NowLoop

As a publication, we haven't felt the need to check in with Bill Belichick and North Carolina since October. There are only so many jokes to make about a mediocre college football team as it plays out the string, and how much more is there to say, really? Let's give it a try anyway. It could be the last chance. The string has been officially played out: The Tar Heels were trampled on Saturday by NC State, 42-19. UNC finished the season with a 4-8 record, and will not be bowl-eligible for the first time since 2018, which was Larry Fedora's final season. Here's a brutal series of stats about this year's team, via the Raleigh News & Observer:

Steph Curry's mere presence can mask so much mediocrity. As long as he's on court, the Golden State Warriors' offense crackles with possibility. The threat of Curry getting the ball with a few inches of space keeps any defense in permanent panic, and he is masterful at using his teammates as screeners and passers to pry open what little space he needs. The threes splash, and the offense looks like a dream. As soon as the greatest shooter ever walks to the bench, that illusion dissipates. It quickly becomes clear that the other Warriors on the floor have a collective vertical leap of 80 inches and 1.5 functional jump shots, and cannot actually pool together their skills to make the ball go into the hoop. Curry made magic with them, but without him, they are totally inert. They might as well be Easter Island statues plunked on the court for him to use as screens. It's a testament to Curry's singularity, and how far from contention the rest of Golden State's roster is. Perhaps there is no greater stylistic divergence in the NBA, depending on whether a given player is on or off the floor.When Curry hurt his right quad during Wednesday's loss to the Houston Rockets, it guaranteed that we were going to see a lot more of that second, uglier Warriors team. The severity of the Curry on-off is borne out not just stylistically, but statistically. Before Saturday night's game against the New Orleans Pelicans, ESPN's Anthony Slater observed that the Warriors had an offensive rating of 118.2 with Curry on the floor, and 105.2 with him off the floor. That would be the difference between an offense ranked sixth or 30th in the NBA. Though Curry's injury was reportedly less severe than it initially seemed, he'll be sitting out at least a week. When asked in press how they'd cope in his absence, head coach Steve Kerr said that they'd have to play fast, get stops, and hunt easy buckets in transition.

The Detroit Lions and their fans have been on an emotional roller coaster over the past few days. Actually, the better amusement park ride for this metaphor might be a drop tower—it would more accurately convey how jarring and abrupt the changes in mood have been with this week's news. Lions great Lem Barney was erroneously reported to be dead for a few hours on Saturday, and in a broader context that's somehow more of a below-the-fold item. The ride began Wednesday when former Lions center Frank Ragnow, who retired this past summer, declared he was returning to football. The team's announcement of the news, featuring a totally sick archive photo of Ragnow running out of the tunnel, provided an instant shot of energy. The Lions' 29-year-old Pro Bowl center would be coming back to protect Jared Goff and improve an already-fierce run game, in the final stretch of the regular season. It wasn't Thanksgiving yet, but already this felt like a victory.

For years, a rumor has floated around about the length of Willem Dafoe’s penis. Willem Dafoe’s penis is said to be extra-large. It is allegedly so big, in fact, that after filming nude scenes in the 2009 film Antichrist, Lars von Trier reported that he needed to re-shoot them using a different actor. “He has an enormous dick,” the director told The Boston Phoenix while promoting the film. “We had to take those scenes out of the film.” Here came the kicker: When Dafoe’s penis was on screen, said von Trier, “everybody got very confused when they saw it”. What this means is that somewhere out there lives a humble man whose penis stood in for Willem Dafoe’s. Who is he?

Daniel Slosberg is the Tom Joad of Diana Nyad’s bullshitting. Whenever she’s out there beatin’ up the truth, he’ll be there.  So Slosberg was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. earlier this month as town officials planted a plaque at Las Olas Beach to honor Nyad, a local kid who grew up to be as famous as any female American swimmer of the pre-Ledecky era. Slosberg says he hadn’t flown in 10 years, but when he heard that the woman who Slosberg calls “swimming’s greatest fraud” was going to be commemorated by public servants, he had to get on a plane.

Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry. The Assassin's Creed series is a bit of a blind spot for me. It wasn't always that way. I played the first game in the series way back in 2007, and while that game had a lot of flaws, it intrigued me enough to check out the second, which is one of the better games for the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 console generation. Ubisoft, the series' developer, clearly felt the same—or at least read the tides of overwhelmingly positive fan reactions—and followed with two sequels focused on Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the charming Italian Renaissance protagonist. The Ezio Saga is a focused effort that leverages that era of Italian history and, more importantly for a series that engages with every nook and cranny of its open worlds, Italian architecture to deliver a satisfying experience.

It is Thanksgiving all across these United States, but it wasn't until last weekend that I really felt it. I can read a calendar, and the season's usual logistic and chore requirements were all right there where I could see them, but knowing that a favorite holiday is coming and actually feeling it are different things. For Thanksgiving, which I love dearly, that realization manifests as a sort of exhausted gratitude, or maybe just grateful exhaustion. The way Thanksgiving season plays out, which is generally as a procession of low, short days stacking up across gray weeks dwindling fast into winter, punctuated by some emails from my mother with the subject line "Brussels Sprout," is familiar enough. But the experience of washing ashore on this little island in time in which all that stuff somehow feels good always seems to come out of nowhere, and always arrives as a relief.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The website will be a little sleepy for the next few days, so feel free to kick your feet up and relax in this open thread. Snacks are in the fridge!

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. A while back, I got a request from the 13-year-old. The kid is already a burgeoning foodie. And even though foodie culture essentially died during the pandemic, I’m never gonna dissuade people, be they my kids or otherwise, from wanting to eat the good shit. We were having steak for dinner that night, and the boy wanted to up the stakes. So he asked me if I could make a green peppercorn sauce to go with the beef. I had never made this sauce. I wasn’t even sure we had the ingredients for it lying around. But kids don’t give a fuck about any of those roadblocks. When they want their green peppercorn steak sauce, they want it now.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: We finally made it to the end of a knotty mess of a college football season. The road has been paved with the bodies of formerly high-paid coaches and transfer-portal casualties. But after all the hootin’ and hollerin’ we are here at Rivalry Week, where your record isn’t supposed to matter and everyone, audience and players alike, is weighed down by Thanksgiving dinner. The highlights of this weekend likely revolve around whether Ohio State could actually blow it again, or if Auburn has enough black magic to sabotage Alabama’s season once more for old time’s sake. But even the rivalries with lower stakes should be lots of fun; it’s fun to hate and fun to watch other haters inflict their hatred upon one another. At the Hater’s Ball, it’s hard not to have a good time.