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Some people are fans of the Green Bay Packers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Green Bay Packers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: 

Time to drop a little summer recipe. Take some lesbian 20-somethings—like at least 60 of them—and drop them in a group chat. At the center of it all you’ll need a leader, someone who commands attention or fear, and could be the object of everyone's affection under the right circumstances. Next, you’ll need a heat wave and a stacked events calendar: think line dancing, body shots, and bottle service. Now is not the time to be afraid to go out three times over the course of a weekend. This all may sound intense, but maybe not inherently chaotic. Now ask yourself how liberal you could be with sharing your location with multiple people on an ongoing basis. Finally, what if being caught up in the whirlwind only made you come to the conclusion that the distinctions between platonic and romantic are a false binary, especially when it comes to smooching. Secrets and messes? That’s just part of plan. Get ready for one of the wildest stories in the history of Normal Gossip. Don’t be afraid to take notes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykuhbgkT54g

How many runs did the Seattle Mariners lose by in Tuesday night's game against Brewers in Milwaukee? And how many runs did the Mariners themselves score? Don't concern yourself with these matters, this silly fixation on who won the game, and by how much. The true connoisseur understands that witnessing something new every single day is a blessing, and boy did the Mariners—and Brewers, but mostly, if we are being honest, the Mariners—show everyone something unique and special. Because the Mariners are never the sort of team to leave their fans hanging for a prolonged period of time, they began delivering in the bottom of the first inning. With two outs, William Contreras hit a single to short left field. Milwaukee's third-base coach sent Jake Bauers to home from second, where, as slow-motion replay revealed, Bauers effectively if not necessarily intentionally executed a two-handed punch to remove the ball from Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh's mitt. Thus ensued a mad scramble back to the plate, conveyed here via freeze frame: The angles of approach, the potential energy captured in the players' body language, the catcher's match left strewn across the ground ... there is beauty in everything, even suffering.

The 2026 LIV Golf season will end this weekend at LIV Golf Indianapolis. The 4 Aces GC fellows have a narrow lead over Ripper GC in the team championship, which I guess they will uhh look to maintain or whatever. Don't worry about it. That team title was supposed to be decided the final weekend of August in Plymouth, Mich., but that event has now been officially cancelled, as was long anticipated. The stupid, broke league simply lacks the money to run it. The payouts for the finale will be significantly reduced. Without the outrageous support of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, LIV Golf cannot continue to dump huge prize money into its noisy, broadly three-quarter-assed events. The bonus pool for the player championship, per Golf Magazine, will be $10 million, down from $30 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the team championship—an utterly inconsequential competition to every living creature on Earth except for the handful of people in line to win a share of the prize—will be $30 million, down from $50 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the LIV Indianapolis event, separate from the championships it will decide, has also been cut in half. That's still a lot of cash to hand out for 54 holes of golf. It's mighty expensive to run a golf promotion designed to compete directly with the PGA Tour. It made sense to pour grotesque sums into this mess when it was hoping to meaningfully disrupt men's professional golf; now that the PGA Tour has shrugged off the incursion and LIV Golf has settled in as nothing more than its own stupid tagline, $80 million in year-end bonuses starts to look more precisely like what it is, which is an enormous waste of money.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Chris answers a question about being summarily rejected by one's own flesh-and-blood.

The bases are loaded in the bottom of the second. Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, with his beautiful hair and crisp terrifying swing, is at the plate. The pitch from the Padres' Robbie Ray is a 92-mph sinker that he leaves up on the outer edge of the zone. Lindor stings it to the opposite field, and the ball towers up and out toward the right-field corner, where he is waiting. He is always waiting. Fernando Tatis Jr., the king of the Robbin' Padres, with his flowing hair and big face, does not fear the long ball. He is its god. Already in this game he has hit a home run, but that does not mean he will allow others the pleasure. No, he is the home run's master. He sees the ball off Lindor's bat threatening to become a grand slam, and he tracks it. His legs race, his head craned toward the ball, his eyes on it. That is his ball. He knows it.

On the cover of Slam magazine's October 1998 issue, Chamique Holdsclaw wore a New York Knicks jersey, NBA basketball in hand. Right next to the forward from Queens was a sneaky inversion of the more common question: "Is The NBA Ready For Chamique Holdsclaw?" She was the first female athlete to appear on the magazine's cover, and as former Slam editor-in-chief Tony Gervino would recall in a 2024 essay, the editors were intentionally being a little provocative. Reader reception was not as negative as expected, although Pat Summitt, Holdsclaw's college coach at the University of Tennessee, called Gervino to chew him out about how her player could have lost her NCAA eligibility if she had accepted the Knicks jersey she was wearing for the shoot. Growing up in Astoria Houses, Holdsclaw said she had to have her friends advocate for her to be able to play basketball at the local Boys and Girls Club. She went on to have a terrific high school career at Christ the King in Queens, followed by more of the same at the collegiate level. Holdsclaw was entering her fourth season with the Lady Volunteers at the time of the Slam cover, and had dominated the college game as the program won three consecutive championships. She remains the all-time leading scorer and rebounder in NCAA women's tournament history, recording totals of 470 points and 197 rebounds. For Holdsclaw, who was part of the 2026 class inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this past weekend, the Slam cover wasn’t actually asking if she would go play against the men. It didn’t really matter what the boys were doing. The WNBA was two years old and was looking for more star power. Slam, among others, predicted she would be the one to fill those shoes, calling her "the future of women's basketball."

For most women who play baseball in the United States, playing America's pastime in a professional league has been little more than a dream. Yet for a select group of women, that dream is becoming a reality.  The Women's Pro Baseball League began its inaugural season on Aug. 1, with the four-team league playing all of its games in Springfield, Ill., where dozens of the 120 women who were selected in the league's draft play pro ball. It is the most anticipated women's pro baseball league since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League disbanded in 1954.  But for many players who were selected in the draft, which took place in November, the dream of getting paid to play baseball in the United States remains deferred.

When Lakers majority owner Jerry Buss died in 2013, he left his 66 percent stake to six of his children, with daughter Jeanie Buss acting as the team's governor. Jerry hoped his family would hold on to the franchise, and toward the end of his life, he took financial and contractual measures that made it easier for them to do so. Naturally, after his death these six Buss children got caught up in over a decade of infighting that saw them split into three rough camps. Eldest siblings Johnny and Jim wanted to sell and cash out; in the middle, Jeanie wanted to keep running the team, and Janie followed her lead; Joey and Jesse, over 20 years younger than the rest, wanted to hang on and eventually run the team themselves, based on the tontine-like structure of the trust. Somehow all this infighting culminated in Jeanie, who had been resistant to previous suggestions of a sale, initiating the sudden 2025 sale of a majority stake to Mark Walter. That left the Busses with a 17.8 percent stake and Jeanie acting as governor until at least 2030, although that arrangement already appears to be obsolete. After Walter—who is under federal investigation—in turn sold the Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner last week, the Buss siblings saw an opportunity to sell the rest of their stake in the team, according to Monday's report from ESPN's Shams Charania. "We love the Lakers, Laker fans and will continue to support Los Angeles; but it is time to use this opportunity to move on and exit gracefully while we still can," the Buss family said in a statement. Charania helpfully clarified that Jeanie would be unable to act as governor once she owned 0 percent of the franchise, which I can confirm fails to meet the 15 percent minimum threshold.

The Arizona Diamondbacks either have an injured cleanup hitter, a truancy problem, a communications dysfunction, some mysterious and possibly sinister fourth thing, or all of the above. Well, there's a sixth possibility: They don't mind taking a beat writer for a ride now and then to preserve clubhouse tranquility. But let's take that as a given, because that's what a beat writer is for: to toss under the bus when you want the driver to stop. Anyway, one of their best players, second baseman and designated hitter Ketel Marte, skipped Monday night's 11-1 loss in Boston after going through the bother of flying there from Atlanta with his teammates. This led Arizona Republic beat writer Nick Piecoro, a responsible sort with two decades of said responsibility in the job to prove it, to post this: