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There are times when a team can lose a primetime game and feel hard-done-by. A good squad can have an off-night, or run into a particularly bad matchup, and suddenly millions of Monday Night Football viewers have incorrectly concluded that those fellas are bad at football. The Vikings, who came into Monday's game against the Bills with a 6-1 record, offered no such misrepresentation. Anyone who watched that game came away with a precise understanding of who the Minnesota Vikings are: a team that can't move the ball to save its life. I shudder to think of the hypothetical casual fan who was excited to tune into a game between two six-win teams, only to be treated to a game that, despite being close in a technical sense, never really offered any drama. The Vikings are to blame for that, as they managed to lose 23-6 while putting yet another inept offensive performance on tape. Minnesota finished the game with 178 total yards and nine first downs, and possessed the ball for 17:28, their lowest mark in franchise history. That was somehow all they could manage against the 30th ranked pass defense in the league. The star of this horrible show was Carson Wentz, who was forced into starting quarterback duty thanks to Kyler Murray's hamstring injury. Wentz completed eight of his 25 passes for 81 yards, and threw two interceptions. It was a historically bad performance, one so vivid in its awful particulars that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman were able to set aside any hard feelings they might currently have for each other and join in channeling their disgust at the field:

Olivia Reingold might be the most notably embarrassing employee at the Free Press, but her coworkers won't let her take that title without a fight. Last Wednesday, following the midterm elections, the outlet posted a video by a different staffer who characterized Abdul El-Sayed's victory speech, which he gave almost entirely in English, as being delivered in Arabic. By Sunday, that video was deleted. The publication announced the decision, which apparently needed four days of deliberation, with the following note: We deleted an opinion video about the use of foreign languages in election night speeches. The post contained a factual error and its tone fell short of what we believe advances healthy public discourse. The rigorous editorial process that produces the work that appears on our website and in our newsletters must apply to everything we post on social media. We’ll be updating how we do things to achieve just that. We regret the error. The video in question was by reporter Maya Sulkin, whose accompanying caption was as follows: “Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed gave his victory speech in Arabic last night. Rep. Ilhan Omar addressed her victory party in Somali. And this morning, Iran’s supreme leader posted that America’s collapse ‘has accelerated.’ What should we make of these acceptance speeches?” The blue wave has resulted in some unlikely victories, but I didn't know that included the supreme leader of Iran.

Not all franchises are made equal. Some are widely understood by their peers to be operated by dullards. These imbalances are clear to everyone—fans, analysts, other executives—if not to the dullards themselves. Is it bullying whenever the Oklahoma City Thunder do business with, say, the Sacramento Kings? Maybe it is. During the 2025 NBA Draft, these two teams kicked off the first phase of this saga. The Kings sent a top-16 protected pick belonging to the San Antonio Spurs; the Thunder sent the No. 24 pick. The Kings then used that pick to select Nique Clifford, a versatile 6-foot-5 prospect. The knock on Clifford was his age—already 23 at draft night—but he was considered a good athlete with positional size, feel, and ball skills. After a solid rookie season, he was a modest source of hope on a Sacramento roster that badly needed any. Any evaluation of Clifford would also have to factor in that he was playing under full-time head coach Doug Christie, who is the NBA franchise equivalent of swapping on the donut tire on your car and then taking it on a cross-country road trip. Christie had poor Clifford playing point guard for stretches of the season, struggling to make plays out of isolation. But at least Clifford was in no rush to prove himself, having joined a play-in franchise on a clear downward trajectory which included conducting confusing trades for middling players. Alas, Clifford just couldn't keep up with the furious pace of innovation in Sacramento. Just 16 months after the Kings acquired him, Clifford had slipped out of the rotation. On Sunday, they traded him back to the Thunder, and in return received two-second round picks. Particularly strange is the timing of the trade. What was Sacramento's rush to move on from the sophomore? The 1-9 Kings are headed nowhere but hell. They have a lively point guard now in Darius Acuff Jr., who has been happily taking on galactic usage; their best wing, Keegan Murray, finally returned from an ankle injury yesterday. If anything, now is the time to properly test out all their rookie-scale players and assess their quality.

On Sunday, Nvidia announced that it was opening an investigation into CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to an affair with a Singapore-based data-center company executive named Alice Huang (no relation), whom U.S. officials say is also working as a spy for Chinese state intelligence. Given the size of Nvidia, as well as its strategic centrality to the intense AI buildout competition between the U.S. and China, Huang might be the single most desirable person in the tech industry, if not the whole world, for Beijing to honeypot. According to reporting around the matter, it seems like they got what they came for. We must begin with the crux of the issue, which is the matter of why Nvidia is in such a central position. AI software companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have gotten significantly more media attention because they make consumer products and engage in marketing rhetoric about their potential to create the machine god, but Nvidia is the company that has made the most actual money during the ongoing AI boom. Nvidia makes chips, supposedly the best of all the chips, on which every big-time software company built its flagship platforms a few years ago. This has made Nvidia the second-biggest publicly traded company in the world, and has made its founder Jensen Huang fabulously wealthy and quite the influential figure. It's also made the Santa Clara–based Nvidia the most critical part of the U.S. strategic plan to assert global AI dominance, by which I mean dominance over China, its principal competitor in the field. American trade policy forbids Nvidia from selling its best stuff to Chinese companies: U.S. policymakers want American companies to build the biggest and best data centers and create AI software that can most effectively and profitably book a flight for you, tell you some stuff you love about your kid, or conduct microtargeted drone assassinations of restive labor organizers.

Things have to be really bad for the New England Patriots if even Christian Gonzalez is dropping a stinker. The All-Pro cornerback has been one of the most consistent players on a Pats team that has struggled to find consistency at other positions, but Sunday against the Green Bay Packers, Gonzalez was just like many of his teammates: overwhelmed and outmatched in a 45-27 loss that was functionally over by the third quarter. This was the worst performance of Gonzalez's pro career since he entered the NFL in 2023. Against Green Bay's receiving duo of Matthew Golden and Christian Watson, the league's highest-paid cornerback was helpless, consistently getting beat on deep routes and losing one or both in coverage for touchdowns. According to Next Gen Stats, Gonzalez gave up a total of 10 catches for 187 receiving yards on Sunday, the most of his career and the third-most of any player this season. He had given up a total of 196 receiving yards across his first six games. On Green Bay's second TD of the day, Gonzalez and teammate Marcus Jones both covered Watson as he ran to the corner, leaving Golden wide open. Late in the third quarter, Gonzalez over-leveraged toward the outside against Watson, who just ran a skinny post and essentially walked into the end zone to make the score 40-14. "I mean, they just got the best of me today,” Gonzalez said after the loss. “I mean, this is pro football. They got good receivers like every team. So, they got the best of me today. Move on from it and be ready for next week.” His head coach Mike Vrabel was a little more pointed in his postgame comments: "When your best players don’t play good, you don’t have much of a chance in this league. So, we expect a lot more. He expects a lot more. We need more from him and everybody else."

Take no shortcuts when you solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Oren Herschander, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Oren is a research-based artist and the creative director of the Lillian V. Mountweazel Research Collection. His puzzles regularly appear in Paper Airplane magazine and his favorite bridge is the Outerbridge Crossing. See more of his work at Oddlyoren.com.  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. 

Sunday night's Bucs-Bears game possessed the major ingredients necessary for a Chicago fan freakout. Franchise quarterback Caleb Williams looked lost for much of the action, throwing four interceptions and stalling on three second-half three-and-outs. The team as a whole, meanwhile, surrendered a first-half 17-3 lead, allowing the game-tying touchdown following a fumble in the final stages of the fourth quarter. But the concerns one would have about the Bears' offense feel relatively minor today, because despite all their errors, a buzzer-beating Cairo Santos field goal and a stout defensive performance allowed Chicago to notch their fourth straight win, 27-24, improving to 7-2 as they fight for first place in the NFL's toughest division. The first nine minutes at Soldier Field were a party. The Buccaneers, entering the game as clear underdogs but coming off their two best outings of the season, got steamrolled, allowing a pair of Williams TD passes while mustering just six yards of their own. From that point on, however, everything became a struggle. Williams chucked a pick near the end zone to conclude a drive, then tossed another on his very next chance when he tried and failed to loft the ball out of bounds to avoid a sack. Before halftime arrived, he'd gift a third pass to the defense, making a silly decision to just huck the ball forward under pressure. Watching from afar, it felt like Williams's early success had put him in a consequence-free mindset on the field, and in his postgame it did very much sound like confidence was the culprit. "I'm going to throw until I can't throw anymore," Williams said. "That's how I live. I work my tail off to be in this position. I'll never not throw the ball. I could throw 100 picks in one game. ... That's how I grew up. That's who I am. I don't get gun-shy."

One imagines Philip Rivers in his fortress of solitude, away from his platoon of children and contemplating what to do with his winter now that his St. Michael Catholic High School team has been knocked out of the Alabama high school playoffs. Then it hit him: Well, if the Chargers won't ask me to replace Justin Herbert before he gets killed, maybe I'll just go coach North Carolina State. Of course, it didn't happen that way, because the former quarterback's name has been the one most linked with the Raleigh job since Dave Doeren got tagged and bagged in late October. The possibility of him stepping into the gig was the principal discussion point in Rivers's postgame presser after St. Michael lost to Glenwood School on Friday night. It had been considered the faitest of accompli for weeks, in fact, and Rivers had already been elevated to First Candidate In Training when his son Gunner (of course that is his name), who had been Rivers's quarterback at St. Mike's, committed to NC State. The presumption here is that Rivers's prosciutto-thin coaching résumé—in mentioning his six seasons at St. Mike, we have covered all of it—has been trumped by his ability to pry open donor pockets and make the Wolfpack relevant again in the bloated ACC. And when we say "again," we mean "as a big spender in a landscape where 'big' is $40 million a year rather than $20 million." Doeren made a point of describing the limitations that such a barebones budget played on the school's chances of being noticed, and the school responded with a simple, You're absolutely right about that, Dave-O. Now get out.

Some of the most memorable nights in hockey are driven by malice. If the NHL could capture in a bottle the atmosphere of John Tavares's first trip to Long Island after signing with Toronto, or Brady Tkachuk's Ottawa return as a Panther, it could and would sell it. And fans would buy it, because what these nights are really about is catharsis: the purging of resentments and the reaffirmation of loyalties. It's a nice thing to do from time to time. Builds community. Strengthens fandom. Probably good for mental health. The crowd that boos together, cheers together. Winnipeg wants and deserves a night of catharsis, to wish a not-so-fond farewell to Connor Hellebuyck, the greatest player the franchise has ever had, and who got so sick of both losing and living in Winnipeg that he forced his way to New Jersey. And wouldn't you know it, the Devils are on a Canada swing, and will take on the Jets on Tuesday. It ought to be personality-driven appointment viewing, in a league that doesn't have nearly enough of that. But the Devils have affirmed their commitment to non-entertainment. Connor Hellebuyck will not start in Winnipeg, per an all-timer of an official statement.

You—yes, you—could be in elected office today. The median Defector reader is a smart and good-looking progressive with impeccable taste. What other qualifications do you really need? Had you thrown your hat in ahead of the blue wave, today you could be your state's lieutenant governor. Hell, for that matter, maybe you are your state's lieutenant governor. Have you checked your mail? Consider the case of Sebastian Matta, a 19-year-old sophomore at Arizona State University. He has a 3.25 GPA, per the New York Times, and he lives at home with his parents. Starting in February, Matta will be the Superior Court Clerk of Maricopa County, which has a geographic area larger than New Jersey and a population larger than Oregon. Matta will lead a department that, according to Phoenix-area CBS affiliate KTVK, processes more than 16,000 documents per day and has an annual budget of $65 million. Matta will be the boss to some 670 veteran professional staff. "I hope that they realize that I’m just not any 19-year-old," said Matta, hoping to give confidence to the hundreds of people who will soon be working under him in an incredibly complex bureaucracy.