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It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Soccer may be a fickle game, but on the whole it does a good job of putting things in their rightful place. In that sense, there's maybe no team in the world to whom soccer has been more consistently, maddeningly fair than Mexico.

Unremarkable dweeb Nick Bilton has been the executive producer of 60 Minutes for less than a week, and he has already written his name into the history books as one of the media industry's most pathetic bosses. Bilton's week started with him getting colossally owned during his first all-hands meeting with 60 Minutes staffers, a meeting that had to be cut short because of how badly longtime correspondent Scott Pelley was big-dogging his new boss by simply pointing out Bilton's lack of credentials and asking him to explain why a bunch of seasoned and well-respected 60 Minutes employees had been fired. Monday night, news broke that Bilton, having had some time to stew on getting turned inside out by a member of his own staff, has fired Pelley. Several media reporters and publications circulated the email that Bilton sent to Pelley. You can almost hear Bilton sniveling:

I call them my dummies, the people who I watch on my big screen in the evenings as a way to calm my nervous system. It's not necessarily that my dummies are stupid, but anyone who agrees to go on a reality television show has to have enough optimism in their body to drown out any truly critical thought. They believe in love, or at least fame. They believe not only that they are special, but that in a villa with 12 other people and hundreds of cameras, where the hottest hotties you’ve ever seen in your life will be brought in to try to destroy your crush, they will come out on top. My dummies. I love them so much.  Love Island has been a staple of British reality television for more than a decade now, and Love Island USA has surged in popularity in the last three years. Like other dating shows, Love Island is theoretically about finding a partner. Singles couple up immediately, then the show does everything in its power to “test” these brand new couples. They send in even hotter singles with no attachments and call them bombshells. They make the contestants play games where they have to kiss each other or try to get each other's heart rates as high as possible. Halfway through the show, just when couples are starting to gain a sense of security, the islanders are split in half by gender for "Casa Amor" and presented with five new bombshells. It’s demented. It’s the kind of “tests” that you might imagine a relationship would endure if you exclusively watched '90s rom-coms and never ever went on an actual date, or—in the case of all the islanders— you were so hot that your perception of reality was that you are a '90s rom-com heroine.  None of this is what makes Love Island so addictively watchable. There are dozens of reality shows that conduct versions of what is essentially the Stanford prison experiment on hot singles in exchange for potential Instagram followers. This is a whole genre of reality television that people love. But all of those shows film their seasons, and then producers take the reality of what happened and map it onto storyboards. They create satisfying narratives and build out heroic and villainous character arcs for real people.

Are you ready to receive a powerful piece of information? OK, here it comes: Politicians can increase their chances of getting elected to office if they are seen as down-to-earth and relatable by their constituents. This novel observation, unearthed for the first time this week, is the premise of a Nathaniel Frum column that appeared on The Atlantic on Tuesday. Before you ask, yes, Nathaniel is awful Atlantic staff writer David Frum's stupid son. Not content with simply blowing his readers' minds by telling them that being likable is a boon to politicians, Frum uses his powerful thinking abilities to lay out a brilliant plan for exactly how a politician might go about appearing more normal and cool: They should express idiotic and insincere sports opinions, as frequently and as loudly as possible, in the spaces where such opinions are most abundant. Frum begins his column by (correctly) dinging New York Governor Kathy Hochul for challenging Donald Trump to name the starting lineup of the Knicks' "1993 championship team," which was in point of fact more of a lost-in-the-Eastern-Conference-Finals team. Hochul came off like a real dope because her error underlined what was already obvious: She only occasionally pretends to like sports in order to curry favor with her constituents.

You can say a lot of complimentary things about these Carolina Hurricanes. And I will! They are relentless, squeezing the life out of their Eastern Conference opponents by outskating them to every puck and outworking them on every battle. They are rested, having gone 12-1 on their way to the Stanley Cup Final, with plenty of time between each round to let wounds heal. But one thing they are not, perhaps, is battle-tested. They have not struggled, have not stressed on the way to get here. Each time they have metaphorically punched an opponent in the mouth, that opponent has gone down and stayed down. The Golden Knights punched back on Tuesday, the clear aggressors in a wild Game 1 that saw Las Vegas emerge with the 5-4 victory. So many of Vegas's goals came off applying just a little bit of pressure to Carolina—nothing out of the ordinary for a good hockey team, but the sort of sustained and psychologically erosive checking that lesser teams just aren't capable of mustering for 60 minutes. And the Hurricanes, so poised up until this round, were repeatedly pestered into errors: turnovers, failed clears, lackadaisical backchecking. At inopportune times the Canes looked like ... well, like the teams the Canes have beaten. They'd better internalize quickly that this ain't Montreal. The Knights have a knack for poking and prodding pressure points, and it's on their targets not to flinch under it, because they're not going to let up, and they're not going to miss many opportunities to take advantage of lapses. "It's those mistakes we made tonight that really [we] just don't make. And we made too many of those," said coach Rod Brind'Amour. "They forced us into them and we didn't handle pressure particularly well."

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 gambling, World Cup loyalties, griddles, window seat etiquette, and more. Your letters: Capn Po:

By racing the Giro d'Italia, Jonas Vingegaard chose to court the most pressure possible. Not only would he face the unrelenting scrutiny of being the sole favorite for the race, whatever he did would be judged against his archrival Tadej Pogacar's authoritative 2024 Giro. If any of the other challengers for the Giro ever got a wheel past him at any point, he'd face serious questions about whether trying the Giro–Tour de France double represented a brush with hubris. Even if he bested them, if he did not also banish the ghost of Pogacar in the process, he'd have offered further evidence to skeptics that beating Pogacar this summer in France and beyond was outside of his abilities. It's worth remembering this pressure, because it seems like such a distant worry after the nearly perfect Giro that Vingegaard put together. The Danish champion was in total control the entire race. He never faced a moment of jeopardy, never put a wheel wrong, and never made a bad decision en route to the overall title and five stage wins. He and his Visma team controlled every single mountain stage despite losing the steadying presence of Wilco Kelderman at the very start of the race, and they rode the veteran Sepp Kuss to a stage win and the young Davide Piganzoli into the top ten. Their dominance cleaved the race into two distinct spheres: the typical Giro-as-comedy stuff, where Michael Valgren was pulling a Poké Ball out of his pocket and Giulio Ciccone was throwing temper tantrums on the bike; and the stages where Visma was trying, which meant they were necessarily succeeding. As tempting as it is to frame the perfection of Vingegaard's Giro—a race that made him only the eighth cyclist to win all three of the sports Grand Tours—against Pogacar's Giro two years earlier, what we saw in Italy was not a tribute act but rather its own thing. Vingegaard and Pogacar are very different racers, and they raced two distinct, equally dominant Giri. The word with Vingegaard is control. On all five of his stage wins, his team would set a hard tempo until most everyone was sheared off by the brutal pace, Vingegaard would accelerate one time, and everyone would hang their heads and race their own race, with Gall the final rider to drop off Vingegaard's wheel. When Gall gave it a go on Stage 16 and lasted 10 or so seconds, it counted as an impressive performance.

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Colombia comes into the 2026 World Cup as one of the hungriest teams in the field. After missing the 2022 edition of the tournament, Los Cafeteros are back, having breezed through the hardest qualifying test in the entire world: CONMEBOL’s grinding 18-match crucible, which Colombia finished in third place, eight points safe of the intercontinental playoff spot. Along the way, Colombia beat both Argentina and Brazil at home, the first time it had toppled the latter in World Cup qualifying history, and also added a runner-up finish at the 2024 Copa América, taking Argentina deep into extra time before losing to a 112th minute winner. In other words, despite the disappointment of the last World Cup cycle, this is an experienced and battle-tested side, one coming into the 2026 tournament with plenty of talent in a starting XI that can compete with anyone.

The great Hanif Abdurraqib joined us this week on Nothing But Respect. You are probably familiar with Abdurraqib's work as a poet, author, journalist, and subject of a Giri Nathan profile, which was timed to the release of Abdurraqib's 2024 book, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. We talked a bit about the book, a good amount about his beloved Minnesota Timberwolves, and a lot about the forthcoming NBA Finals between the Knicks and Spurs. I also asked Abdurraqib to give us his own scouting report, which he generously provided. This was a fun one! https://art19.com/shows/nothing-but-respect/episodes/3f32c963-2f70-4be5-9a6d-fa95bcb693ce

Hoopheads across the nation begin their annual vigil Wednesday in anticipation of receiving the thing they most crave in all the world—a new team to admire, love, fear, and hate simultaneously. And you can't really blame them for their baffled antipathies. Their favorite sport is both defined and repelled by dynastic teams and the silly little debates they shape, which are always on the menu as a kind of bland and ubiquitous comfort food, the sort of tastes-the-same-everywhere sludge you can eat and regret along any of the nation's highways. And these fans are starving for it; they haven't had that level of reliability in this sport in nearly a decade now. But they live in hope, and dread, that a new dynasty is upon us, this one governed by Wemby The First (and so far Only) and sure to run for 10 years, since that is the most common span of time employed in the sentence, "He's going to be unstoppable/the face of basketball for the next X years." This is the natural response of the basketball intelligentsia when confronted with something new and temporarily indomitable, and if it is generally doomed and dull, it's also not totally wrong—any sufficiently good team will make it difficult to imagine any other team knocking them off. But for most of the last decade, that is just what has happened, followed by either the resentment that comes from being right or the dismissiveness of being wrong, because basketball fans work very hard to want the next big thing until it arrives and then to become sick of it shortly thereafter. Victor Wembanyama is called an alien, and that is the highest of compliments until it becomes a condemnation. Often this will happen in the same conversation. And so the new working theory is "Wemby has come to save us and then rule us as a cruel overlord." There are, to be fair, relatively fewer fears that the New York Knickerbockers, against whom Wemby either will or will not begin his reign of benign terror, will become a repeat champion. That's not really a knock on the Knicks so much as it's largely due to the fear that imagining the Knicks as a dynasty is to imagine their fan base into an army of vampires who shriek perpetually into the night seeking bare vulnerable necks, with the only wooden stake available to the nation as a whole being Tony Brothers.