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After an extended denouement to a doomed tenure, Manchester United finally set manager Michael Carrick loose on Thursday, hoping to put an end to the club's worst league start in 40 years. On Friday, the next era for England's most famous club began, sort of, as United announced that Mauricio Pochettino would be leaving the U.S. men's national team on Nov. 18 in order to become the new boss at Old Trafford. Carrick's departure is no surprise, but Pochettino's arrival counts as a bit of a shock. Pochettino had famously come to international prominence first at Southampton and then in his five-season-plus stint at Tottenham Hotspur, which saw that club's evolution from an also-ran into, well, an also-ran that could actually fight with the big boys. Eventually, his tenure there grew stale and the lack of trophies forced a move, with Tottenham firing him in November of 2019. The Argentine then took a year off before signing on to succeed Thomas Tuchel at Paris Saint-Germain in early 2021; his first half-season there wasn't great, as he oversaw the only PSG squad to not win the Ligue 1 title this decade. He did go on to win the league in his first full season, but PSG let him go in the summer of 2022 anyway. A return to the Premier League with Chelsea followed in 2023, where he finished in sixth place in his only season at Stamford Bridge. That brings us to September 2024, when Pochettino became manager of the USMNT ahead of the 2026 World Cup cycle. His appointment was a big deal, as he became the highest-paid and most accomplished manager in the country's history (Jurgen Klinsmann will quibble with the latter assessment, but whatever) in advance of a home(-ish) World Cup. Pochettino had a rocky start there, but eventually righted the ship enough to guide the USMNT to a Group D first-place finish and a Round of 32 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. An embarrassing loss to Belgium in the Round of 16 put a bit of a damper on the run, but overall, Pochettino did what he was hired to do: help the USMNT perform at the World Cup.

Welcome to The Friday Chart, in which Defector contributor Harry Krinsky attempts to turn whatever’s been going on in his head lately into a chart.

Before the NWSL playoffs started, I predicted, like many, that San Diego would go all the way. The second-seeded Wave were so solid, so well-balanced, and with a possession-based style that steamrolled team after team. Making it past the faltering, Mina Tanaka–less Utah Royals in the quarterfinals didn't feel anything close to a question. Where San Diego had earned 25 points in the final 10 matches of the regular season, Utah earned just 11. I've never been so happy to be wrong. In delivering a 1-0 upset in San Diego last Friday, Utah provided a postseason performance that left me, a neutral, pumping with joyful adrenaline.  As expected, San Diego dominated in nearly every way: shots, possession, touches in the final third. But the only stat that matters is goals scored, and Utah goalkeeper Mandy McGlynn had something to say about this. 

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. Ray: Lots of things got chucked in the bin last week: Miami's unbeaten season and Mario Cristobal's muffled rage, Ryan Day's offseason peace of mind, Lane Kiffin's shiny glow in Baton Rouge, the Heisman Trophy projections (now it's Oklahoma State quarterback Drew Mestemaker and Boise State running back Dylan Riley as the favorites, right?), Nebraska's budget for the next seven years if it fires Matt Rhule and has to pay him $63 million to turn in his sideline credential—in all, it's just getting thicker at this end of the trough. As a result, Georgia is the new badass in residence after stomping Ole Miss, 42-7, and UCLA and Utah are last unbeaten teams in FBS. Texas is back—what, for the third time now?—and there are still five Big Ten coaches who haven't gotten the memo to rip ESPN for jerry-rigging the committee rankings to satisfy their SEC overlords. Remember, children: A conspiracy doesn't have to be proven to be advanced—it only has to sound evil to be convincing—and college football's various hierarchies have been doing Satan's bidding since 1869. But never mind all that; you're already bought in, so enjoy hell. For now, let's dance that ska.

The suspended rabona, the showy drag with the left foot, the ricochet off the defender, the bobble of instinctive control on the byline with the right, then back onto the left for a quick push with the outstep into the goalmouth, where a teammate applies the finishing touch. https://bsky.app/profile/cbssportsgolazo-m.bsky.social/post/3mydcrsneyu3h Even a few weeks later, the rabona-croqueta that Lamine Yamal improvised in Barcelona’s recent Champions League win over Galatasaray astonishes with its ingenuity. Did he intend the move to come off exactly as it did? We don’t know. Does it matter? It does not. 

It's just like they told you it would happen in D.A.R.E.: You have been miraculously, tragically transported 2,800 years back in time, in the land that is now the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia. The site will be eventually called Tunnug 1 by the archaeologists who excavate it in 2017. But that is the future, and this is the present, meaning 800 B.C. You have come to sit with the Scythians, nomads who roamed the Eurasian steppes on horseback. You have even glimpsed their warrior-king, whose long and stately braids make him seem like a pretty cool guy. Also, he's smoking. Suddenly the warrior-king glimpses you back, his reddish eyes glinting in the firelight. He leans over to you, whispers something inscrutable in an Eastern Iranic language, and extends in his grizzled hands an ancient joint, leaving you with only one question: Would you smoke that shit? There are, to be certain, pros and cons. But one thing is clear, per a paper published recently in the journal Science: The Scythians were definitely using cannabis to get high. The analysis, led by Fabio-haired University of Bern archaeologist Gino Caspari, represents the earliest definitive evidence of humans consuming marijuana as a psychoactive drug, which was previously only traced back 2,500 years ago where Sogdian mourners once lit up in the ancient Jirzankal Cemetery in what is now western China. It's only fitting that marijuana hails from one of the highest places in the world: the eastern Tibetan Plateau, also known as the Roof of the World. The plant evolved around 28 million years ago, and as early as 4,000 years ago Chinese farmers cultivated the plant for rope, clothing, and paper, per Science. But it is harder to tell when in the archaeological record ancient people first became gone off that loud. Wild weed, the ancestors of the domesticated kind, has only a little tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the plant's intoxicating compound. Some researchers confirmed this when they tried to smoke wild weed and felt nothing, also per Science. (It is unclear if these particular researchers are also the paper's authors, who described cannabis as an "illicit" substance.)

Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, who is worth over $100 billion, resigned as CEO on Thursday morning, following an emergency board meeting prompted by several reports that he'd been having various affairs, most notably with someone U.S. officials believe was spying on behalf of the Chinese government. Nvidia has an unorthodox corporate structure, built around Huang, which largely eschews traditional executive roles in favor of a large council of vice presidents who report directly to Huang, which makes the matter of his succession trickier to game out than it would be in other cases of a CEO doing sex stuff. He'll be succeeded on an interim basis by Colette Kress, formerly the CFO, whom Wired characterizes as one of the few people with a high-level grasp of the company's finances and ties to Wall Street. A quick recap of how we got here: Nvidia is the single most important hardware technology company in the world, a chip designer that boosted its market cap to more than $4 trillion by making the must-have picks and shovels of the ongoing AI boom. As such, Nvidia is something like a shadow arm of the U.S. government, the latter of which is engaged in the stupidest-ever version of the space race with China over who can build the machine god first. Nvidia wants to sell its best stuff to Chinese companies because it doesn't really care who wins, as long as it makes money for investors, but the Trump administration won't allow it. Meanwhile, the tip-top Chinese AI companies have found ways to smuggle in the best Nvidia chips via third parties mostly based in Southeast Asia.

The SS United States finally sank in the Gulf of Mexico at around 10 p.m. ET Wedneday night. Not since the Minnow had a doomed vessel’s last tour run so far over schedule and still kept viewers engaged. Those who stuck with the 10-hour livestream were rewarded with an amazingly touching denouement.  The ship had its day. The SS United States hit the seas in 1952, and at 990 feet long was about 100 feet longer than the Titanic, yet was able to hit speeds of more than 38 knots, still faster than any transatlantic ocean liner ever. But it was deemed obsolete and taken out of service way back in 1969, and spent the last 30 years docked in Philadelphia. Attempts to keep the SS US above water as a hotel or museum failed, and some folks in Okaloosa County, Florida, decided the liner was most valuable at the bottom of sea. The county floated a $10 million plan to turn the ship into an artificial reef and thereby enhance the Redneck Riviera’s reputation as a fishing and scuba diving destination. This entailed sinking the SS US about 22 miles off Fort Walton Beach during the very same week that the Edmund Fitzgerald hit bottom 51 years earlier. 

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. Talk to any college football fan, and they’re unlikely to volunteer praise for their sport’s referees. You’ve seen how many times NFL refs miss an obvious foul, call a ticky-tack holding penalty that took place 50 miles away from the ball, or overturn a sick catch because they noticed the ball quiver slightly after a wideout hit the ground. Imagine how inept college officials must be by comparison. Conferences would probably be better off asking parents to do the job. That said, there is one area where college football has an edge over The Shield on field governance, and here it is:

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life might seem like a bland title for a biography, until it dawns on you exactly how much living the man did. He eloped with his aunt at 19, then humiliated her by writing a novel about it translated into more than 30 languages; divorced her for her much younger niece, his first cousin; and, after a scandalous 50-year marriage beset by separations, walked out one last time for the Spanish socialite and tabloid favorite Isabel Preysler, ex-wife of Julio Iglesias and mother of Enrique. Arguably the world’s most famous Peruvian after Paddington, Vargas Llosa would have been president if not for the dark-horse populist Alberto Fujimori—father of the current president—who handily defeated Vargas Llosa’s platform of neoliberal shock economics in 1990. And in 2010, at age 74, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, joining the pantheon alongside his lifelong frenemy Gabriel García Márquez, whom he famously punched in the face at a film premiere, for reasons that remain unclear.  Thus, the page count of the new biography—the first since his death in 2025 and almost certainly the last word on the subject—clocking in at 812. Gerald Martin, a British critic who also wrote the definitive book on García Márquez, spent 25 years interviewing Vargas Llosa and those who knew him. The result is a monumental achievement: a synthesis of his subject's personal and political life with a surgical yet shockingly breezy analysis of the writing itself. And while it’s not always right to conflate fictional characters with their creator, Vargas Llosa is a special case, Martin argues: a novelist who peppered his work with confessions.