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Spend enough time on the soccer side of social media and you're bound to come across one of those video-comp odes to the Barclaysman. As proud guy-rememberers ourselves, we of course do not begrudge the pleasant strolls down memory lane these highlight reels take you for, bathing nostalgic light on once beloved but semi-forgotten cult players, the ones who made the Premier League what it was back when the EPL was known as the BPL. But if it's worth singing the praises of yesterday's lesser nobility, then it's also worth giving props to the ones who are still kicking today. One such player deserving of some shine is Danny Welbeck, whose long career and his belated apex show just how major a minor legend can be. If it feels like Welbeck has been around forever, that's because he has. I'm unc enough to remember back in the Barclays days when the now-35-year-old was Manchester United's buzzy young hotshot, the latest exciting Carrington product from whom Alex Ferguson was sure to wring 20 goals a season in the coming years. Welbeck made his Premier League debut for United in November of 2008, about a week before his 18th birthday. But it wasn't until a few years later, in 2011, when he really announced himself as a potential force to be reckoned with. Coming into that 2011–12 season, on the heels of a solid loan campaign with Sunderland, Welbeck was well positioned to seize United's starting striker position, beating out the likes of Dimitar Berbatov and Javier Hernández for the right to take Wayne Rooney's hand in goaly matrimony. Welbeck performed the role respectably, scoring 12 goals across 39 appearances in all competitions in a season capped by United just getting pipped to the title by the famous Agüero goal. On their own, Welbeck's numbers weren't mindblowing, which explains United's addition of Robin van Persie the next summer, but his youth and the breadth of his skill set marked him as a serious talent we'd surely be hearing about for years to come. As it turned out, that both was and wasn't true.

It's opening day, sort of. The Yankees and Giants will start the season in San Francisco, today's only game. It's a Netflix exclusive, which is an annoying development if you, like me, want to watch this game but don't have Netflix and will not buy Netflix. But Netflix made MLB an offer it couldn't refuse. It's a reported $50 million over three years, for what feels like a fairly skimpy slate of programming: three opening-day exclusives, Home Run Derbies, and occasional special events, like the Field of Dreams game and WBC games in Japan. That is what happens when a company with too much money decides it wants to get into live sports. Another thing that happens is that the desire to make the game feel like An Event results in an overstuffed broadcast, where not a single second is allowed to pass without some recognizable face on screen. Here is the broadcast team:

Some will say that the best part of a Formula 1 regulations overhaul is that the start of the next season, not unlike the spring that soon follows, will herald new hope for a better year. The truth is that the best part of a Formula 1 regulations overhaul is the inevitable rules disputes, petty politicking, and snitchery that follows, often helpfully litigated through the media. Take, say, George Russell, before the Chinese Grand Prix, who was sure to lodge his complaints about the current race start procedure prior to the weekend. "Unfortunately," Russell said, "sometimes when you're trying to make changes for the good of the sport, if a team has a competitive edge—like Ferrari at the moment with the race starts—they wouldn't wish to see anything changing." Public opinion has historically been a little unfair to Russell's media statements, as he is not necessarily more of a complainer than any other F1 driver, but is simply cursed with the tone and mien of a schoolboy tattling to the headmaster. Not helping matters is his position as a Mercedes driver, where he forms a united front with his team principal and fellow Tier One rules advocate (read: complainer) Toto Wolff. Which is to say that race starts, and Ferrari's lack of interest in modifying the regulations, were furiously discussed ages before Russell's complaints in China. To start at the start for race starts, we naturally have to start at the new engine regulations. The biggest impact on race starts has been the removal of the MGU-H, which stored energy from the engine's exhaust gases and powered the car's turbocharger on demand; once the turbo was spun up sufficiently, it would give the engine more power. Because the MGU-H was expensive, heavy, and complicated for new manufacturers like Audi, it was removed this year, meaning the turbo can only be charged by the exhaust gasses produce by the running engine. The issue with race starts in 2026 is that each step of that process—the engine producing exhaust, the turbo charging, the engine receiving additional power from the turbo—takes time, resulting in a delay between when a driver demands power and when that power arrives, known as turbo lag. (A very helpful visualization of this process can be found in Chain Bear's explainer video.)

There are broadly speaking two types of gamblers: valuable and not valuable. All are referred to as customers. The latter group are dilettantes. These people deposit maybe once or twice, usually to take advantage of a first-time deposit promotion, but rarely or never again after that. Maybe they don't care much for sports, or are turned off by the way betting on sports makes watching sports miserable. Or maybe they tried the slots, and the slow drain of money down to zero left them feeling empty. Whatever the case, they don't have the itch. These customers are not valuable. I learned to sort gamblers into these categories during the years I worked for an online sportsbook. I worked in customer service, at first directly with customers and later in a more behind-the-scenes role. These jobs required a little bit of detective work, and I often found myself wading through piles of extremely detailed personal information about our customers. Names, addresses, payment history, net losses, geolocation, remarks left during previous customer service interactions; all of this was there for me to review any time there was a problem with a customer that needed to be solved. Through this process I got intimate looks into the lives of strangers.  What I came to understand while doing these jobs is exactly what kind of customer is most valuable to an online gambling company. All gamblers fall somewhere on a spectrum from habitual to compulsive to addicted. Addicts may be technically valuable customers in that they deposit regularly, but they are not desirable customers. You don't want your customers killing themselves or losing all their money. How then could they continue to deposit?

For my money, the funniest recurring bit in Amazon's highly variable action-comedy series Reacher is the use it makes of its main character's blank, brutal sociopathy. Reacher, in Reacher, is generally righteous, but the code that he follows serves mostly to offer him one shortcut after another to outlandishly brutal violence. He is swift and certain in his assessment of every situation, which means that he is often doing stuff like brusquely folding some henchman's body like a fine-dining waiter might fold a discarded napkin, to the evident horror even of those otherwise on his side. Reacher will squint and mutter something like "It was one of Col. Grissom's kill team," or "He was with the Ecuadorians," if questioned about it, and some short time later, he will say "I want pancakes now" in roughly the same tone. But that is just my opinion. If you polled most Reacher watchers, they would probably tell you that the funniest Reacher trope is how many characters try their luck against him in single combat. Reacher is canonically enormous, a Gronkowski-sized violence engine hard-wired to dispense compound fractures to those who exploit the vulnerable who is, paradoxically or not, absolutely catnip to members of the Exploit The Vulnerable community despite being effectively invulnerable himself. In Reacher, the role is played by the slightly less large but still objectively mountainous actor Alan Ritchson, and while the show throws in some visual gags grounded in Ritchson's size—two full-sized characters briefly obscured by his refrigerator-sized torso, one regulation-sized barbecue grill hurled through the window of a sedan—most of the size-related storytelling comes down to some version of this: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:g62tajye723r3fa4gqw7l7ql/post/3lisxyzct4k2e

Before this week, Dayton Webber's life was often described as inspirational. In 2010, a story on ESPN described him as a 12-year-old boy who, despite the quadruple amputation of his hands and legs to survive a bacterial infection at 10 months old, lived a spectacularly active and normal life, including a passion for wrestling. As an adult, he became a successful professional cornhole player, leading to him being the subject of TV features by both ESPN and the Today Show. Webber leaned into this imagery himself, writing on his TikTok account that he's a motivational speaker. On Instagram, his biography says that he's a "quad amputee that sees no limits." It's familiar imagery to any sports fan, where the archetype of the athlete overcoming the odds, regardless of gender or ability, is as central to the messaging as sports itself. Webber's social media also showed him firing weapons. On TikTok, he showed his prowess with a crossbow. On YouTube, his account included videos of him shooting various firearms. Webber leaned into this imagery himself, with one video titled "No Hands No Feet Shooting 9mm Handgun!!!!" It was a firearm he used on Monday, according to authorities, to shoot and kill another man. On Tuesday, Webber, age 27, was charged by authorities in Maryland with two counts of murder. Law enforcement said he shot a passenger in his car, killing him.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking universal knife subsidies, noogies, desert island concerts, good doggies, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m out next week on Spring Break. That’s right, baby. Me and my boys are heading down to Cancun to crush some beers and mack on some fine ladies. And not necessarily in that order, muchacho! I kid, of course. My family and I are off on a road trip all week, which was a good plan seeing as how air travel in this country is no longer possible. But fear not, we’ll have a guest host bagger ready for you folks, so email them your stupid questions and they’ll indulge you. Got all that? Sweet.

The New York Rangers have had a bad enough season as it is, what with being the worst team in the Eastern Conference and all, but charity like this is frankly unbecoming. They left Madison Square Garden Monday night tying a 71-year-old franchise record for fewest shots in a game with nine in a 2-1 loss to the Ottawa Senators, only to head to Toronto this morning for a game against the second-worst team in the Eastern Conference and finding out that, no, they'd actually attempted 10. In a phrase, damn it. In the grander scheme, it doesn't much matter, but in a season this forgettable, in a game this bad, why would you try to find an extra shot to make the night seem less abject? Statistical accuracy, sure. A more accurate reflection of reality, fine. Still, in a game so otherwise bereft, finding that 10th shot seems almost antithetical to the tale being told here. The 10th shot must exist, clearly, but to what end? Nine is just a better number. In fact, any truly valuable league employee would have gone through the tape and taken off a shot or two, just so the numbers could fit the greater truth. The fewest shots taken in a game is actually six, by Toronto, in a series-clinching playoff loss to New Jersey (and we're sure the cheery Toronto mediocracy handled that well) in 2000. In a regular-season game, the record is seven, by Washington in 1978. Frankly, we would have been tempted to eradicate the Rangers' third-period goal by Conor Sheary, but we are clumsy white-collar criminals and surely someone would have noticed if the final score changed. Sheary, for one.

Madison Square Garden is playing host to a copaganda campaign that has infiltrated its sporting events and will culminate in a special concert on March 28, exclusively for officers and civilian employees of the New York City Police Department. Surely you can figure out which very rich person is responsible for this idea. It was only by attending a New York Rangers game Monday night that I became aware of the "Thank You, NYPD" campaign. Compared to the usual ticket price for a hockey game at MSG, it was a relatively reasonable $55 to get in and witness Mika Zibanejad's 1,000th NHL regular-season game, a momentous occasion in which his team, the worst in the East, recorded a historically low total of nine shots on goal in a 2-1 loss to the Ottawa Senators. The following morning, the Rangers were credited with one additional shot. Dignity restored. During a break in the game, I was distracted by the video display's request that fans turn on their phone flashlights to thank the NYPD—a call to action that felt too stupid for a child to have suggested it. Then a QR code appeared on screen, and reappeared throughout the rest of the game, encouraging those in attendance to scan it and record their own videos thanking the NYPD. Who came up with this?

I've never been to Connecticut except to pass through it, so I personally can't speak to how hospitable it is to visitors. But Syracuse coach Felisha Legette-Jack would be happy if she never saw another Nutmegger for the rest of her life. "For us to continue to come to Connecticut year after year after year is, to me, it's a personal attack," Legette-Jack said after her Orange lost, 98-45, in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on Monday. That was just one line of many in her press conference/vent session that all but begged the selection committee to stop grouping early-round teams by region and give Syracuse some other top program's home court to lose on. "To have to come and be in this particular bracket every freaking year is unacceptable," she said. "It's wrong."