Defector
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Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Arizona Cardinals
Some people are fans of the Arizona Cardinals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Arizona Cardinals. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: “Oh my goodness.” https://twitter.com/NFLFrance/status/1974969244019491007
After 75 Years Of Losing, Mayo Shocked The World And Shook A Stadium
DUBLIN — Misery loves company, but ecstasy attracts it. And so it was that Irish football fans by the tens of thousands shed happy tears together inside Croke Park on Sunday during the All-Ireland Final, as historically downtrodden Mayo vanquished both mighty Kerry, 1-20 to 1-17, and oh-so-many demons. It’s impossible to make up for 75 years of pain and suffering caused by all the brutal championship-game losses in one afternoon, but the outpouring of joy among Mayo players and the green-and-r...
Munetaka Murakami Hit Two Homers For His Parents And They Still Prefer Their Dogs
It is an unfamiliar pleasure of this Chicago White Sox season that, in the two months when big slugger Munetaka Murakami did not hit a home run for them, the team improved from 3.5 games back in the AL Central, to first in their division with a 1.5-game lead. But you know what's even cooler than winning games? Winning games in blowout fashion when big slugger Munetaka Murakami smashes two dingers on his very own bobblehead day. The Sox had lost their first two in a weekend series against th...
The Crossword, July 27: Way Downtown (Themeless)
It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by Jack Hatchett , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Jack is a Washington Wizards fan who, for the first time in 10 years, is excited to watch his favorite team play a game of basketball. In addition to crosswords, he enjoys playing ultimate, golfing, and cycling. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX , run every Monday. If y...
UNC Places Mike Lombardi On Administrative Leave
UNC football general manager Mike Lombardi has been placed on paid administrative leave, according to a statement released by the school Monday morning. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has placed Michael Lombardi, general manager for the Carolina football program, on paid administrative leave, effective immediately. As is standard procedure with personnel matters, leadership, staff, and student-athletes are prohibited from addressing this topic further, and has no ref...
Some More Stuff I Saw At The Tour de France
VARIOUS CITIES AND TOWNS, France — The Tour de France is over. I hope you enjoyed my 16 dispatches from France, on topics such as the race's impossible future , how cycling solved sleep , the unforgiving life of a photographer , France's vibrant unc ecosystem , and the chaotic frenzy of Alpe d'Huez. It was a privilege to be able to cover all three weeks of the race, and we couldn't do it without your support, so thank you. This is the final dispatch before I go sit in the ocean for a week an...
All The Trains I Rode In Los Angeles
This is not really a blog about trains . A blog about trains in Los Angeles, and my experience with them across 10 days, would ultimately be very short: Despite its notorious gaps in coverage, LA Metro was perfectly functional. If there were any calendar window during which it would be easy, relatively speaking, to visit Los Angeles without a car, it would be during the World Cup, with swarms of European tourists purportedly accustomed to better things. Some of the World Cup's influence was...
All Hail Lilli Tagger And The One-Hander
In antiquity, tennis players could win with a diverse mix of skillsets, with some even relying on speed, anticipation, net touch. This variety is often mourned by the old heads. Because in the sport's present—and, given the arc of string and racket tech, its foreseeable future—the skill that looms above all else is mighty ball-striking from the baseline. Though I do mourn the loss of off-speed demons on grass , for example, I have made my peace with this reality, and perhaps because I had my o...
How Tadej Pogacar Got The Joy Back
PARIS — Every story has a beginning and an end, but the best stories have worthwhile middles. Narrative stakes are established and then resolved. It's what happens in between that makes a story. This is where the greatest cyclist of all time currently finds himself. Pogacar rode to his fifth Tour victory with an astonishing sense of joy. The ennui that plagued his fourth Tour win has dissolved. His greatest rival is well behind him. The yellow jersey that weighed him down now buoys him. The...
Pete Crow-Armstrong Is Good Enough To Raise The Forbidden Question
Let's acknowledge that there is no conversation to be had about who the best player in baseball is, so long as Shohei Ohtani is drawing breath and applying his skills as a two-way player. The gavel has long been banged on that issue. But there's a lot of baseball being played, and a lot of cool guys doing the playing, and one of those guys is Pete Crow-Armstrong, who in an Ohtani-less universe is the best player in baseball. Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs beat the crap out of the Pirates last ...
A Day In The Chaos Of Cycling’s Most Legendary Arena
ALPE D'HUEZ, France — Roughly halfway up the final climb of Stage 19, and roughly five hours before the riders hit the base, our car indulged the thick snarl of besotted fans who wanted to do the wave with us. This slowed us across a critical speed threshold, beyond which our car was no longer something worth avoiding but rather something worth rocking. I'd seen videos of cars getting shaken the night before, and hoped to get shaken myself, though I was not prepared for how jarring and violent...
The Dodgers Went To Grandpa’s House!
There are aspects of being president of the United States that Donald Trump is really bad at, and others at which he is significantly worse. It goes without saying that none of that is improving, but what is most notable about his performance in the position is the extent to which he has never really bothered to figure out what the job is. From the earliest days of his presidency , there was a sort of inchoate yearning that emanated from the more respectable reaches of the political culture fo...
From Cursed To First? Mayo And Teen Sensation Kobe McDonald Want To Win Just Once
DUBLIN — The All-Ireland Senior Football final, the Irish Super Bowl, takes place July 26 at Dublin's historic Croke Park. This year’s game mismatches Kerry and Mayo, Gaelic football’s biggest winners against the most notorious losers in the ancient sport’s history. Kerry fans expected their team to be here. They always do. They’re the defending champs and will be playing for their 40th title. No other county comes close. Legendary manager Paidi Ó Sé once called his team’s supporters "the ...
LeBron James Is A Philadelphia 76er
Perhaps there was no weirder possible conclusion to this saga: LeBron James is moving to Philadelphia. Shams Charania reported Friday that James will sign with the 76ers on a two-year, $8 million deal with a player option. The 41-year-old won't be ring-chasing with Steph Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, nor any other top-10 player, nor his hometown Cavaliers. Instead he'll join an undeniably talented but aesthetically hideous assortment of Sixers looking to take advantage of a reshu...
A Good Tour de France Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief. The champagne flowed , the tears streamed. The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off. EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win. The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to i...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: New York Jets
Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: New York Jets. https://twitter.com/iJordanMoore/status/2075649848762569003
You’ve Got To Hand It To Rodin
My eyes kept going back to the hand, so tender and gently placed that you could forget these were bodies forged from marble. For all of the grabbing passion and sexual infatuation of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss , the hands always seemed to suggest something much softer and loving. The woman, leaning back and on the edge of the rough base stone, could easily slip. But without any grabbing or force, his hand steadies her. His palm and thumb hover over her leg, and the only touch is by the tips of h...
Is Jimothy OK? A Creature Investigation
Jimothy crept into our lives like any good cryptid—as a blurry, scuttling thing. Kiana Hall, the Seattle local whose firsthand footage resulted in Jimothy's newfound fame, first thought she had spotted a cat running under a car. But upon closer inspection, the creature was no feline. "I was seeing some kind of gray, fluffy creature that was shaped sort of like an orb with really long legs," Hall said in an interview with Reuters . Hall's vertical video captures the creature, which she christen...
Danny McBride Leaves You Wandering
I imagine the pitch for Danny McBride’s new short story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men , went a little something like this: Hey, this is Danny McBride’s agent. Yeah, that guy. He wants to write a short story collection called something like Thrilling Tales of Modern Men . And I imagine the response from the editor at Random House was similar to my own, upon hearing about the book: Hell yeah . Amidst a moment in our culture where the question of what defines the contemporary man i...
Arachnid Surgical Robots And Neckless Third Basemen, With Paul Tremblay
Sooner or later, you just run out of sports. There are currently a couple of regular seasons going on at the moment, but after a thrilling NBA playoffs led directly into a blast of a World Cup, a three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds happening 71 percent of the way through a long season can't help but look weak in comparison. This was a fun way to disrupt our normal sports watching biorhythms, but it was not a permanent one. It was with that in mind that we invited the bestselling nove...
The Red Sox’s Streak Is Over, But The Children Have Feasted
There's a Massachusetts–based restaurant chain that offers a free kids meal— kid must be present, limit two per party —the day after a Boston Red Sox win. When the team was scuffling at the bottom of the AL East and manager Alex Cora was fired for a dismal start, the promotion became an easy joke: The children of New England were hungry. So hungry. Offensive struggles and one-run losses had turned them into the wee ragamuffins of Oliver Twist . But around the end of June, after dropping two...
LIV Golf Circling The Toilet From Whence It Sprung
LIV Golf's honchos, the poor suckers, are still out there scrambling around, looking for investors to keep their dipshit tour afloat after the Saudi Public Investment Fund suddenly booted them into the wilderness back in April. Now that LIV Golf has lost its utility as a sportswashing spectacle and as a wedge for market disruption, it is left with zero authentic value whatsoever. Nobody was clamoring for more golf, for golf with stupid team names, or for much noisier golf . A formerly endlessl...
Here Is An Extremely And Needlessly Complicated Way To Rescue Portland From Tom Dundon
In the absence of any actual NBA basketball to watch, the blogscape is currently lousy with basketball-knowers furiously knowing basketball. It couldn't be any other way, although it is all happening at such a frantic rate that one is left absolutely convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons by week's end because Brian Windhorst's pal/source Spliffy The Dry Cleaner got a tip, and also that Tyler Herro either punched, was punched by , or has never actually...
Leicy Santos Is In The Right Spot
The Boston Legacy is not known for being gentle. The expansion team has earned more yellow cards and committed more fouls than any other club in the NWSL this year. On Sunday, that didn’t matter for Leicy Santos. At least twice, the Washington Spirit midfielder found herself with the ball cornered by three Boston players. With remarkable efficiency, she made them all look like fools. After a few deft touches and even better body positioning, she had evaded considerable pressure and released th...
Sophie Cunningham Is About As Edgy As A Beach Ball
There’s a type of public relations exercise that unfolds like a joke. In it, a notable figure who has chosen to sit for a longform profile, declined to answer a sensitive question through her representative, posed for a corresponding photoshoot, and recently "hopscotched across the country" to engage in "a slew" of "business opportunities and brand activations" insists she doesn't care what other people think of her. Sophie Cunningham sure doesn't. As Hallie Grossman, the author of an ESPN...
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