2026-01-20 01:30:56
For a year without many new and exciting head coaching candidates, there sure are a lot of head coaches getting canned. The Buffalo Bills announced Monday morning that they had fired HC Sean McDermott, two days after the team lost to the Denver Broncos in overtime. It'll be the 10th head coaching change within the NFL this season.
Across his nine seasons with the Bills, McDermott had a 98-50 record in the regular season and an 8-8 record in the postseason. In his first campaign, he snapped the franchise's 18-year playoff drought, and Buffalo would continue to play well into January with him and quarterback Josh Allen at the helm. Crucially, despite all this success, he never led the Bills to a Super Bowl appearance. For quite a while, the Kansas City Chiefs would crush the hopes of most other AFC contenders in the playoff bracket, but this year, with Patrick Mahomes injured and his team eliminated from contention, the excuses for the rest of the conference dried up. For another example, see John Harbaugh with the Ravens.
McDermott and Allen's long-term success helps to cover up the fact that, by their recent standards, this was a down year for the Bills. They were a very popular Super Bowl pick before the season started. Instead, they went 12-5 and didn't win the AFC East for the first time since 2019. The Patriots earned two more wins and also advanced further in the playoffs. If McDermott were a newer coach, this season would've been an admirable effort. In a playoff field with no Mahomes, no Joe Burrow, and no Lamar Jackson, it felt like a wasted year of Allen's prime.
2026-01-20 00:18:55
Jarrett Stidham and I have thrown the same number of passes in the NFL over the last two years. With that lived experience in common, I feel comfortable assuming that we shared the same thought as we separately watched the Patriots beat the Texans on Sunday: Well, this is alarming. The Denver Broncos' ice-cold backup QB, who will be called into service for the AFC Championship Game after Bo Nix got injured defeating the Bills, will have to take his first meaningful snaps since the 2023 season as his top-seeded team tries to fulfill its half of a Stidham-Darnold Super Bowl matchup. Based on what New England did in the divisional round, the prognosis is negative.
Texans fans may have their problems with C.J. Stroud, but at the very least he is a passable NFL starter with three winning seasons under his belt. Except against New England, playing the role Stidham will be forced into next weekend, he looked like he was trying to quarterback with his eyes closed. While the 28-16 final score was a testament to Houston's defense, Stroud's line was horrendous: 20-for-47 with 212 yards, one touchdown, and four interceptions. You can all but guarantee that the Pats are going to direct their resources into stopping the run, daring Stidham to make plays with his arm, so three picks or fewer feels like a worthy goal for this outing.
In fairness, Jarrett Stidham wasn't just plucked out of the stands as the winner of a quarterback-the-Broncos contest. He's hung around the NFL for several years since being drafted out of Auburn in the fourth round back in 2019. He's liked well enough in Denver that the Broncos actively chose to re-sign him for two years ahead of the 2025 season. He was "nearly perfect" in this past preseason. He has won an NFL game before: New Year's Eve 2023 against the Chargers, where Stidham contributed to the 16-9 final on a touchdown pass on which Lil'Jordan Humphrey did about 95 percent of the work. And three years ago, the NFL posted a video titled "Jarrett Stidham Played like the Rent was Due!" that showed off his handiwork from a Raiders loss to the 49ers.
2026-01-19 23:59:21
Why not take our Monday crossword out for a spin? 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.
2026-01-19 22:32:24
With less than 20 seconds remaining in Sunday night's Rams-Bears clash, Caleb Williams successfully connected on an impossible-seeming touchdown pass. Chicago's season has been all about improbable comebacks, but this was a new peak.
The Bears offense had been mostly stymied all day, and up to this point they'd turned the ball over twice while the Rams had held on tight all game. However, the defense had done just enough to keep it a one-score game, 17-10, when Williams got the ball at midfield for a two-minute drill. A few completions brought Chicago into the red zone on second-and-4. A few incompletions made it fourth down from the 14—one last chance to add to that list of jaw-dropping late-game plays that have helped so many Bears fans fall back in love with this team this year.
It started horrendously. Williams, facing pressure, ran straight backward until he was literally 25 yards behind the line of scrimmage. Anyone who watches football knows, or at least thinks they know, that absolutely nothing good can happen when a quarterback does this. I was rooting pretty hard for the Bears here, watching alongside my Chicago-native boyfriend, and it was at this point that I accepted the season was over. But I was early to that conclusion. Williams was fast enough to buy a second of space from his pursuers, and on the 40-yard line he turned back toward the end zone and lofted a pass into the unknown.
2026-01-19 08:38:32
C.J. Stroud played like a man possessed in Sunday's divisional round game against the New England Patriots. The problem was that for a lot of the first half, the Houston Texans quarterback was a vessel for the spirit of playoff Jake Delhomme.
It was a hideous afternoon for Stroud in the Texans' 28-16 loss. His first quarter was whatever: Houston's first two drives of the game resulted in a three-and-out and a field goal, respectively, and his first interception was a bad throw, but New England cornerback Carlton Davis III made a great play on the ball and kept his knee in bounds. Besides, that turnover felt less costly when Patriots QB Drake Maye lost a fumble two plays into the subsequent drive. After a touchdown catch by Char—sorry, Christian Kirk, Houston even held a 10-7 lead early in the second quarter. Then it turned into a horror show for poor C.J.
2026-01-19 03:58:58
On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia brought charges against 26 people they say were involved in a scheme to fix bets on college basketball and Chinese Basketball Association games. The point-shaving scheme, according to a 70-page indictment unsealed that morning, involved at least three dozen players on 17 different teams.
Twenty of the defendants played college basketball during at least one of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 NCAA seasons. Some were already the subjects of NCAA investigations into betting violations this fall and were no longer competing. A few defendants, however, were active college basketball players until Thursday. Carlos Hart, Camian Shell and Oumar Koureissi, who are charged with fixing games at previous schools before transferring to new ones, have played in games as recently as this week. Simeon Cottle, a Kennesaw State player who's now suspended indefinitely, put up 21 points in a win the night before he was indicted. He is his conference’s leading scorer and was named CUSA preseason player of the year.
The indictment refers to the scheme’s ringleaders as “the fixers,” a group of people who started by recruiting and bribing players to fix CBA games during the 2022-23 season. After some success doing that, the fixers decided to try men's college basketball, enlisting NCAA players who agreed to make sure their team didn’t cover point spreads. Among the fixers, according to the indictment, were Marves Fairley and Shane Hennen. Fairley and Hennen were also indicted by a New York grand jury in October for alleged involvement in a similar scheme in the NBA—the one involving Terry Rozier. Where the bets in the Rozier case were player props—bets a single player could conceivably fix alone—the wagers mentioned in the Philadelphia indictment were spread bets and half bets concerning team scoring, which makes fixing a bit tougher. In colorful and depressing detail, the indictment shows just how exhausting it is to rig a team sport.
