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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

SAN FRANCISCO — What now? Any ideas? The Golden State Valkyries trailed the Atlanta Dream by six at halftime, and every point in this series felt like a hundred. The Valks will tell you theirs is an “egoless” team, one on which no one is above a scramble for a loose ball or a box-out. Zero All-WNBA players. Zero MVPs. The concept of “MV” wouldn’t even sit right with them. That spirit carried them far in the regular season, kept them fresh for the postseason, and made them nimble enough to handle a mid-series shake-up to the starting lineup. So committed were they to this formula that even six games in, Finals MVP really was anyone’s for the taking. Only no one was taking it. If you have 10 stars on your team, you have none.  Basketball is a team sport, but even its team-iest sequences end in something individual. For the ball to get through the net, one player has to entertain a selfish thought: I am taller than you, or I am stronger than you, or I can get this shot up faster than you can get here. Gabby Williams, Golden State’s only All-Star selection this year, was brought here in the offseason to be that player. But for six games, scoring—even finding decent shots to take—had been a pain for her, and 20 minutes into the seventh, it didn’t seem like the struggle was letting up. She finished with two points at the half, having scored zero in the first quarter and the two on only one field goal attempt in the second. At some point in the third, though, you could see it all dawn on her. She is stronger than the Dream’s point guard, Jordin Canada, whom she hunted in switches. She is a former track champion who is faster than everyone else on the floor. Just like that, she was the most confident player out there, her heat-check threes bringing life back into Ballhalla in a 28-point second half for the ages. When it all clicked, Williams solved two problems: After a 68-63 Game 7 win in a sometimes stomach-turning series, the Golden State Valkyries are WNBA champions in the franchise’s second year. The eventual Finals MVP finished with 30 points, three rebounds, two assists, two steals and four blocks. 

On Friday, the Hobart/Lawrence Police Department released a batch of records related to Packers running back Josh Jacobs's domestic violence arrest in May. The records reveal that while police were investigating the May incident, they were contacted by three other women who said Jacobs abused them in the past. One document describes a phone conversation a police investigator had with a woman, who said she felt compelled to contact police after learning about the details of Jacobs's May arrest. According to the report, this woman told the investigator that she was abused by Jacobs in 2023 after meeting him in his house. She told police that she went to Jacobs's house after meeting him on Instagram. The woman claims that when she arrived at the house, Jacobs questioned whether she had come to have sex with him. When she said that wasn't the reason she came to the house, she says he became angry and slapped her across the face. The woman also told police that Jacobs grabbed her by the hair, pinned her to the bed, threw her off the bed, spit on her, grabbed her by the throat, and said, "I should kill you right now." The woman told the investigator that she did not contact the police at the time because she remained friends with Jacobs after the incident and was worried people wouldn't believe her.

Following this week's news of Patrick Stewart's death, the Defector staff convened to remember some of our favorite performances by him. The Simpsons Patrick Stewart is one of our most recognizable forces in pop culture: the kind of star who could be identified just by his profile, a rare feat of notoriety in any era. Every bit of him is iconic, but it’s his voice that truly makes him the performer he was. It's only right, then, that he became a memorable voice actor in animated work.

There are few joys in sports that can truly exceed a game in which both coaches are in danger of getting fired, and no place does that game better than England. There are no distractions that can cause the fevered punditocracy to avert its eyes from the desperate hope that one (or, in the most orgiastic case, both) gets smoked right after the game. This is possible because a dissatisfying draw can enrage both fan bases equally, in the way that Giants-Commanders sickened the souls of football fans on this side of the ditch three weeks ago. But there is one scenario that trumps even that, and Americans will have it tomorrow morning at the breakfast hour: Manchester United at Chelsea. Two big clubs that are underachieving in their own specific ways, will face each other at 8:30 a.m. ET, and in deepest zombie hours on the West Coast. What makes it genuinely special for everyone is that no institution on earth, in any pursuit, does boss-in-trouble quite like Manchester United. Carrick got the full car wash a week ago after successive three-goal losses to Como (4-1) in the Champions League and Bournemouth (3-0) in the Prem. This extended a stretch of winless results that go back to United's Champions League win over Sabah of Azerbaijan, a newbie team that, on the European stage, qualifies not as minnows but something more on the order of plankton. The first loss was in Italy, in a very cool stadium that overlooks Lake Como, and which by definition is the coolest stadium in Europe because of it. The second was at home before—get this—an appreciative crowd that applauded Carrick when the team went for the postgame salute to the fans. They turned unanimously loud, profane, and ugly as soon as Carrick left the field.

During the first quarter of Thursday's game between the equally winless Pelicans and Kings, Sacramento rookie Darius Acuff Jr. ran the length of the floor in transition and punched home a sweeping dunk past a late trail from Jeremiah Fears and a halfhearted contest from Trey Murphy III. It was an amazing play, which is why Acuff took a second to flex and mean-mug for the dozens of fans in New Orleans. It was also a live play, and as Acuff preened, the Pelicans ran back and Murphy got an easy dunk, after Acuff's absence forced Domantas Sabonis to abandon the paint. This sequence serves as a useful Rorschach test for the Acuff observer: Do you see Acuff's smooth athleticism, and his ability to produce not only tough but beautiful buckets? Or do you see an undersized guard whose lack of interest in the floor game is matched only by his inability to affect it? Both are totally valid reads of the most (and only) fascinating player on the worst team in basketball, although I think partisans of both positions would agree that Acuff's first five NBA games have been remarkable. Nobody in the league has attempted or missed more shots. No rookie has ever attempted as many shots in their first few games. Acuff sits snugly wedged between Steph Curry and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on the usage leaderboard, with the sixth-highest rate in the NBA. It's both fantastic theater and an irresistible new front in the Real Hooper Wars; the Kings, in the meantime, are so bad that the question of any of it mattering will be entirely theoretical for a while. This leaves us all free to enjoy Acuff's game and use it as a plank from which to mount arguments about how basketball should work.

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. Ray: Saturday is Halloween, and the schedule is notably threadbare for showdown games; only two games this weekend are between nationally ranked teams, and a bunch more are showdowns involving 4-3 programs. So go ahead, dress up, go to a party, and absentmindedly house a bunch of Reese's peanut butter cups in your host's rec room while pretending not to watch Washington-Nebraska. There's no need to let the costume be the most embarrassing part of your day. As for the games: if you insist. Kentucky has the best record in the SEC for the first since ... uhh, ever? (Since 1977, actually.) The Wildcats' schedule down the stretch is unkind, but head coach Will Stein no doubt sent an aide to blow up a copy of the conference standings for display all over the campus, maybe covering all the basketball flyers. This is not likely to remain so, but a moment is still a moment.

Aldous Huxley likened the exorcism of the prioress Jeanne des Anges to “a rape in a public lavatory.” It was this horrific description that director Ken Russell shared with production designer Derek Jarman before they set out to tell that story. Russell wanted to capture the spirit of Huxley’s nonfiction book, The Devils of Loudun, about the 17th-century incident in which a convent of nuns claimed possession, exhibiting wild and lewd behavior, leading to the sorcery conviction and execution of the priest Urbain Grandier. For that 1971 adaptation, The Devils, Jarman took the assignment quite literally. Large, white tiles cover every inch of Loudun’s Ursuline convent in the film, from floor to wall to arched ceiling. Tiles, and iron bars. It’s a gorgeous set, photographed by cinematographer David Watkin in anamorphic widescreen grandeur, and immerses the audience in the suffocated, cloistered lives of the nuns. Its starkness is at once mesmerizing and maddening. It is the perfect place for a case of possession—or many—and a likely site for clinically staged abuse. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen the scene in question, which is somehow more and less disturbing than Huxley’s six words suggests. I first watched The Devils some 15 or 20 years ago, on a pirated copy. It was a film whose reputation preceded it, and I was a young guy, barely out of high school, titillated by its scandalous history. Even before it was originally released, The Devils was heavily cut to appease British censors. It was cut further still for its American release. Though it earned respectable sums at the U.K. box office, the lavish Warner Bros. production received a critical thrashing—Roger Ebert’s sarcastic review is a classic in the genre of getting it completely backward—and essentially buried thereafter, popping up on a couple of VHS releases in the ’80s, but never on DVD or Blu-ray. In the early 2000s, British film critic Mark Kermode rediscovered the censored footage, helping Russell put together a director’s cut that screened only once, off a DigiBeta tape.  The copy I’d watched years ago was an earlier cut, likely the original theatrical version minus the most controversial scenes, but all that history had me primed for an outrageous film, and an outrageous film is very much what I got. Sister Jeanne’s exorcism—set in that white, tiled lavatory of a convent, molested by priests wielding giant syringes to perform forced enemas—was sensational, as was the rest of the film’s high-toned lunacy. Rampant nudity, violence, actors gesticulating wildly, saying things like, “They say they can stand up to the Church, but they can't stand up to this bitch.” A movie for sickos. I loved it, naturally, but I don’t think I took it very seriously.

Russia, which has been functionally banned from international hockey for more than four years, must be allowed to return to international events starting in December in Canada. That's the ruling today by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest sport court in the land. But there's a whole lot still unsettled, including a looming shitshow at next year's World Championships. The International Ice Hockey Federation banned the Russian member association in February 2022, as did almost every other sport's Olympic federation following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That war is still ongoing, but in July of this year the IOC lifted its blanket ban on Russian Olympic committees, and said that its recommendations to individual sport federations no longer apply. Ukraine is currently appealing that decision. (This is tricky business, and I'm glad it's not up to me to decide. Should individual athletes be punished for their government's actions? Or is a ban of Russia's prestigious hockey program more accurately a punishment of the country as a whole? But then, why Russia and not some other war-starting, international law-ignoring countries I could name and/or live in?)