jingoism:
That’s human malware Pat McAfee, Corso’s ostensible replacement on the GameDay set, giving the HOO BABY to our troops while his colleagues mindlessly chuckle in assent. This latest offense comes a mere week after the show invited universally despised Senator Ted Cruz onto its live broadcast from Austin, in which GameDay host Rece Davis allowed the Texas republican to shill for the odious Protect College Sports Act, and offered zero pushback on Cruz in doing so.
The fourth season of Amazon's Reacher, which was based on Lee Child's book Gone Tomorrow and set largely in Philadelphia, came to a close earlier this week. Defector's elite Reacher Creature team was convened to discuss this unusually brutal and mostly quite good season of t...
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: Sometime between showing college football's highest-rated games of all time, ESP...
Alexander Ovechkin is probably the single most famous Russian athlete. He is also a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and not a particularly quiet or passive one. This, occasionally, has gotten him into some hot water with the rest of the world, given Putin's co...
There are few scenarios for a struggling and injury-riddled defense more nightmarish than the one the Detroit Lions' unit had to face on Thursday night. Just four days after suffering through a 31-30 overtime win over the Saints, during which they were on the field for a gru...
On Thursday morning, USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino announced his roster for a forthcoming quartet of games. The first thing that leaps out is that Christian Pulisic's name is nowhere to be found. The story is that the U.S.'s best player will stay in Italy as he heals up ...
