NowLoop

At times it really does feel like time is moving faster than ever, and even things that happened a year ago might as well have happened 10 years ago. But it is important to maintain perspective, and understand that time and history have to play their parts before we can properly recognize moments for what they meant at the time they happened. With that said, it can feel a little strange to begin reevaluating the legacy of Nick Saban, football coach, and the Saban era of Alabama football a mere three years after his surprise retirement from the team and college football in general. The man is just started getting comfortable as on-air ESPN talent, finding time to evaluate games and banter with human Red Bull can Pat McAfee, in between his actual work as minister of propaganda for archaic college sports bills. The truth is we aren’t removed enough from the Saban era to understand what his time there meant for the sport, that particular team, or the city of Tuscaloosa at large. But the content machine needs to eat constantly in order to maintain value for an increasingly shrinking number of investors, and so it must be fed. So Nick Saban, come on down for your glossy, incredibly long, fussy, overproduced, myth-making, hagiographic sports documentary project. The new six-part ESPN documentary, Saban, is the officially authorized story of Nick Saban as championship coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, alongside some other stops at Toledo, Michigan State, and a national championship at LSU. If you’ve watched enough modern sports documentaries, and Lord knows we have, then you already know what to expect: a lot of inspiration-core, thinly veiled sponcon in which the product is the star of the documentary themselves. 

The lead-up to Sunday's game between Liverpool and Manchester City could not have felt more strange. Here were the two teams that have defined approximately the last decade of the Premier League, who have been each other's fiercest rivals while setting new standards for excellence on the pitch, meeting in a meaningless game. It was meaningless in a figurative sense, in that the primary reason for anyone tuning in was to see how the Anfield crowd would greet their guests in their first game since City was found guilty of 114 financial rule breaches. It was likely meaningless in a literal sense, too, as the points City gained from its 3-0 win are likely to be wiped out by whatever considerable punishment the Premier League eventually doles out. Due to this year's supersized international break, Premier League fans have had nothing to do but use the last three weeks to stew in their feelings of grievance. Spend enough time thinking about those 114 guilty verdicts, and the £900 million in phony sponsorship money which City used to establish itself as lords of the competition, and it's hard not to come away feeling that everything about the last decade would have been different—especially for your team—if not for these fraudsters. This game eventually had to be played, though, and once it started, so much of the venom that built up over the last few weeks seemed to dissipate. The visiting City fans, defiant and armed with their inflatable bananas, entered the stadium via police escort. The Liverpool fans provided plenty of roaring and chanting early on, but eventually there was just a soccer game to watch. And a fairly boring one at that: A cagey first half in which neither team created many chances ended 0-0, and the game was eventually decided by Ryan Gravenberch's sending off in the 62nd minute, which gave City's attackers all the space they needed to eventually put three goals past Liverpool's defense.

You heard it here first: It's time to play our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Jeremy Venook and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. 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. 

The idea that the Milwaukee Brewers can keep playing the same game over and over again and getting the same result is an interesting one. It's probably not a sustainable one, because baseball does not tend to operate that way, but you keep watching for something different from them, and it always turns out the same. This would be a problem for them if they were somehow failing at this playoff thing, but rather they seem to have it down pat. Through five games, the formula is simple: Starting pitcher goes four innings, the same four relievers maintain the status quo, the hitters make three runs stand up in victory, and then everyone goes to the clubhouse for a beer and shower and comes back again the next day to do it again. Surely this cannot be sustained, if only because at some point Abner Uribe's arm will accordion back into his chest cavity. At some point in this postseason they either have to break out a 10-run game, get blown out the same way, have the bullpen melt into slag ... or maybe Jacob Misiorowski throws a three-hit complete game shutout just for giggles and candy.

We're in Landover, Maryland. It's the New York Giants taking on the Washington Commanders: a divisional rivalry game on a rainy Sunday afternoon with two teams desperate to win the NFC East, but in bad shape thanks to injuries and general haplessness. The Commanders got their quarterback back just in time for this matchup, with Jayden Daniels returning from injuring his arm a couple weeks ago. The Giants are still led by Jameis Winston and the natural chicanery he brings. Together these two teams accounted for some of the worst football of the afternoon. Winston threw for 326 yards and three touchdowns, but lost a fumble—at least he didn't throw multiple interceptions in this one. Daniels threw for 199 yards but rushed for another 103 yards and two TDs. But that's not why you're here. That's not enough to compel you to read a blog about the Giants and Commanders. In their overtime period, with under two minutes left of a game that neither side seemed particularly interested in winning, the Commanders defense caused a fumble by Cam Skattebo. The plays that followed included a reception by Terry McLaurin for 16 yards, a run by Daniels for another 16 yards, and a pass to Treylon Burks for 13 yards, putting the Commanders firmly in field goal range. With under a minute left, Rachaad White ran the ball for a couple of yards, which kept the clock moving. Makes sense, right? Run the clock down so you can kick it with as little time available as possible. The offense seemed to run a lot of clock off before their next play, but no matter. These are professionals; they know what they're doing. Daniels knows there's no timeouts left. He's the reason for that, as he called the last timeout earlier in overtime. It'll be fine.

To paraphrase one of the greats, it's not easy living up to the standards of Jaguars Junction. It's not just about the losing; any team can lose a game, especially in the NFL. It's also not about the penalties. The yellow flags come for all of us. No, to feel truly welcome in Jaguars Junction, one must not just lose but lose with panache. One must fail in a way that makes everyone stand up, point at the screen, and say aloud, "Are you kidding me?" One must collapse in a fashion that defies all logic and science, which is a given for the Florida Man. You could call it je ne sais quoi, though when Florida is involved, it demands a French-Canadian accent. And yet, as one of Defector's resident Floridians, your dear author has no choice but to welcome the Philadelphia Eagles to this perhaps not illustrious but certainly noted shrine to humiliation. Their flop from across the pond on Sunday demands it. What follows is no less than my journalistic duty. By all reasonable accounts, the Jaguars appeared on Sunday poised to continue their fine and upstanding tradition of losing in both creative and heartbreaking fashion. Technically, near the end of the fourth quarter, the Jags were leading. But spiritually, they were already showing signs of returning to form when kicker Cam Little—who has one of the strongest legs in the league—missed the extra point, making their advantage two points instead of three. As Little's kick hooked left, I could hear the theme music to Jaguars Junction playing in my ears. The Hamilton Nolan bat signal began to warm up. At least, in a cruel and unreliable world, this one truism would remain.

There's no point in trying to predict how a Red River Rivalry game will go. Texas and Oklahoma have aligned themselves to this eternal blood feud, some Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid shit. It doesn't matter what the records next to their names say or what the expectations for each team are, because this game will almost certainly go the opposite of what you expect, and end in a knife fight in the mud. On Saturday, Oklahoma came out of that fight as the last man standing. https://youtu.be/KLxPeYzbp_4?si=FaBU0Ub4x4xoz8OU The Sooners beat the No. 1 ranked Texas Longhorns, 27-24. With the game tied throughout much of the fourth quarter, Arch Manning threw his second interception with about 19 seconds left in regulation. After a couple of incredible passes by John Mateer to get within field goal range, Oklahoma kicker Tate Sandell got the chance for a 47-yard field goal at the end of regulation to put the Sooners over the top.

The Chicago White Sox had been given oodles of credit for overcoming the three worst years in their history (throwing the 1919 World Series aside). When they plowed remorselessly and successfully through their first four postseason games this fall, you could sense that magic was being conjured in the least explicable way. They'd been kissed on the forehead by the same gods that had pummeled them repeatedly. They were going to be a team of destiny, whether or not they liked or understood it. But these White Sox are made of sterner stuff than that, and the thing that made them charming—their return from bulk failure to national quasi-relevance—was turned on its head Saturday in spectacular style. They had boiled down their 2023, 2024, and 2025 seasons into one evening's work, an homage to their own abjectness condensed into two hours and 36 minutes. Last night was just a montage of them getting their steps in, almost all of it walking to and from their own dugout.  There's no point in being clever about this either. In the game that they needed to win to advance to the American League Championship Series and make all their suffering worthwhile, they struck out 21 times. Twenty-one. In nine innings. They were allotted 27 outs and did the least they could possibly do with those outs, nearly 78 percent of the time. Nobody has ever done that before in a nine-inning game in the 156-year history of the game as counted by those psychos at Baseball Reference—regular season or playoffs. In the game that could have made them the most improbable underdog in the history of dogs, they went out like, well, dogs.

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.