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The Verdict Is In: Bo Nix Stinks
If you watched the Broncos-Chargers game on Sunday, first of all, my apologies. You shouldn’t have had to see that. Second of all, you might have come away from that game saying, “Good Lord, Justin Herbert has gone from being overhyped to being actively shitty!” I can’t blame you for that gut reaction. Herbert’s play has deteriorated to the point where no one would blame that team’s brass for staging a full reset at quarterback. But the bigger story from that game had nothing to do with Herber...
Brian Flores’s Racial Discrimination Lawsuit Reveals Racist Recruiting Memo
A memo prepared for the Las Vegas Raiders by the recruiting firm Korn Ferry was entered as an exhibit in Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores's ongoing racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams. The memo was unsealed by the court Tuesday, giving the public a rare look at how coaching candidates are evaluated by teams. As it turns out, this particular evaluation was pretty racist. The memo, first reported on by Front Office Sports , contains a list of F...
Tyreek Hill Found Liable For Two Counts Of Battery
A jury found former Kansas City and Miami receiver Tyreek Hill liable Tuesday night for two counts of battery in his civil trial. The same Miami jury found him not liable on another five counts of battery, one count of assault, one count of intentional infliction of emotional distress, and one count of continuing domestic violence. The jury awarded Hill's estranged wife, Lakeeta Vaccaro, $500,000 in compensatory damages, but did not award any punitive damages. The trial came about as par...
I Met The Twee Bird That Ruffled Kelly Clarkson’s Feathers
Before we get to the feud, let's start with the facts. Molly , the wooden crank-operated automaton made by the artist Bliss Kolb, is a beauty. Although Molly is made of basswood, cherry, and teak, with glass eyes and steel screws, its buttery yellow body and dusky brown wings recall the northern yellow warbler , a melodic whistling songbird found across the U.S. and Canada. Molly is a beautiful singer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZ4RysiN3A It is also true that Kelly Clarkson is a...
WNBA Capably Solves Logistical Problem
The WNBA was staring down the following issue: After the first two games of the Finals, beginning Saturday at the raucous 18,064-seat building which the Golden State Valkyries have sold out for two straight years, the series would move to Atlanta, where the Dream’s primary arena, Gateway Center, seats just 3,500. The Dream have so far played their three home playoff games at the larger State Farm Arena, the approximately 17,044-seat venue where the Hawks play. (The two teams do not share an...
It’s Normal To Have Watched ‘The Batman’ Roughly Eight Times
Find a new slant!
My Darkest Confession: Stone Temple Pilots Was A Great Band
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 bread heels, beer guts, gastropubs, Digger , and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m off 'bag duty next week while I finish up a special feature assignment. But don’t worry; we’ll have a guest host ready to entertain your finest inquiries. Just hit up the Funbag email address and they’ll be wa...
What The Steve Ballmer Scandal Says About Sports Media
The NBA season is one week away, and there's one game I can't stop thinking about. On Nov. 2, Kawhi Leonard's Toronto Raptors will travel to Los Angeles to play the Clippers, his former team and the subject of the NBA's harshest-ever punishment over the cap shenanigans they did to sign him back in 2019. The spectacle of Leonard, back in L.A. in a Raptors uniform, will be so weird, and I'm curious to see how the basketball media will cover it. Speaking of basketball media, that's the true su...
Christine Brennan Has Not Fully Lost It, According To Christine Brennan In Two Baffling Phone Calls
This past Friday, Christine Brennan asked to speak with an editor at Defector. The USA Today columnist's request was somewhat expected, since Giri Nathan had written about her in an article published two days earlier, the piece critical of her fixation with measuring the WNBA's success through the singular metric of Caitlin Clark. While writing his article, Giri had reached out to Brennan for comment on what her ideal strategy would be for the league to properly market the Indiana Fever's star...
‘Fallow’ Explores A World Where Big Tech Has Disrupted Pregnancy
The practice of surrogacy can be said to date back to the Bible; in Genesis 16, Abram is promised descendants by God, but his wife Sarah is unable to conceive. Sarah then instructs Abram to lay with her handmaid, who is then able to bear his child and fulfill God’s promise. This story begins at the issue of infertility. Yet the practice today has evolved to address a myriad of motivations: the pro-natalism push, the desire to preserve one’s body, gay couples endeavoring to start a family. The ...
There Is Some Mighty Weird Stuff Going On Up There
The technical term for them is Transient Luminous Events, and it's a good term. Transient, because they last just a few milliseconds. Luminous, because they light up the sky, but also because they invoke the radiant immanence of an Old Testament manifestation. Events, because—well, imagine you saw this. You would agree this was an Event. The most commonly observed TLE is a red sprite, an enormous electrical discharge shooting upward from thunderstorm clouds, usually a blood-red color due to...
The Brewers Are Walking Down Their Wounded Prey
I like to imagine a wised-up contrarian reading Ray Ratto's blog about the Milwaukee Brewers' Game 1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers, which identifies a formula in the way the Brew Crew are progressing through the National League playoffs. It's not a vague, vibes-based formula that Ratto describes, either: He says Milwaukee's opponent scores first "but cannot make a big inning out of its opportunity"; he says the Brewers "catch up quickly" then nose ahead; he says Milwaukee's starter "goe...
‘Saban’ Has Nothing To Say About Its Subject Or The World He Helped Create
At times it really does feel like time is moving faster than ever, and even things that happened a year ago might as well have happened 10 years ago. But it is important to maintain perspective, and understand that time and history have to play their parts before we can properly recognize moments for what they meant at the time they happened. With that said, it can feel a little strange to begin reevaluating the legacy of Nick Saban, football coach, and the Saban era of Alabama football a mere...
What Kind Of Villain Will Manchester City Be?
The lead-up to Sunday's game between Liverpool and Manchester City could not have felt more strange. Here were the two teams that have defined approximately the last decade of the Premier League, who have been each other's fiercest rivals while setting new standards for excellence on the pitch, meeting in a meaningless game. It was meaningless in a figurative sense, in that the primary reason for anyone tuning in was to see how the Anfield crowd would greet their guests in their first game sin...
The Crossword, Oct. 12: Ripped From The Headlines
You heard it here first: It's time to play our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Jeremy Venook 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 .
The Brewers Will Just Keep Doing This Until Someone Stops Them
The idea that the Milwaukee Brewers can keep playing the same game over and over again and getting the same result is an interesting one. It's probably not a sustainable one, because baseball does not tend to operate that way, but you keep watching for something different from them, and it always turns out the same. This would be a problem for them if they were somehow failing at this playoff thing, but rather they seem to have it down pat. Through five games, the formula is simple: Startin...
Well, That’s The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen In Some Time
We're in Landover, Maryland. It's the New York Giants taking on the Washington Commanders: a divisional rivalry game on a rainy Sunday afternoon with two teams desperate to win the NFC East, but in bad shape thanks to injuries and general haplessness. The Commanders got their quarterback back just in time for this matchup, with Jayden Daniels returning from injuring his arm a couple weeks ago. The Giants are still led by Jameis Winston and the natural chicanery he brings. Together these two te...
Welcome The Philadelphia Eagles To Jaguars Junction
To paraphrase one of the greats, it's not easy living up to the standards of Jaguars Junction . It's not just about the losing; any team can lose a game, especially in the NFL. It's also not about the penalties. The yellow flags come for all of us. No, to feel truly welcome in Jaguars Junction, one must not just lose but lose with panache. One must fail in a way that makes everyone stand up, point at the screen, and say aloud, "Are you kidding me?" One must collapse in a fashion that defies al...
OU-Texas Is The Last Truly Bonkers College Football Rivalry
There's no point in trying to predict how a Red River Rivalry game will go. Texas and Oklahoma have aligned themselves to this eternal blood feud, some Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid shit. It doesn't matter what the records next to their names say or what the expectations for each team are, because this game will almost certainly go the opposite of what you expect, and end in a knife fight in the mud. On Saturday, Oklahoma came out of that fight as the last man standing. https://youtu.be/KL...
The White Sox Lean Into The “Windy” In “Windy City”
The Chicago White Sox had been given oodles of credit for overcoming the three worst years in their history (throwing the 1919 World Series aside). When they plowed remorselessly and successfully through their first four postseason games this fall, you could sense that magic was being conjured in the least explicable way. They'd been kissed on the forehead by the same gods that had pummeled them repeatedly. They were going to be a team of destiny, whether or not they liked or understood it. ...
New Details Emerge About 2019 Child Abuse Investigation Involving Tyreek Hill
In early 2019, Tyreek Hill was already proof of just how far athletic talent can take you. Yes, he had pleaded guilty to domestic abuse in college, including signing a document in which he said he placed his pregnant girlfriend in a headlock. Yes, he was then dismissed by Oklahoma State, transferring to Division II…
Mike Ditka, Forever Chicago
The relationship between sports and the place where those games are played is largely a matter of fans developing a strong but mostly manageable addiction to their own pheromones. Ritual and iconography matter more than the actual results when the results don't meet the need; the first two are stable and reliable in a way the third will never be. It has always been thus. And so Mike Ditka, whose death at age 86 was announced by his family Friday morning, was and remains still Chicago in way...
The Secret To Living 194 Years Is Being A Turtle
Geriatric Jonathan has made the news again, this time for having his genome sequenced. The Aldabra giant tortoise, who is estimated to be 194 years old, is the oldest known land animal on the planet. (The ocean, which teems with glass sponges thousands of years old and Greenland sharks that have been swimming for centuries, takes longevity to different extremes.) As such, it is understandable why scientists would want to sequence Jonathan's genome. He's lived a long freaking time. Yet many ...
What’s To Be Done With Jerry Dipoto?
During a Sept. 28 press conference , Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto stated unprompted that if he had been fired following this season, it would have been justified. This is an extremely funny thing to say when you have not lost your job, especially when contextualized by your firings of five of your colleagues in the surrounding 48 hours, all of whom you hired. The difference between having your hypothetical firing rendered justifiable and having your walking papers act...
Another Mountaineering Documentary That Asks: What Is Wrong With These People?
Having leisurely picked it up one day without expecting to be taken in, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air arrested me from the first page. “Among my five teammates who reached the top [of Mount Everest], four … perished in a rogue storm,” Krakauer writes. “By the time I’d descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out.” Twelve deaths seemed to me a Shakespearean number. But the more I read about mountaineering, the m...
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