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It was clear that the relationship between Real Madrid and La Liga president Javier Tebas was heading toward disaster when the two parties started bickering in the press less than a month ago, but we've now reached the stage where one is earnestly comparing the behavior of the other to an infamous Nazi. After Jose Mourinho printed out images of perceived missed calls from the Madrid derby, Tebas blasted Real Madrid for what he felt was a bit of image manipulation, calling the club out for believing itself to be bigger than La Liga itself, all while utilizing the press to drive forward its messaging. In response, Madrid called out what it felt was Tebas's fixation on belittling the winningest club in Spanish soccer history. As I said in September, I thought cooler heads would prevail after how embarrassing that whole situation was for both sides. Boy howdy, was I wrong! As is proving to be his custom, Tebas woke up on Friday and decided to send yet another ballista bolt at Real Madrid. Specifically, and repeatedly, Tebas attacked the media surrounding the club for what he believes are biased articles and debate segments on Real Madrid TV. His targets this time were Tomás González-Martín and Jesús Urdiola, journalists with El Debate, the same Spanish publication he attacked last time. Tebas raised two specific articles as issues: One, by González-Martín, details Real Madrid's continued fight with the league over the Negreira referee scandal; the other, by Urdiola, is about how Real Madrid feels personally attacked by La Liga's schedule-making.

ESPN is reporting that ESPN and the College Football Playoff are close to a deal to expand the playoff field to 24 teams in 2027. This news arrives merely two years after the field already expanded from four teams to 12. Not only was this expansion inevitable, but it is unlikely to be the last we see. For now, we are on the cusp of a 24-team playoff, which comes as ESPN and the CFP have been negotiating a big new deal for the network to continue broadcasting the games. According to ESPN's reporting, this new deal will do away with Power 4 conference championship games and start the season a week earlier. Details are reportedly being finalized, but ESPN describes the current composition for the 24-team field as 19 at-large bids, the Power 4 conference champions "as determined by each league," and the highest-ranked Group of 6 team. The Big Ten has been a leading proponent for this change, and its commissioner Tony Pettiti pushed back against complaints that further expansion would dilute and devalue the product and the games. He argues that the new system would include "tiered incentives." According to ESPN, seeds 1 through 8 would get a first-round bye, followed by a home game. Teams seeded from 9 through 16 would get a first-round home game, while teams seeded 17 and lower should be vying for a higher ranking, both to stay in competition and to get that first-round home game. Cool.

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: It's been a tough year for Texas A&M and head coach Mike Elko, who celebrated the Aggies' 27-6 loss to Missouri last Saturday by calling the team's leading social media outlet a "cesspool" and, two days later, apologized for calling the team's leading social media outlet a "cesspool." Elko also said that he is the reason Texas A&M is struggling, which is probably what the team's leading social media outlet was saying about him after his team lost at home by three scores. This is that rare case where someone can be right all three times, making Saturday's showdown with The Citadel a must-watch game, just to see what Elko says afterward if his Aggies don't cover the 45.5-point spread. Otherwise, it's just another weekend in college football's version of paradise, if that's what you consider your afterlife goal. Israel: We are near midseason, and exactly as we predicted the most exciting programs in the sport are Will Stein's Kentucky and Bob Chesney's UCLA. Bill Belichick's UNC team keeps losing, but they're too scrappy and full of energy to make fun of or even care about. Deion Sanders's Colorado team is a complete mess but are too dull and incompetent to fuel much schadenfreude. Lane Kiffin cannot get the stank of the Brian Kelly era off LSU in one offseason, it turns out. And all the best teams are just kinda humming along uncontroversially, save for the occasional bad referee call. Texas lost the Red River Shootout to a mid-to-bad Oklahoma team, but that's just something that happens in that game.

And so ends the Los Angeles Dodgers' reign as baseball's most overwhelming boogeyman. The poster kids for the omnipotence of money, the belief that having the best player means being the best team, the power of the big market over all it surveys—all of that feels less important at this moment than the ability to do the things the Milwaukee Brewers do better than anyone else. The same old song has been replaced, for the moment, by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xzmeye6MaY Yes, meet your new overlords. The Brewers pack extraordinary amounts of baseball into every game, play it better than anyone else, and supposedly have no interest in hitting home runs. It was fitting, then, that they gave the nation a little tweak on the cheek Thursday night en route to sweeping the Dodgers out of the postseason when the final run they scored in their 6-4 win came on a moonshot from noted Boston Red Sox ex-pat and devoted homer avoider David Hamilton. The Brewers did all the things that made them the best team in baseball this season, and mostly kept the Dodgers from doing the things that won them the last two World Series—and then they did the stuff that contemporary winning baseball teams do, too, in a typically unpredictable way.

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. It's nice having Nigella Lawson in the tent. She is cheerful and radiates serenity, and she takes those big glorious bites. She makes you want to bake and to eat. She even makes you want to share the things you bake with others, so that they too can take a huge cheek-bulging bite of something messy and crumbly and you two can giggle together at the decadence of it all.

The model of Donald Trump currently on display is fussy and sour, poached to glossy and unappetizing gumminess in his own luxurious bathwater; he is also, to all appearances, miserable. It is hard to say whether the adoration of his admirers or the revulsion of a large and growing portion of the American populace has been worse for him in that regard, but neither seems to have done him much good. The Trump currently maundering and free-associating through 110-minute performances at various swing-state event spaces is manic or wan but mostly just dull—a mean old dunce listing his gripes, telling weird lies, and talking about dumb stuff he saw on TV. People suffer and die as a direct result of how much he sucks, every day, and he is still somehow the most boring old rich guy imaginable. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is humiliating in the extreme to live in a society that produced someone like this at all, let alone put him in charge of everything. Trump remains very well-insulated from the consequences of his actions, moment by moment thanks to a team of chittering courtiers and Renfield types and more generally because protecting him from those consequences is the only thing that a number of hugely important political institutions really do anymore. But also you can tell that he knows, at some level, that everyone can see that he is failing. There's another version of Donald Trump that only comes out when he feels safe, and while that version also sucks ass and is stupid as hell, it is notable as the last vestige of the character who once charmed America's most credulous and least exacting voters. The other version of him, the one that speaks in front of smaller, more carefully curated crowds, does not seem to know that everyone can see that he is failing. That Trump is making innumerable lives around the world harder, crueler, and worse is not something that would bother him, because his own life remains pretty much the same. The trouble comes when he is perceived, correctly, as a preening and delusional failure, and in front of a crowd of people who believe he can do no wrong, all of whom are visibly, clammily yearning to give him more of their money, Trump is untroubled. He knows he can get up there and just say whatever, and so he does.

L.A. Material is an independent news organization aimed at filling some holes in the Los Angeles news landscape and making that fascinating, fragmented city more legible. You can learn more, and subscribe, at lamaterial.com. This story originally ran at the site on Sept. 30. I had been going to Dodger Stadium with my dad for about 30 years before he pointed them out to me. “See that?” he asked, gesturing toward two rectangular panels of concrete on a far wall of the main seating structure. They looked almost like friezes, carved with inscrutable designs. My dad had been wondering about them for decades. Turns out the pieces he’d spotted are just the beginning. Eventually I’d locate more custom bas-relief sculptures around the park—about a dozen in total. Smaller ones visible from the field-level entrances. Massive, multi-story pieces that wrap around certain outside corners of the building. They’re subtle: abstract scenes unadorned with color, camouflaged into the rest of their concrete environments, in some cases obscured by trees and bushes. 

After a flyout and a strikeout in his first two attempts, Jake Bauers's third time facing Blake Snell in Wednesday's Game 3 of the National League Championship Series went like this: Bauers took a slider down the middle of the plate for strike one. He took two non-competitive pitches down low to make the count 2-1. He foul-tipped a changeup, and then, sitting on two strikes, four pitches into his at-bat, he decided that he simply would not strike out again. So Bauers fouled off a slider in the zone, then a curveball. He laid off an inside fastball to draw the count full. Then he managed to foul off a high fastball, and, immediately after, slowed down to catch a changeup in the zone. As the pitch count for this at-bat ticked over into double digits, Bauers pulled a slider that sat up in the zone a bit too much, sending it into the stands past the right-field foul pole. On the 11th pitch, Bauers made no mistake. Snell threw a middle-middle, 98-mph fastball, and Bauers smoked a no-doubt, two-run homer that carried over 400 feet into right field to give the Milwaukee Brewers a 3-2 lead. When Bauers's teammate Garrett Mitchell hit his own home run off Snell just two pitches later, it was, comparatively, an anticlimax. Spiritually speaking, a guy hitting a home run one pitch after just missing out on another home run counts for two home runs. Bauers had already won the game; Mitchell's own homer was just overkill on Snell's way out.

This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I had on our two favorite WNBA writers to talk about the Golden State Valkyries' forthcoming championship. Both Maitreyi Anantharaman, whom you all know from her work here, and Maya Goldberg-Safir, whom you also know from her work here and should know from her work at Rough Notes, know ball and will be covering the series between the Valks and the Atlanta Dream. We spent a solid hour talking about the series and the path the two teams took to get here, but mostly we talked about Kiah Stokes. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

Ross Douthat has a fantasy novel for young adult readers: The Falcon's Children, the first in what reportedly will be a trilogy from the respectability-conservatism peddler, who left his sinecure as a columnist at the New York Times earlier this year so that he could lower television's aggregate charisma level by 944 percent as a correspondent for Bari Weiss's 60 Minutes. That is virtually all I will ever know about The Falcon's Children, and I beseech you, tender reader, to follow my example. I am here today to talk about fantasy maps. Here, via Douthat's Substack (where he first published at least some of the text of The Falcon's Children), is the hand-drawn map of his fantasy world: