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Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Drew answers a question about extracurricular activities.

The U.S. Department of Education this week formally withdrew updates made during the Joe Biden presidency to the federal law banning discrimination in education based on sex. Specifically, the Education Department is removing language that expanded Title IX protections to cover discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The changes also mark the official return of previous regulations, previously enacted during Donald Trump's first term, that significantly narrowed the types of sexual misconduct and harassment reports schools and universities must investigate. Title IX is the federal law passed in the 1970s that banned discrimination based on sex in education. It's widely credited with making the United States a global leader in women's sports as well as forcing schools and universities to investigate reports of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.

The Drake Maye Crisis, now seven weeks long stretching back to last season's playoffs, shows no signs of abating. His performance against the Jaguars in Week 3 was his worst yet, and he has now turned the ball over 15 times in his last seven games. What the fuck is going on? Will Maye ever be good again, or has his career been derailed by the un-Christian behavior of his head coach? These questions and many more are the subject of this week's episode of All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/86479eed-5de7-4198-bc8c-f3a8c19c1e6f We also address the J.J. McCarthy trade, the welcome resurgence of Case Keenum, and, thanks to listener Zachary, we get deeper intel on the dangers of modern artificial turf. And we do it all in LESS than two hours this time around. In fact, we have a format tweak coming next week that will make our bullshit even faster and bullshittier. We don’t shy away from contact (via Riverside call) here at All Ball. When others go soft, we go hard. It’s what you, the audience, deserve.

Looking at the raw numbers from 2026, the Chicago White Sox's stable of pitchers ultimately hover around league average, so I guess I can't start by saying something that feels emotionally true to me, which is "The Sox are going to try to be the first team to win the World Series without any pitchers." But when I think back on this stretch run, as I watched my newly adopted sons try and fail to hold off Cleveland in the AL Central and settle instead for the six-seed in the American League, two images stand out to me: that incredibly clutch Randal Grichuk dinger, and Will Venable walking out to the mound to make yet another pitching change. You don't have to worry about getting in your steps when you manage the White Sox. The Sox don't have a rotation so much as they do a skeleton crew: the very good Sean Burke and a bunch of rotating temps. Only three players have made more than 15 starts for the team this year, and that weakness has only gotten more glaring as the games get more meaningful. Anthony Kay, one of those few regulars, rarely makes it past the fifth inning and has an ERA of 4.44. Davis Martin has struggled with injury. Erick Fedde is often paired with an opener. Luis Castillo had a go of it when he was traded from the Mariners, but is back on mop-up duty. The point is, Venable's had to treat the high-stress games of September like he was cooking a six-course meal, constantly switching between appliances and instruments as he tried to get to the end without burning anything. If we're going to extend this metaphor as far as we can, then Grant Taylor is Venable's rice cooker. You can turn him on, go breathe for a minute, and trust that he won't start a fire. The 24-year-old from Alabama is in his second MLB season, and after looking promising but inconsistent as a rookie on a 102-loss team, he is now the most trusted arm in a group that's up 1-0 on the Astros in a short playoff series. During Game 1 in Houston on Tuesday, it was Taylor who carried the team to victory in a bullpen game, throwing a career-high 54 pitches as he earned the final seven outs of a 6-3 win.

“Here are the main things you need to know about the Resident Evil games,” I explained to my friend Liz over the nonsense of the Digger trailer. “There’s a big outbreak of some kind of mutagenic virus. First you get a pistol, then you get a shotgun. A dog usually attacks you. There are locks and you look for keys. You open a lot of drawers. There’s an evil pharmaceutical company called Umbrella. You start in a house and end in a lab.” “Got it,” Liz said. “I’ll point at the screen when any of that happens.” “You heal yourself with herbs,” I added helpfully.

After Friday's unofficial reports that Manchester City had been found guilty on almost all of the 115 charges of financial rule breaching, it was only a matter of time before the true breadth of those breaches came to light. It was not surprising, save for maybe the almost perfect batting average of the charges, that City was found guilty, but the details are something to behold. The Premier League released its statement on the situation on Tuesday, and the headline number is eye-grabbing: City was found to have circumvented both the league's and UEFA's spending limits by over £900 million between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons. (The investigation, which started in 2019, does not cover anything more recent than the title-winning 2017-18 season.) Just to establish a reference point about the scale of City's wrongdoing, when Everton was deducted 10 points in late 2023 for a similar style breach of the Premier League's profit and sustainability rules, the Toffees were found to have violated the limits by £19.5 million. A few months after that, Nottingham Forest received a four-point deduction for a violation of £34.5 million. (The difference there had to do with both an inconsistency in the application of the rules and Forest's more willing cooperation with the investigation in comparison to Everton's.) The punishment scale isn't a one-to-one factor, so it's not like City will receive a 461-point deduction, or even a 260-point deduction, but the £900 million number does help one understand the degree of malfeasance City has engaged in since the club was bought by Abu Dhabi United Group. As a refresher, the main charges against City came in the form of juiced up sponsorship revenue, in which the listed sponsors were recorded to have paid a much higher amount of pounds than actually received. The difference between the listed number and the actual number was found to have been paid by Abu Dhabi United Group, helping to increase City's commercial revenue from about £82 million the season before the period of investigation all the way to £500 million by the summer of 2018. The purpose of such a scheme is to circumvent the spending limits the Premier League puts on its teams. Even if a club has access to the kind of unlimited spending power an owner like the Abu Dhabi United Group can provide, it is restricted by rules stipulating that spending on players and coaches must scale in relation to its revenue. Thus, City gained access to more of its owners' fortune by disguising incoming money from those owners as sponsorship revenue.

Every manager understands the prime directive of postseason baseball, which is, "Whatever you do, it's wrong. We'll let you know when." Don Mattingly knows this, having danced the dance for nearly a decade now. In his eagerness to get to the ninth inning Tuesday, the Philadelphia Phillies manager summoned his closer Jhoan Duran to begin the seventh for what could have ended up being the white elephant of a three-inning save. That he never got past two was the wrong part, naturally. After a clean sheet in the seventh, Duran allowed a two-out infield single, a hit batsman, and a 100-mph fastball to pass dangerously within Austin Riley's line of sight, and boom, the manager's an idiot, and the Phillies are a game from elimination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKoMwf53Xg8

What does the perfect Indiana Fever game look like? Corner any member of the organization to demand an answer to that question, and they would probably describe something like Tuesday's 99-89 victory over the Las Vegas Aces. If you've somehow yet to have your interest piqued by the incendiary potential that this Fever squad brought to the playoffs, then this is the highlight reel for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3vVAcgDb1c What the Fever have over every other team in this year's playoff field is a fully functional and complementary Big Three. In Caitlin Clark they have a defense-breaking shooter who also just so happens to be one of the league's best playmakers and pace-setters. In Kelsey Mitchell they have a relentless, pure scoring guard, and in Aliyah Boston they have a bruiser who can play off either of the guards and keep sustained pressure on the rim. When all three are clicking, it can feel like they are capable of scoring 130 points.

Let me take you Behind the Blog™ for a moment. The Defector staff is currently assembled in a top-secret location, and a bunch of us were crammed into Lauren's room to watch the end of Red Sox-Yankees. Ben Rice hit a grand slam in the eighth to make it 9-0 New York, his second homer of the game and to nearly the same part of the park. I mustered all of my formidable wit and floated to the assembled bloggers a potential headline: Ben Twice. Everyone groaned at my shit. Pearls before swine. I'll show them, I vowed. Anyway, that's how you got this headline. The grand slam was mostly style points; it was Rice's first homer, a solo shot in the fifth inning, that felt like it truly decided the first game of this best-of-three wild card series. Cam Schlittler was dealing for the Yankees; he would finish with six and a third innings of two-hit, 10-strikeout gas. Payton Tolle, Boston's own young and talented arm, was surviving: one run on five hits scattered over his four innings to that point. Tolle recorded two quick outs in the fifth before manager Chad Tracy gave him the hook. It felt like scared managing. Compare to the Yankees letting Schlittler throw a career-high 117 pitches. But Tracy didn't want Rice to get a third look at Tolle's stuff. “Not just the pitch count necessarily, but you’re trailing already, you’re moving through the third time [through the order],” Tracy said. “Rice had already hit a double in the gap off of him, and you have a nice lane there for Miller, and obviously he got him."

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 overly chatty coworkers, Hunter S. Thompson, buying a new car, and more. Your letters: Todd: