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The moment general manager Chris Ballard was given Fredo's kiss by the Indianapolis Colts' HR department Monday morning, the rumor mill started to churn up replacements. This is bleak work, but consider that the alternative was analyzing how the Colts managed to lose at home against a previously winless Titans team on Sunday. The first name on that list, per Dan Patrick, was Peyton Manning. It's a perfectly silly, superficial, and absolutely in-play choice for the job: the only person who does insurance commercials more often than Flo from Progressive. That's because Manning is the preeminent former Indianapolis Colt, a quarterback who won a Super Bowl ring for the team and had the best seasons of his Hall of Fame career in that town. It's in play because Manning is an omnipresent medioid who ably plays the affable goober, but is in real life anything but. It's also in play because the Colts are owned by the daughter of the late Jim Irsay, Carlie Irsay-Gordon, an owner who takes notes on the sidelines in a constant quest to avoid just being seen as another fail-offspring in a league that's lousy with them. After the team's final loss of last season, she asked Ballard if he believed he still had "his juju." Given that he got canned with a career record in the job of 72-82-1 and the Colts haven't reached the playoffs since the 2020 season, it puts a serious strain on the concept of "juju." Somewhere in that notebook, at some point during Sunday's grim and lifeless 26-20 loss to the Tennessee Titans, for god's sake, Irsay-Gordon presumably wrote "this juju sucks," if not in so many words then decisively enough to punch Ballard's ticket. Irsay-Gordon explained her sideline note-taking thusly two weeks ago to Front Office Sports: 

When last we checked in with Devin Cooley, he was serving as the backup goaltender for one of the worst teams in the league—I mean, downright putrid, couldn't-pay-me-to-watch bad. Not a lot has changed about the Calgary Flames in 11 months. They have two wins so far, second-fewest in the NHL. They have allowed 37 goals, second-most in the league. They're sporting a goal differential of minus-20 in just eight games played, which means that if you attend a Flames game, you should expect to see them lose by multiple goals. In practice they have lost multiple games by four, and multiple games by five. It takes a type to thrive in that environment, and Cooley might be that type. All goalies are strange—they are under constant, ego-deforming pressure, and must spend an unhelpful amount of time alone in their own minds—but Cooley is rare in being able to describe his specific flavor of strange. In that interview last year, he displayed a mindset that while nihilist on its face, is probably pretty healthy in its ability to compartmentalize each save, each game, and wall it off from the saves and games he has yet to face. "Nothing matters," he said, "nobody cares, we're all going to die." So, what would the Flames' poor 2026 start do for Cooley's mood? Well, ah, at least his bunny Tito seems in good spirits. Good for Tito. He's the only living being who can attend a Flames game and not suffer psychic damage.

On Oct. 9, the New York Times reported that UFC veteran Tim Kennedy was recovering in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after he'd been shot three times while conducting a deadly, murkily defined operation with Erik Prince's private military group in the remote highlands of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against Rwandan-backed rebel group M23. The constellation of proper nouns in that sentence is staggering, and lights the way to understanding the strange, idiosyncratic state of affairs in one of the most mineral-rich areas of the planet. I am going to walk you through this story, proper noun by proper noun (out of order), in hopes of untangling the messy web. Democratic Republic of Congo A few billion years ago, the large-scale geologic province known as the Congo Craton formed. Cratons are geologic provinces that have survived the endless churn of tectonic activity that recycles most of the Earth's crust, meaning they contain some of the most ancient rocks on the planet. In central Africa, the Congo Craton is overlaid by the massive and comparatively young Congo Basin, a sedimentary complex that contains the largest deposit of cobalt in the world, in addition to huge amounts of copper, gold, tantalum, and other valuable minerals.

Where the Sacramento Kings are concerned, all "joy" is relative. But this team, which projects to be among the NBA's worst, enjoyed one charming preseason storyline: the apparent revival of Ben Simmons as an actual rotation player. The basketball gods have chosen to deprive them and their fans of even this meager comfort. ESPN's Shams Charania reported on Sunday that Simmons tore his right Achilles tendon during a Kings practice, ending his season before it really began. Simmons, a former All-NBA selection, went completely unsigned during the 2025-26 season. He deliberately distanced himself from basketball during that time, not even watching a game until the playoffs. That distance allowed the 30-year-old to pursue a maritime passion—sport fishing—and also allowed him to rebuild himself into a player good enough to sign the veteran minimum for a team projected by ESPN to win 21.7 games. "I didn't touch a ball for the whole year," Simmons told reporters at Kings media day. "I didn't watch basketball. I just focused on getting my body right and my mind right." Multiple back surgeries had siphoned away his former athleticism. But Simmons observed a "night and day" difference in his mental health, after allowing his back to heal in his year off; affirmed his love of the sport; and, when asked if he could get back to his old self, said: "He's there. He woke up."

College football had its first Blood Week of the season. This weekend saw losses for eight ranked teams, and even the teams that didn't lose had extremely close calls. That brings us to the Miami Hurricanes, who played a big rivalry game with unranked Florida State, which turned into a shootout even though Miami is supposed to have a championship defense and Florida State is Florida State. After four quarters and two overtimes, Miami beat FSU, 43-35. Saturday's victory came only after two seemingly successful Hail Marys by FSU quarterback Ashton Daniels were consecutively called back. The first was due to a holding penalty on the offense. The second attempt looked like it ended with FSU receiver Duce Robinson having dual possession of the ball, but it was ultimately ruled an interception for Miami. https://youtu.be/4_VJMwiyUc0?si=yViWmGV5aVqM3Wms

Jalen Hurts's season is over. On Monday, his agent Nicole Lynn, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Eagles, released a statement about the quarterback's health situation as it pertains to the blood clot in his leg, an issue that was first revealed publicly on Oct. 15 and which landed Hurts on injured reserve two days later. https://www.instagram.com/p/DercP9xRobx/?hl=en Monday's statement sheds more light on what exactly happened since the Eagles' trip to London to face the Jacksonville Jaguars on Oct. 11. The relevant part is also the scariest part:

For eons, roly-polies have rightfully dominated the rolling space, at least in our imagination. The crustaceans' astonishing ability to transform from a legged arthropod into a perfect sphere, a behavior called volvation, earned the bugs their nickname. But the bugs are far from the only rollers in the animal kingdom. Pangolins, hedgehogs, echidnas, and armadillos do it too, curling up their bodies into defensive balls. So does the Venezuelan pebble toad, which tucks in its head and tumbles down slopes to escape tarantulas. The Mount Lyell salamander rolls too, coiling itself into a wheel and bouncing down steep rocks. None of these animals become quite as Platonic a sphere as the roly-poly, but they do well enough. But becoming a ball is not the only way to roll. The dwarf reed snake has found another way to roll away from danger, not by becoming a ball but by becoming something like a hoop. This peculiar motion, the mechanics of which are analyzed in a new paper in Current Biology, raises an important question: What is more sinister, a snake slithering in the grass or a snake rolling itself like a possessed wheel?

Call it a buzzer beating. The reigning WBC super welterweight champ and most interesting man in boxing, Sebastian Fundora, delivered as interesting a knockout as memory serves while retaining his title Saturday night in Las Vegas.  Fundora, the tallest 154-pound champ in history (6-foot-5.5 inches) and someone who taunts opponents about the ease with which he makes weight, wounded pesky challenger Ermal Hadribeaj with a vicious assortment of body blows and haymakers to the head as the last seconds of the last round of their brutal and surprisingly competitive 12-round slugfest ticked away. Then, just as the final bell sounded, Fundora landed a lightning-fast kill shot to Hadribeaj’s chin. Referee Thomas Taylor began counting out Hadribeaj, who was sprawled on the canvas, as most onlookers inside the casino arena were wondering what was going on, given that the clock had run out.  But, no matter what the title of that ubiquitous '80s and ‘90s sitcom implies, you can no longer actually be saved by the bell in boxing, not even the bell ending the last round. And even though Hadribeaj got to his feet just before getting a 10 count, Taylor ruled he was in no condition to continue. And utilizing the powers vested in him by the so-called Unified Rules of Boxing, a package of uniform edicts which since around the turn of the century have been adopted in Nevada and throughout the U.S. that allows for fights to be stopped even after the final bell under such circumstances, Taylor waved his hands over his head and declared a knockout. (Decorated vets Terence Crawford and Tim Bradley, who sat ringside as working media for the TV broadcast, vented at Taylor after the fight for not letting Hadribeaj go home with a decision loss.)

You know the situation: It's time to solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Enrique Henestroza Anguiano and Matthew Stock, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Enrique is a data scientist, crossword constructor, USTA league tennis player, and fútbol fan from Oakland, Calif. Matthew is a stay-at-home dad, crossword constructor, rec frisbee league player, and Ted Lasso fan from Dallas. 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. 

Another new album of old Eva Cassidy recordings, called Jazzed, is about to come out. Cassidy, a peerless D.C. songbird, died 30 years ago next month. Her supply of unheard material ran out long ago. So those who legally control Cassidy's songbook transitioned from merely curating her art, as her label still claims to be doing with the latest project, to altering it. Jazzed gave me the blues. Cassidy's talent was rare and huge, though it took her dying to get the music industry to notice. And the story of her quiet, relatively anonymous life giving way to massive posthumous popularity the world over is equally amazing. When she was alive and singing, Cassidy was unknown outside the D.C. area, where she was born and raised and stayed until the end. She really wasn't a big draw in her hometown, either. She had a small, hardcore group of local fans who loved her for her pitch-perfect voice and multi-genre musical range, and also for being a serene, sweet soul seemingly as oblivious to her own artistic genius as were all the record-label honchos who rejected her when she was knocking on doors looking for a deal. She paid her bills by working at a plant nursery, not by making beautiful music. Cassidy and her band gigged mostly at bars, never at theaters or music halls. She financed her own recordings, including 1996's Live at Blues Alley, the only solo album she lived to see released.  But right when that record was about to come out, Cassidy began telling friends she wasn't feeling right, and died from melanoma mere months later. Some Cassidy recordings got into the hands of pop influencers in England in the late 1990s, most notably her cover of "Over the Rainbow," and over the next few years she became a phenomenon throughout Europe and then the world. Another big break came when Team USA's Michelle Kwan skated to Cassidy's version of "Fields of Gold" on the way to a bronze medal during the 2002 Olympics.