NowLoop

In early 2019, Tyreek Hill was already proof of just how far athletic talent can take you. Yes, he had pleaded guilty to domestic abuse in college, including signing a document in which he said he placed his pregnant girlfriend in a headlock. Yes, he was then dismissed by Oklahoma State, transferring to Division II…

The relationship between sports and the place where those games are played is largely a matter of fans developing a strong but mostly manageable addiction to their own pheromones. Ritual and iconography matter more than the actual results when the results don't meet the need; the first two are stable and reliable in a way the third will never be. It has always been thus. And so Mike Ditka, whose death at age 86 was announced by his family Friday morning, was and remains still Chicago in ways that no other figure in any other city could manage. Ditka explained Chicago's view of itself from head to toe, vocal inflections to hand gestures, minor local biases to general worldview. Chicago is Ditka just as Ditka was Chicago, and that self-reverential truth will remain true even after he's gone. Ditka was quite literally the face of the Bears from the moment he left the University of Pittsburgh to seek his fortune in football 65 years ago. His helmet with the white single-bar facemask and his gashed-up face behind it was the image of choice in their 1963 championship, the one that interrupted the Decade of Lombardi. Ditka's contractual intransigence in the face of the team's iconic (and iconically vice-gripped) owner, George Halas, reinforced that status despite the six-year endgame in Philadelphia and then Dallas that completed his playing career. Even Ditka's Super Bowl championship with Dallas in 1971 felt a bit odd, in that Why is that Chicago guy celebrating next to Roger Staubach? kind of way. He sent himself into exile rather than take what Halas was offering, but Ditka never really left.

Geriatric Jonathan has made the news again, this time for having his genome sequenced. The Aldabra giant tortoise, who is estimated to be 194 years old, is the oldest known land animal on the planet. (The ocean, which teems with glass sponges thousands of years old and Greenland sharks that have been swimming for centuries, takes longevity to different extremes.) As such, it is understandable why scientists would want to sequence Jonathan's genome. He's lived a long freaking time. Yet many of the headlines heralding this new inquiry into Jonathan's venerable age, which was published in Science Advances, have made me laugh with their implications that we may follow in Jonathan's closely spaced footsteps. Consider Reuters: "A 194-Year-Old Tortoise, World's Oldest Land Animal, May Hold Clues to Longer Life." Or take The Times: "Has 194-Year-Old Tortoise Jonathan Taught Us the Secret to Longer Life?" What are the clues and secrets to Jonathan's extremely long life? Mainly there is one: Jonathan is a turtle. I can hardly blame these publications for this headline format; the blueprint was in the press releases issued by the University of Cambridge and Vanderbilt University, both of which framed Jonathan as potentially holding the secret to a long and healthy life, which he very well could! The headline in IFLScience—"We Finally Know How Jonathan The Tortoise, The World's Oldest Land Animal, Is Still Alive And Kicking At 194"—is easily answered the same way. Jonathan the tortoise is alive and kicking because he had the good luck to be born an Aldabra giant tortoise. Were Jonathan a human guy he would not be alive.

During a Sept. 28 press conference, Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto stated unprompted that if he had been fired following this season, it would have been justified. This is an extremely funny thing to say when you have not lost your job, especially when contextualized by your firings of five of your colleagues in the surrounding 48 hours, all of whom you hired. The difference between having your hypothetical firing rendered justifiable and having your walking papers actually handed to you is, uh, the whole dang thing. This is the sports executive equivalent of If I Did It, an implied admission of guilt issued directly after having gotten away with that shit. Like O.J., Dipoto will not elude fate forever; nobody with his job ever really does. I do find it sort of interesting to consider what he has actually done wrong. While most anyone paying attention to him likely agrees Dipoto has some real bozo moments, I think we may disagree on the specifics. Likewise, we might wish for a different hand at the helm, but for what reason? It's worth considering what, exactly, Jerry Dipoto has done wrong. The 2026 Seattle Mariners dramatically wretched and quivered their way to a third-place finish in a truly dogshit American League West, scoring the fewest runs they have in a full season since 2015. This year’s squad had some injuries and a bit of bad luck, but that isn’t actually much of an excuse. Those 2015 Mariners, who Dipoto took charge of at the end of the season, needed to give Logan Morrison 500 real major-league plate appearances and employ Dustin Ackley in a serious capacity to have an offense that shitty. Anyway, in the 11 years since, Dipoto saw his title bumped to President of Baseball Operations, and rewarded the M’s by winning eight playoff games, total. The day before Dipoto admitted his firing would be justified, the M’s announced that Dan Wilson would be relieved of his duties as on-field manager. The day after, Wilson’s shitcanning was followed by that of his bench coach, Manny Acta, as well as his first base coach, hitting coach, and infield coach. The hitting was obviously quite bad, and the infield was even worse, owing significantly to JP Crawford’s valiant losing battle with the position of shortstop. There are a wonderful variety of advanced defensive metrics out there, with bitterly conflicting philosophies; Baseball Info Solutions has one, FanGraphs has one, and Statcast has two different ones. No matter which one you prefer, if you stack all the 2026 team defenses up against each other, you will find the Mariners DFL. 

Having leisurely picked it up one day without expecting to be taken in, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air arrested me from the first page. “Among my five teammates who reached the top [of Mount Everest], four … perished in a rogue storm,” Krakauer writes. “By the time I’d descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out.” Twelve deaths seemed to me a Shakespearean number. But the more I read about mountaineering, the more I realized that there was nothing extraordinary, per se, about tragedy in the mountains. On Everest alone, as many as 10 people die on average every year, a number that keeps climbing as temperatures rise. Krakauer’s book is so affecting because he refuses to look at this fact with nonchalance.  In that, Krakauer seems to be a bit of an outlier. Nonchalance is a common trait in adventurers whose impossible feats break through to the mainstream; consider Alex Honnold’s maddeningly blasé attitude towards his own chances in Free Solo. For those of us who are fearful, this ability to repress, or at least temper, the fear of death is the root of our fascination with extreme sports athletes. Most depictions of their exploits ask an obvious question: Why do this? But that’s a deceiving question, because the answer, at least as far as the psychologies on display are concerned, is equally obvious: Why not? When he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory—the English mountaineer who was among the first to break trail on Everest, and who died on his third attempt to summit the mountain in 1924—famously replied: “Because it is there.” But the rest of his quote is just as telling a glimpse into the reasoning of the high-elevation climber. The urge, he said, is “a part, I suppose, of man’s desire to conquer the universe.” 

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: You'll have to wade through a fair amount of mediocre slop to get to the actual prize this week. That prize is the Georgia-Alabama blood feud; the rest of it is just college football. The outcome in that game will go a long way toward pissing off one fan base while making the other completely insufferable—that is, if the hurricane permits the game to be played at all. If you're just in it for the hate, there's always Texas at Oklahoma, although OU has taken a profound backward step of late and Steve Sarkisian is his own bad time in your living room. Now that the games are winnowing themselves down to a few bangers per week, we have elected to be more selective with our viewing habits; yes, there is college football five nights per week until Halloween, but that doesn't mean we or you or anyone else should be consuming most of it. We'll still do it, mind you—the regular season starts at the end of November anyway, and games of little notice still have their charms. They just have a more difficult task making themselves seen amid all this inventory.

As if Thursday's 24-16 defeat to a (formerly) winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers team—a loss which never really felt as close as the final score looks—wasn't already bad enough for the Dallas Cowboys. They now have to deal with everyone seeing a video of Dak Prescott walking to the locker room, fresh after losing at home to those aforementioned Bucs, taking offense to a worker inside the stadium calling his performance "embarrassing." The word was so triggering that it forced Prescott into some glaring, perhaps even glowering. https://twitter.com/AdamJRossow/status/2108426633493242327 Later at his press conference, where Prescott had to sit there and explain his team's ass-kicking in primetime, he was asked about the moment:

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. When I was a child, there was nothing I loved more than preservatives. I loved soda. I loved fast food. I loved the kind of packaged treats that you get in a box at the grocery store, where each of them is individually wrapped in plastic, and the sugar content is so high that they make your teeth hurt. In particular, I loved Little Debbie's Nutty Buddies. The stacked wafers layered with chocolate and peanut butter called to me when my household had them. It was always a special treat. I can feel the crunch of the thin wafers between my teeth even now, probably 25 years since my last Nutty Buddy. I would eat one tomorrow. Such is the draw of childhood nostalgia and sweet treats.

If one wanted to understand the alarming state of international politics in the Western Hemisphere through a single story, it'd be hard to beat Jose Antonio Kast visiting CECOT this past January. Kast spent nearly 20 years at the extreme right fringe of Chilean politics, mostly crusading against women's rights. His father was a Nazi, and not in any sort of metaphorical sense: He served as an Oberleutnant in the Wehrmacht in World War II. Various members of the Kast family also worked for the Pinochet dictatorship and have dedicated their lives to revanche. Last December, Kast won Chile's presidential election thanks in part to Donald Trump throwing his weight around, and before he took office, he went up to El Salvador to visit its notorious CECOT prison. Kast said he was interested in how to "import good ideas and proposals," such as the mass torture compound, in his quest to militarize Chile against the specter of narcoterrorists and illegal immigrants, and in doing so bring it into close collaboration with the Trump administration. This sort of thing has been happening all across Latin America since Trump strode back into power, with a rapidly dwindling handful of notable exceptions. The two most-populated countries cling to leftist rule, for now anyway. Claudia Sheinbaum's government is quite popular in Mexico and has managed to keep the U.S. relatively at bay, while Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is still in charge of Brazil. However, Lula underperformed in the first round of Brazilian elections this past Sunday, and Brazil is on the verge of electing Flavio Bolsonaro. The eldest son of the currently jailed and constantly leaking fascist former president assuming office of the second-most populous country in the Western Hemisphere would represent a total victory for the Trump-aligned right-wing movement in South America, and would by extension be a disaster for the country, the hemisphere, and the planet. How did we get here, and what tensions animate this broad coalition?

I know how the faint praise goes, but a lot of the important things Angel Reese does actually do show up in the box score. They certainly did in Atlanta’s Game 2 win over New York on Wednesday, a 101-98 overtime thriller that gave the Dream a 2-0 lead in the semifinals. This showed up in the box score: