2026-01-14 22:53:14
It's pretty remarkable to recall today, after the firing of Xabi Alonso and the uncertainty about the state of Real Madrid's star-studded project, that the club is only a year and a half removed from the absolute pinnacle. The 48-hour period between June 1 and June 3, 2024, when the team won the Champions League final and then announced that it had added to that championship group the best player in the sport, Kylian Mbappé, could credibly stand as the very apotheosis of what Real Madrid aspires to be. From those heights, it maybe shouldn't be so much of a surprise that the club had nowhere to go but down.
If Real Madrid's fate since those days stands for anything, it's that nothing can be taken for granted in this sport, and that tomorrow is not promised to anybody, not even those who already appear to possess it. It's not the case that the Blancos' struggles in the Mbappé era were completely unforeseeable, and in fact the risks were obvious from the outset. A team is a delicate mix of synergies, partnerships, hierarchies, and personalities, and it was clear that the de facto exchange of Toni Kroos for Mbappé would fundamentally alter the balances the team had arrived at over the years, and not necessarily for the better. The biggest question for Madrid the day Mbappé signed was how exactly the team planned to incorporate the Frenchman's talents with those of his new superstar teammates, Vinícius and Jude Bellingham, since the three did not seem to be the most natural of fits. A year and a half later, Real is still struggling to figure that out.
When Mbappé first arrived, the Blancos were led by the sport's most brilliant jigsaw solver, Carlo Ancelotti. But not even he could coax any sustainable connections between the trio itself and the mishmash collection of players behind them. When the club's patience ran out with the Italian, they turned to Alonso, the crown jewel of that offseason's coaching carousel, one of the most promising young managers in the game, a man seemingly ideally placed to succeed inside the game's most unforgiving crucible. Like the Mbappé signing, the Alonso hire felt like a coup, a dream. But like with the Mbappé signing, the club was not adequately prepared to make the most fanciful aspects of the Alonso dream a reality.
2026-01-14 06:40:11
After limping into the playoffs, the Pittsburgh Steelers suffered another first-round loss. After months—years, really—of intense scrutiny of his job, head coach Mike Tomlin has decided to "step down" from the position he's held for 19 years. Like a cowboy at the end of a Western, he now walks off into that proverbial sunset.
At least, that's the story being pushed out. Adam Schefter has reported that Tomlin himself informed the team Tuesday of his plans to step aside. This comes after Monday night's 30-6 loss to the Houston Texans, a game in which Pittsburgh's offense, led by the husk of Aaron Rodgers, was outscored by Houston's defense alone. The scoreline could've been even more lopsided had the Texans' offense been merely decent. Even still, this was yet another playoff game where the Steelers looked overmatched and overwhelmed. The team has not found a long-term solution at quarterback since Ben Roethlisberger's retirement in 2022, and, despite all the credit Tomlin gets for overachieving with deficient teams, has not won a playoff game since 2017. That a 42-year-old Rodgers, potentially on the cusp of retirement himself, gave them their best chance to do so speaks to the organization's issues.
In the end, Tomlin has gotten out ahead of a problem that is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. The roster is old and poorly structured, they don't have a quarterback, and the fanbase had already turned on him, even if the locker room hadn't. Tomlin himself is no longer a spring chicken; once the youngest coach in the league when he first got to the job, the 53-year-old was the longest tenured coach in the league during his final season in Pittsburgh. He won a Super Bowl in his second year in charge in 2008, and got back to another one in 2010, but ends his career with an 8-12 playoff record, tying the longest active streak of playoff losses in a row.
2026-01-14 06:07:34
The precocious Eagles child got his wish, sort of. The Philadelphia Eagles announced Tuesday that offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo has been removed from his position, though he will not be banished to a career of burger-flipping, and may even remain on head coach Nick Sirianni's staff. This was Sirianni's statement in full:
I have decided to make a change at offensive coordinator. I met with Kevin today to discuss the difficult decision, as he is a great coach who has my utmost respect. He has been integral to this team's success over the last five years, not only to the on-field product but behind the scenes as a valued leader for our players and organization. I have no doubt he will continue to have a successful coaching career.
Ultimately, when we fall short of our goals that responsibility lies on my shoulders.
You know things have gone bad for an offensive coordinator when knowledge of his poor job performance has escaped the usual confines of the most dedicated parts of the fanbase. Any conversation with a Philadelphia resident in the past four months was likely to feature Patullo's name being derisively spit out, and with good reason. The Eagles' season ended Sunday in a 23-19 wild-card loss to the San Francisco 49ers, the perfect capper to one of the most lifeless 11-6 campaigns ever produced. The team that rampaged to a Super Bowl title last season was nowhere to be found, and in its place was one that seemed structurally incapable of moving the ball down the field. Jalen Hurts threw for 168 yards in that game, and when his team's season was on the line, all Patullo's offense could muster was a limp pass over the middle to a triple-covered tight end.
2026-01-14 04:31:39
Sometime in the late 1990s, an adult ribbon worm was scooped up from the murk in the waters off the San Juan Islands, in the Pacific Northwest. He was moved to a tank along with a smattering of other invertebrates, including two vermilion bat stars and approximately 30 beige peanut worms. In the years since, the worm has been transported across the country to Virginia, where he lives now. The bat stars died after a couple of decades, and the peanut worms have largely vanished. But the ribbon worm lives on, buried in the tank's mud. Although his exact birthday is unknown, the ribbon worm is at least 26 years old, and probably around 30.
The ribbon worm—recently dubbed Baseodiscus the Eldest, or B for short—was just confirmed to be the longest-lived ribbon worm in the world. His persistence extends the previously known maximum lifespan of such worms (three years) by an order of magnitude, per a short communication in the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: Ecological and Integrative Physiology. (Ribbon worms have separate sexes, and although B has not been definitively tested, researchers suspect the worm is male due to what appear to be numerous testes.)
Such a superlative is certainly impressive for any worm, but the discovery is not necessarily a surprise for scientists who work with marine invertebrates. "We tend to be kind of biased towards like things with bones and things that look like us in terms of complexity in different ways," said Chloe Goodsell, a PhD student at UC Irvine and an author on the paper. "Most of the extremely long-lived organisms on Earth are invertebrates," she added, pointing to giant clams, which can reach 100 years, and tube worms, which can reach 250 years. Ribbon worms are among the longest animals on the planet—one bootlace worm found in Scotland allegedly reached 180 feet—and scientists had long ago hypothesized the creatures lived for many years.
2026-01-14 03:55:25
The operating principle of JD Vance's life in politics seems to be as follows: How can I serve every powerful person while appealing to literally no normal person? There is no boot he won't lick, no special interest he won't kowtow to, no family member he won't throw under the bus, in order to advance his standing in the administration of a man he previously saw as "America's Hitler." He'll even take on the grimy work when necessary.
So when it was time for Donald Trump's administration to address and blindly defend last week's killing of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross, they must have been relieved to remember this readily available cretin. Someone servile and charmless, someone who could absorb the reputational damage that might follow reckless endorsement of a point-blank execution by an officer of the federal government ... where was that guy when you needed some shit eaten?
The vice president made a rare appearance in the White House press briefing room on Jan. 8. The previous day, he was willing to characterize the event as "a tragedy," albeit, according to him, one of Good's own making. But in his televised remarks, he decided to stake out a more extreme position. Even his boss, shown a new angle of the video that same day by the New York Times, found more ambiguity: “It’s a terrible scene ... I think it’s horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.” When you are trailing Donald Trump on issues of nuance and delicacy around a tragedy, you should drop everything and walk into the wilderness.
2026-01-14 02:32:48
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 football, e-shopping, lotion application methods, and more.
Your letters:
Raffi12:
