NowLoop

It's silly to pretend that some otherworldly deity is determining the fates of your favorite sports teams, but what else am I supposed to believe when Lamar Jackson, who had been sidelined with a vaguely described ankle sprain for three games, finally makes it back on the field against the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, only to immediately jam his thumb and leave after one play on offense? The Baltimore Ravens quarterback is most likely out for the rest of the season, as the injury to his throwing hand will require surgery and a trip to the IR. Watching Jackson leave the game, which the Ravens lost 36-10 after also losing backup QB Tyler Huntley to injury, felt similar to when Aaron Rodgers, fresh from carrying the American flag onto the field as a New York Jet for the first time, was taken out for the season on his first drive. That moment marked the beginning of the end for Rodgers and the Jets, as they never captured the magic they hoped to create (Rodgers went 5-12 as the starter the following season). Will it be the same for Lamar Jackson? I've been a fan of Jackson since 2016, when I watched him completely dismantle my school, Florida State, while he was at Louisville on his way to winning the Heisman. He's been one of the most exciting players in football for the past decade. Today, though, I can't help but return to the feeling I had in January 2025, when I watched Mark Andrews drop a pass for a two-point conversion in the divisional round of the playoffs against the Bills, a play which could've sent the game to overtime. In that moment, I felt in my bones that it was over for this version of the Ravens. Not necessarily for Jackson, who was playing his best ball at that point, but for the rest of the team.

It's not particularly surprising to look at the top of the table in the Premier League and see Arsenal and Manchester City. Aside from Liverpool's 2024-25 title-winning campaign, those two sides have dominated the last half decade in England's top flight, and though City has a pending punishment that might shoot them down the pyramid, it's safe to say that these are the two best teams in the best league. Arsenal and City have another thing in common, though, besides their lofty spots on the table: They have both been pecked by the Seagulls of Brighton & Hove Albion. If one were to look at the advanced stats from Saturday's match between Manchester City and Brighton, without looking at the score, it would be safe to assume that City ran rampant. Shots, possession, xG, passing accuracy, dribbles—by every metric, City had statistical supremacy at its home ground. Well, every metric but the one that matters: goals scored. Thanks to an 11th minute Yasin Ayari tally, Brighton came away from Saturday's match with its first-ever win at the Etihad Stadium, the most goals scored in the Premier League, and a stranglehold on third place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtDH-zkXi1A

This year, Kimi Antonelli got lucky. Antonelli drives the fastest car on the grid. He is young—very recently a teenager, even; he turned 20 in August—and that means, when faced with an entirely new and controversial ruleset, he didn't have years of prior programming to overcome. And despite his youth, Antonelli has a good sense of narrative satisfaction. This Sunday, during the Mexican Grand Prix, he made sure to snag a podium place in the race where he became the youngest ever Formula 1 driver to win a Drivers Championship, hoisted in celebration by the generational superstars before him. Past, present, future. It was the third iteration of an Antonelli–Max Verstappen–Lewis Hamilton podium this year. When the podium roster first occurred in Canada, still early in the season, it was already tempting to refer to the moment as legendary: Antonelli was riding a four-race win streak, and led his much more experienced teammate, George Russell, by 43 points in the championship. But last year proved that inexperienced winners can lose championships even after being staked to larger, later leads, and Antonelli is as inexperienced as it gets, while Russell was getting unlucky with engine failures and mechanical issues. Antonelli had a substantial slump in form over the summer the previous year as a rookie, after a string of good performances to start the season. Over the same stretch of the calendar this year, Antonelli suffered two engine failures from strong positions and otherwise earned a podium. Put aside those two engine failures, and so far this season, the only other race in which he did not finish on the podium was the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where he finished P5. Formula 1 is a sport in which it is notoriously difficult to distinguish generational talents by their skill rather than by their results. Even the greatest drivers of all time cannot overcome massive gaps in machinery. Even a generational driver will need the correct team, the correct car, the correct regulations, the correct teammate, the correct timing; a generational driver must deliver several seasons of consistent results to prove their standing. But last year provided a timely example of what it looks like when two merely very good drivers, matched in their very-goodness, are given a rocketship to guide to a championship: a close but not particularly exciting battle marked more by ass-over-heels fumbling and obnoxious team orders than iconic victories.

There is a sign outside the NHL league offices in New York and Toronto (yep, there are two of them) stolen from construction sites that reads: "(Number Of) Days Since The Last Trade Demand." The current number is 3, and the latest is the strangest so far. It came from Tampa's notoriously taciturn star Nikita Kucherov, who had told his teammates on a team flight that he 1) would not re-sign with the Lightning next summer, 2) wants to be traded somewhere else, and 3) intends to keep playing for the time being while his wishes are accommodated by the team. That last part won him the defense of his coach, Jon Cooper, but it also won a public rejection from general manager Julien BriseBois. So yeah, stay tuned for more fun in our next exciting episode. Kucherov is the fourth big-name NHL player to seek immediate relocation to the players' new favorite team, SOTH (Somewhere Other Than Here). His pursuit of SOTH has been more amicable than his peers' because he didn't make a public show of his unhappiness (that's what agents are for) and is not refusing to play. Indeed, he assisted on three of the four Tampa Bay goals in their 5-4 shootout loss to the highly ordinary Predators, so a case can be made that he is still giving his all for the olde towne team. A better case could probably have been made if we had bothered to watch the game, but transparency requires that we admit we were watching the WNBA because every Game 7 is by definition better than every other game in any other sport at any other time.

Our Monday crossword is the best, and don't get it twisted. This week's puzzle was constructed by Vik Shirvaikar, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Vik is a data scientist, weekend soccer referee, and long-suffering Cowboys fan from the Dallas area. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. 

Elisabetta Palagi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa, had sent her team of research students to Ethiopia to study geladas, monkeys whose hearts appear to gleam out of their chests. But as her students watched the geladas munch on a grassy plateau alongside other grazing animals, they noticed a peculiar interaction between two other animals. A bull approached a male donkey and mounted him. This behavior did not seem to bother the donkey. The donkey did not kick him or otherwise try to escape the interaction. The researchers contacted Palagi and asked if she thought this cross-species intercourse was worth studying. "I said yes," Palagi wrote in an email. After close observation, the researchers found that the the bull, dubbed Achille, and the donkey, dubbed Patroclo, have a persistent, mutual sexual relationship, which is described in a new paper in Current Biology. Achille and Patroclo's relationship was not news to the local herders, who laughed when they saw the researchers filming the unexpected pair. "What was an unexpected observation for us was evidently a familiar sight to them," Palagi said. (The paper includes explicit footage of the pair's mating that we have omitted out of respect for their privacy.) The plateau, with scattered gelada monkeys and Achille and Patroclo nuzzling on the left.

There are two recurring trans women named Carolina in Sloane Murphy's short story collection Shut Up I Love You I'll Call You Tomorrow. One's nicknamed North, and the other's nicknamed South, but nobody can seem to keep track of which is which. "Most of the time she just responds when people call her South," one of the stories says about North, who's the elder of the two. "At least no one was calling her Old Carolina." This is just one of the details in Murphy's debut that reminded me of the best Hold Steady albums, where casts of lushly described, hard-partying outsiders self-destruct during nights that feel as exciting as they are dangerous. The big difference is that the women in Murphy's stories are trans, which means their stakes are even higher. Edited by Emily Zhou, who wrote 2023's essential short story collection Girlfriends, Murphy's Shut Up I Love You does for Trans Chicago what Zhou did for Ann Arbor and Brooklyn. This book announces a talented young writer who crafts stories with a vivid sense of time and place, filled with recognizable conversations and sly humor, punctuated by a willingness to stare at the abyss. But while being trans in 2023 was no great shakes, Murphy's collection arrives at a time when the alarm bells ring even louder—when we can't even watch sports on TV without seeing political ads from one state or another trying to demonize us, trying to tell people we don't deserve to live as we are.

The Detroit Lions became the first team this season to beat the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday, but nobody on either team really wanted to talk about Detroit's 19-15 win after it was over. All anyone could think about was Lions linebacker Jack Campbell. Campbell left the field strapped to a board after making a tackle early in the fourth quarter. Campbell collided with Vikings tight end T.J. Hockenson in what looked like a routine play, but his body went limp as soon as he hit the ground. He remained that way for an agonizingly long period of time while players and coaches from both teams knelt on the field. Campbell was eventually placed on a board and carted off the field, and made no obvious movements. https://twitter.com/NFLonFOX/status/2116992713765609780

It's wise to never expect too much from a clash between two NFC South teams. They tend to be a form of stultifying anti-entertainment, and so Sunday's game between the Atlanta Falcons and Tampa Bay Buccaneers would normally be an easy skip. The NFC South has felt a little different this year, though, and not because any of its teams are playing particularly good football. What they have been doing is playing weird, entertaining football, and today the Bucs and Falcons played what might end up being the weirdest and most entertaining game of the season. A huge rainstorm rolled into Tampa, Fla., this morning, absolutely soaking the Bucs' field and creating the kind of conditions that would make any offensive coordinator squeamish about calling a passing play. Now imagine how much more stressful that scenario becomes when the quarterbacks at their disposal are Baker Mayfield and Michael Penix Jr. Facing these conditions, the Buccaneers came up with a novel strategy: What if we just didn't throw a pass? Well, OK, they threw three passes, but none of them were completed. Mayfield's final stat line: 0-for-3 for zero yards, zero touchdowns, and zero interceptions. Any football game that produces a quarterback box score like that is already a thing to behold, but this one was made truly special by the fact that the Bucs won the game, 16-0. They did so by running the ball 56 times for 324 yards. Bucky Irving and Kenny Gainwell each got to live out every running back's fantasy: Irving finished with 170 yards and a touchdown on 27 carries, and Gainwell chipped in with 140 yards on 25 carries. The game's representative highlight was probably Mayfield fumbling a snap and scrambling for a few seconds before throwing a desperate backward pass to Irving, who churned through the rain and mud before fumbling the ball right at the goal line.

If one thing's been made clear through the last decade or so of national politics, it's that there are John Fettermans hiding in plain sight throughout the Democratic Party. The latest member to don the Mantle Of The Oaf is Haley Stevens, who lost her primary race for a Senate seat to Abdul El-Sayed this summer. Now, a few days before the general election, she has endorsed El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. Stevens appeared Sunday morning with Rogers at a church service in Detroit. While entering the venue, she stopped to tell reporters that she's in favor of investing in black-owned businesses, adding, "that’s the policy that Mike’s going to take on." She then sat in the same row as Rogers during the service. https://twitter.com/samueljrob/status/2116928933740298485