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It's August, you know the drill: Frances Tiafoe's tennis season is just getting started. North American hard court summer is his wake-up. I once asked him if he could figure out how to bottle up the confidence of playing on home turf and tap into it elsewhere on tour, and his response was—paraphrasing here—nah, I'm just never gonna feel like that in Barcelona. Fair enough. Got to respect this level of self-knowledge. Though he's barely weeks removed from wrist surgery, Tiafoe now seems to be picking up his game as he inches towards New York, site of his greatest accomplishments to date. And heading into the softest U.S. Open draw in recent memory, the 28-year-old American might be peaking at an opportune moment.Heading into the summer, Tiafoe's 2026 season had been unglamorous but steady, getting his teeth into every event he played, displaying the consistency that eluded him as a pup. In late June, his efforts paid off with some fresh hardware. Tiafoe claimed the ATP 500 at Halle, beating his buddy Taylor Fritz in the final. That broke a title drought of three years, a period in which he's had to sit back and watch Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner take over the tour, as he receded into a vast and distant middle class, with a ranking drifting around the top 30, and his odometer ticking up into his late 20s. So that Halle win was big shift in overall career momentum: his first 500-level title, fourth title overall, and second title on grass, a surface where he has historically excelled, given his soft hands and improvisational ability. Unfortunately for Tiafoe, that prep did not translate to a deep Wimbledon run. He was dispatched in the third round by Alexander Bublik—who was, for the first time in their matchup history, ranked higher than Tiafoe, one sign of the shifting fates of these talented tricksters. Tiafoe looked gutted after the five-set loss. Two years ago, in the same round of that same tournament, he was losing in five thrilling sets to Alcaraz; surely Bublik was a harder name to stomach. Tiafoe next came out flat at his hometown event in D.C., face-planting in the first round against Terence Atmane. "Very, very poor from my side," he said after. "I play every year, and I never performed how I have today." His next time out, in Montreal, he retired during his second-round match, citing a right wrist injury he said had been bothering him for a while. In early August he had a cyst removed from that wrist. In theory, this was the worst possible slice of the tennis calendar for him to be rehabbing from surgery on his dominant wrist; that's when he's supposed to be stacking ranking points. In practice: This cystless fella is kicking some ass in Ohio. Tiafoe was the runner-up in Cincinnati two years ago, where the quick hard courts really seem to suit him, and he looks unfazed, perhaps even unburdened, by his recent surgery. His first match against Lorenzo Sonego this year in Cincinnati was a feast of shotmaking, pretty much flawless tennis. Then came a bigger test: Learner Tien, the 20-year-old baseline artist who has leapt up to the top of the tour and surpassed most of his elder countrymen. Heading into the match, Tiafoe was ranked No. 24 in the world to Tien's No. 12. At this juncture of the season, everyone on tour is banged up, even setting aside Tiafoe's most recent procedure. Tien has been playing through an elbow injury for months, which has noticeably weakened his forehand; Tiafoe called on the physio for treatment on his hip after the second set. But they still managed to collaborate on a high-quality three-setter, which Tiafoe closed out decisively, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4. At the handshake, a grinning Tien accused Tiafoe of faking the surgery altogether. Next up for Tiafoe was a somewhat off-kilter Felix Auger-Aliassime, whom he beat in straight sets. It's not often that Tiafoe logs consecutive wins against top-20 players—he did it in Halle, and then you have to go back to 2024 for the next most recent instance—but he has done it this week. In tonight's quarterfinal he takes on Lorenzo Musetti, which gives him a chance to extend that streak to three.

Some people are fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Los Angeles Chargers. https://twitter.com/ChargersCountry/status/2086143238252183978

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. It's almost fall! School is back in session and football is just about back. The 2026 college football season will be here next week, and the sport is as chaotic as ever. NIL money is flying, coaches are forever off their rockers, and the NCAA is holding on for dear life to a system that is crumbling in real time. The offseason has provided its own drama, in between transfer portal chicanery and recruiting violations. In the run-up to Week 0, we wanted to go over some of our favorite stories of the offseason, as a sort of pre-preview of things to know about and keep an eye on ahead of the upcoming season. Lane Kiffin Watch

People sometimes wonder what editors do. It's a fair question to ask, given how difficult it is to read a column or blog post and be able to discern exactly how much influence an editor did or did not have over the final product. It's easy to assume that editors don't do much at all, actually, and just skim a hardworking writer's drafts before publication. Thankfully, there are guys like now former Seattle Times columnist Matt Calkins out there to remind us of how much value editors can provide to their publications. Calkins spent 11 years covering sports for the Seattle Times, and announced his resignation from the paper yesterday on Substack. His stated reason for resigning is that his editors refused to publish a column he wrote about anti-trans protestors who gathered outside the arena before a recent Seattle Storm game. After interviewing one of the protestors, he was inspired to write: One of them was 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who’d lost to a biological male in a track and field race in eighth grade and was holding a sign reading “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!” I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in. One thing Wilson emphasized to me at the rally was that she wasn’t anti-trans. Another student-athlete named Frances Staudt — who said she’s endured daily verbal abuse after refusing to play against a biological boy in a basketball game — echoed Wilson’s sentiment. So that was the thesis of my column (which you can read here) — that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.

Before Tadej Pogacar became a hypertuned killer on a bike, before he won any of his record-tying five Tours de France, before he was able to push the boundaries of the volume and variety of races that any single rider could win, he first had to break through. He did so seven years ago at the 2019 Vuelta a España, wherein he won three stages and finished third overall despite coming to Spain to learn how to race and to support Fabio Aru. Pogacar's talent was as obvious as his inexperience, and that Vuelta remains a fascinating snapshot of the state of sport right before he redefined it: rim brakes, Nairo Quintana, a version of Pogacar that didn't know what he was doing. We'll never see that stuff again, though we will get Pogi at the Vuelta for the second and perhaps final time. Why does the Vuelta matter so much to Pogacar? There is not much more left for him to win. It can be a difficult memory exercise, but the world's best cyclists haven't won like Pogacar has for at least four decades. Guys used to specialize, or at least be burdened by the variety of terrain. But Pogacar has won every major stage race except the Tour of the Basque Country. He has won every monument except Paris-Roubaix. He has everything: five Tours, 13 Monuments, a span and breadth of career-wide victory unseen since the days of steel frames. Pogacar is a student of the sport, which has fueled a completist streak. He will do his best to win the Tour every year, and he'll usually succeed, but it's the other stuff that intrigues. Pogacar rocked up to Romandie and the Tour de Suisse this year and smoked the field. The Vuelta is the only Grand Tour left for him to win.

It feels like the World Cup just ended, and yet somehow, some way, the Premier League is already back. England's top flight kicks off on Friday with defending champi—oops, I mean attacking champion; sorry Mikel—Arsenal taking on newly promoted Championship champion Coventry City in North London, before everyone else takes the field over the weekend. It's a quick turnaround after the six-week odyssey that ended with Donald Trump trying to insert himself in Spain's trophy celebration, but that's life in soccer's grossly bloated calendar. As someone who cares about player fitness and the quality of play, I'm concerned that this is going to be a messy season. As someone who misses watching games every weekend, I could not be more excited. Fittingly, the Premier League itself is a real mess right now. Arsenal should feel confident about its chances to repeat, but there's no telling where any of the other 19 teams might finish. (OK, well, there's one team that will almost certainly finish 20th, but I'll get to that later.) There's been a ton of upheaval in England ahead of this season, and with the transfer window not closing until Sept. 1, more could be on the way. With uncertainty thick in the air like London fog, rather than previewing every team one by one, it felt more prudent to take a wider look at the league. I've picked five storylines that will take center stage starting with Friday's season-opening kickoff. These aren't the only riveting plot lines to follow, but they are ones that will go a long way toward deciding who wins the title, who rises, who falls, and who ends up on their asses, covered in shame. Speaking of, let's start with that most volatile of positions, the new Premier League manager.

It’s been a summer of bad news for anybody with favorable feelings (me!) about Texas Tech. The New York Times joined the pigpile this week with a feature story whose subhead said the school had become a “a dystopian academic nightmare.” As if this year’s athletics debacles weren’t nausea-inducing enough. How can a guy (me!) root for a place like this?  The Times piece mulled the aggressive missteps taken by Brandon Creighton, the low-aiming and cartoonishly evil chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, while altering the curriculum to suit his radically conservative agenda—like generating fear among the faculty by sending sloppy AI-generated reports and scary memos which told professors which specific lessons they’re going to have to stop teaching for being too left-leaning, some of which included lessons that weren’t even being taught. One instructor, described as a medieval historian, said he dropped classroom discussion of Viking mythology because there were references to “gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin,” and felt Joan of Arc was also off-limits because that topic could lead to references of her “cross-dressing.” A creative writing teacher told of quitting her job after being warned by the administration about using a book titled Voice of the Fish, because a character describes himself as “transmasculine.” This is, of course, the exact stuff Creighton was brought to Lubbock to do. He had no strong ties to Tech or past as an academic when he got the job. He’d been a politician, holding office in the Texas House and Senate since 2007, and was a leading proponent of many of the state’s shittiest statutes. His record shows he loves racist monuments, hates anything LGBTQ, fears Plato, led the fight to ban abortion in his state, and can be trusted to treat concepts like diversity, equity, inclusion, compassion, fairness, and decency with contempt. He showed he had all the wrong stuff to take over a college by authoring Senate Bill 37, the legislation signed into law last year by yucky Governor Greg Abbott that sentenced academic freedom to death at all the schools in the state university system. 

Some people are fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Ctrl-V.

Talk about a load-bearing hyphen. After a half-season of half-threatened retirement and full-frenzy speculation, the status quo simply continues: As the Formula 1 summer break comes to a close, Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen announced before Verstappen's home race that he has re-signed—not resigned!—with the team for four more years, extending his contract through 2030. This is the least interesting outcome of F1's purported silly season, though it is still somehow notable thanks to the culture of clear communication (read: complaining) in the sport. Verstappen has not been quiet about his displeasure with this year's regulations; that his team had significant early-season struggles obviously factored into his annoyance. Thus, the speculation began. Perhaps Verstappen would go to another team. Perhaps Verstappen would simply and most dramatically express his displeasure by retiring from the formula entirely. The leap from regulation displeasure to a full retirement was, in no small part, a self-fueled rumor. Retiring at age 28 would be shocking for any F1 driver, much less an all-time great, though Verstappen has been vocal from the start of his career that he would leave the sport as soon as his interest waned. Verstappen was regularly moonlighting in GT3 racing and praising the older-school style of racing there. After the Canadian Grand Prix, Verstappen declared that another year, should the regulations not be modified, was "just mentally not doable for me."

I don't get nervous before recording episodes of The Distraction, and was surprised to notice during our more recent live episodes that even the usual bite of anxiety which comes with going onstage was just a fairly mild nibble. Some of this is because Drew does a lot of the annoying work required to make the podcast happen, but most of it owes to how comfortable I've become doing this show with him and for the audience that followed us from The Deadcast over to The Distraction, for the past [number redacted] years. That also explains why I was so anxious about recording this one, which will be the penultimate episode of the show. This was one I didn't really know how to do, until it was time to do it. Then it was easy. That's the thing with getting to talk to a friend for an hour every week for so long—around six years together doing this show, more than a year doing The Deadcast together at Deadspin, and much longer than that for Drew. It's easy and fun in a way that doesn't quite align with the idea of "work," even when it's a little bit sad. Much of this episode is about the years we've spent doing this podcast together and what it has meant to us. We also discuss the podcasts that will replace it: a new concept from Drew that will arrive in Week 1 of the NFL season, and one co-hosted by me that is a little less far along in its progress, but will be along in time.