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:
2026-01-14 01:44:09
The last-place New York Rangers hit a humiliating new low on Saturday, when the Boston Bruins demonized them with a 10-2 drubbing up in Beantown. Trudging back home in the Charlie Brown Christmas pose, the team that played the best regular season in all of the NHL just two seasons ago badly needed a boost in Monday night's contest against the Kraken. The Eastern Conference is still a big tin of sardines, after all, so it's only going to take a medium-sized hot streak for a bad team to change the story of its season. (See also: the Toronto Maple Leafs.)
The Rangers had a dream start to their night—one where they could take heart in the belief that fortune was finally smiling upon them. After the boys in blue killed a quick penalty, Artemi Panarin sent a gorgeous pass to Mika Zibanejad in space as the team entered the offensive zone. The 10-year Ranger center took a shot that hit off goalie Philipp Grubauer and deflected way wide, but that wasn't the end of the chance. The biscuit ricocheted off the end glass and fell right back to Zibanejad as his momentum carried him around the side of the net. Mika flipped the puck backward toward a Grubauer who had no idea where it was, and before the Kraken netminder could get wise to the scheme, he'd scored on himself with the back of his legs. This is the kind of goal you get when you're playing the computer on "rookie" mode, and for a wayward group it was nothing short of a blessing.
2026-01-14 01:09:15
After his Boston Celtics lost 98-96 to the Indiana Pacers on Monday night, head coach Joe Mazzulla delivered a tour-de-force performance as the character "Joe Mazzulla." While speaking to press, he answered all six questions with the same two words, then left.
There's a lot to love about Mazzulla's line delivery. You think, just for a second, that he might provide an actual answer to the next query—nope. "Illegal screen."
2026-01-14 00:32:52
I think about shoulders a lot. (Bear with me.) What would you say made humans the dominant species on the planet Earth? (I said, bear with me.) Is it our big brains, allowing us the use of language to pass down technology and culture? Sure, but before that. Is it our bipedal stance and top-notch thermoregulation, allowing us to endlessly chase down prey across miles of savannah? Yes, but even more primitive than that. It is, I submit, our shoulders, those ball-and-socket joints exquisitely crafted to throw things at other things, that gave us the edge that allowed us to go from clever apes to peerless hunters. Our soft, squishy bodies were no match to go toe-to-toe with beasts with claws or teeth or horns. But thanks to our shoulders, a miracle of evolution, we could throw things at them from a safe distance. With this edge, we summited the food chain. It's no exaggeration to say our shoulders are what make humans human.
So what do you say about a shoulder that can throw a 14-ounce football 70 yards in the air without seeming to make an effort, other than goddamn? At its peak, Aaron Rodgers's shoulder was the pinnacle of human athleticism.
2026-01-14 00:11:52
With the football world's sudden fixation on Mike Tomlin's future or lack of same in Pittsburgh raising the question of why coaching longevity is suddenly a bad thing, we have completely forgotten the more obvious reason for caring about the Steelers—the end of Aaron Rodgers' career. Which is fair enough: Tomlin's annual flirtation with unemployment is familiar by now, but Rodgers' career has been ending, gratingly and in public, for just as long. What's one more indignity?
Tomlin was booed by home fans for still having his job during the dying stages of Monday night's 30-6 throttling at the hands of the otherwise unimpressive Houston Texans, which was a reasonable response to his team's performance but otherwise no indication of anything in particular. The NFL is going through one of its occasional firing binges, only with more big names that ever before and no longer limited to teams that don't make the playoffs. Why, you can still hear the sighs of disappointment from the Green Bay Packers' announcement that they intended to work out a new contract with Matt LaFleur.
But the larger issue in Yinzerville Heights this season has been Rodgers, the 42-year-old future Hall of Famer whose last few seasons have been so marked by physical and reputational injury that they've served almost as a repudiation of the previous 14. The whomping he took on Monday night will make for a melodramatic coda to all of it if he decides (or has decided for him) that football is now a thing he used to do. Rodgers threw a melodramatic but meaningless-but-for-the-storyline pick-six to Calen Bullock for the final score in a game long since lost, and dramaturgists across the sport saw that as the telling end to his end. And this was after Rodgers had been pounded into a fumble that was housed by Texans defensive tackle Sheldon Rankins. The Houston defense outscored everyone on the field except Houston kicker Ka'imi Fairbairn, and Rodgers' age was the statistic most referenced by Joe Buck and Troy Aikman the entire night.
2026-01-13 23:37:21
This week's Nothing But Respect, with returning champion and human body expert Henry Abbott, was a very fun one. Before we get too far into what was said, I have to tell you I have been thinking nonstop about something Henry said over an hour into the recording: When he played high school basketball in Oregon, one of the teams in their conference played on a court with a pillar in the center. He said they knew how to set picks with it. I cannot imagine a better combination of dangerous and comical in a basketball scenario.
We also talked a lot about the NBA's injury crisis and Henry's expertise on the matter. His recent book, Ballistic, is a fascinating look at the frontiers of the human body and the science of its perfection. I loved it as I loved his ability to name most of the muscles in the calf. Harry also brought up the story about the 49ers maybe suffering an injury crisis because of electromagnetic radiation.
