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The fourth season of Amazon's Reacher, which was based on Lee Child's book Gone Tomorrow and set largely in Philadelphia, came to a close earlier this week. Defector's elite Reacher Creature team was convened to discuss this unusually brutal and mostly quite good season of the show; you can find our discussions of previous seasons here and here. The post contains a bunch of spoilers. David: Reacher Creatures, how are we recovering from Reacher Season 4: Showdown At Hoagie Junction? I assume we are all leaving the hospital against medical advice after sustaining thousands of brutal wounds from a bladed weapon, tearing a wan cheesesteak in half on the subway to share with those in need, things of that nature? Brandy: After having a not great time with Season 3, for various reasons, I was thrilled to discover my love of Reacher was able to make a similarly miraculous recovery.

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. Israel: Sometime between showing college football's highest-rated games of all time, ESPN thought it necessary to bonk viewers over the head with fear-mongering over the sport on behalf of the Protect College Sports Act. We've written about it already, and it is all the talk in college sports: ESPN debased itself by putting Senator Ted Cruz on a television set—right where people can see him!—and teeing him up to shill shamelessly and shamefully on behalf of this bill. A bill, not to overdo it, that is not only being championed by the Nick Sabans and the Ted Cruzes of the world, but by President Donald Trump, a large number of athletic conference presidents and university presidents, and corporations like Disney. Given all that, you won't be surprised that the bill is completely anti-labor. It is a bill that seeks to undo the last few years of college athletes grabbing some of the fruits of their labor and put the genie back into its bottle as much as possible, and to reinstall the NCAA atop college sports by federal law. And ESPN, which is now purely just a promotion arm for the many leagues it's in business with, is more than happy to pitch in. The cartel is striking back and hoping enough people are dumb enough, or just spiteful enough, to restore control to the parties whose wild selfishness led to amateurism's collapse.

Alexander Ovechkin is probably the single most famous Russian athlete. He is also a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and not a particularly quiet or passive one. This, occasionally, has gotten him into some hot water with the rest of the world, given Putin's corruption and warmaking. In 2017, Ovechkin launched "PutinTeam," a social media movement supporting Putin and his party in the following year's elections, which were widely decried as fixed. In 2022, following Russia's indefensible invasion of Ukraine, Ovechkin said he still supported Putin. "He's my president," the Capitals star said. You do not, in fact, have to support a particular politician just because he's in charge, not even in Russia. Plenty of Russian NHL players have said nothing. Some have even spoken out against Putin or Russia's attack on Ukraine, which weakens the constant refrain from Ovechkin defenders that he's only on Putin's side to protect his family. It's obviously more than expedience; they have each other's cell numbers. But for the most part, Ovechkin has avoided real criticism for his political stances. Part of this is because he is one of the greatest players ever, and sports fans necessarily get very good at separating art from artist. But another part of it is that Ovechkin seems to have a sense of where the line is, and pulls back when public opinion indicates he's crossing it. Since his 2022 comments, Ovechkin has been near-totally silent on politics. Whether or not the rumors about the NHL telling him to clam up are true, his silence has served him well. The league and many fans were able to celebrate his chases of Wayne Gretzky and 1,000 goals without guilt. Ovechkin didn't face any questions tougher than ones about his favorite Italian restaurant.

There are few scenarios for a struggling and injury-riddled defense more nightmarish than the one the Detroit Lions' unit had to face on Thursday night. Just four days after suffering through a 31-30 overtime win over the Saints, during which they were on the field for a grueling 90 snaps, they found themselves in Buffalo, dealing with Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills in their home opener. And oh yeah, Kerby Joseph and Brian Branch are both still on the PUP list. So it got bad quickly for the Lions on Thursday night, and it stayed bad. The Bills opened the game with a 10-play, 85-yard touchdown drive. The next possession resulted in eight plays, 79 yards, and another touchdown. And what of their third drive of the game? Surely they didn't score on that one, too? Unfortunately for the Lions that one also went for 57 yards and a touchdown on nine plays. The fourth drive was at least brief: four plays for 68 yards and another touchdown. The Bills were up 27-7 by the tail end of the second quarter, and the cameras kept finding Lions stud pass-rusher Aidan Hutchinson on the sideline, gulping down huge breaths of air and spraying water down the front and back of his jersey. He looked like a guy who was being forced to run a marathon at gunpoint, which arguably would have been a more pleasant experience than the one he was living through. The Bills were being 12-personnel bullies, pushing the Lions around with their two tight ends and getting big chunks of yardage however they wanted. There were Josh Allen sprints for first downs, James Cook running for double digits seemingly every time he touched the ball, and wide open receivers sitting in every soft spot the Lions' defense offered up. The Bills ran 74 plays and finished with 34 first downs, meaning that the 41-31 final score flattered the Lions much more than they deserved. By the second half it was obvious to the Bills that they could score as many points as they needed to in order to win the game, and a 10-point margin suited them just fine.

On Thursday morning, USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino announced his roster for a forthcoming quartet of games. The first thing that leaps out is that Christian Pulisic's name is nowhere to be found. The story is that the U.S.'s best player will stay in Italy as he heals up from a pair of injuries sustained in his team's embarrassing loss to Belgium in the World Cup, though Pulisic isn't so injured that he couldn't help his team come back and salvage a draw against Lazio last weekend. Per the sourced-up Doug McIntyre, Pulisic "has had a strained relationship with Pochettino" since skipping the 2025 Gold Cup. It's way too early to forecast Pulisic's medium-term future with the program, or the degree to which it will matter. In the opening days of the 2030 World Cup cycle, it's time to think about the future. It's time to welcome the reign of Cavan Sullivan. Sullivan is only 16 years old, but has been marked for future USMNT stardom since early 2024, when he signed the largest Homegrown Player deal in MLS history with the Philadelphia Union. That deal included a pre-transfer agreement to ship him off to Manchester City when he turned 18. Four years is a long time to have to wait, but City clearly felt someone of his talent was worth it, and he's only proven that decision wise in the two years since.

Steve Belichick has resigned from his job as defensive coordinator at UNC following an investigation that found "certain actions demonstrated a disregard for Carolina's values and standards of conduct," according to a statement released Thursday by the university. Belichick, the son of head coach Bill Belichick, already had been on medical leave. This follows Mike Lombardi resigning earlier this month from his job as general manager. Little else has been made public by UNC about what led to Lombardi and Steve Belichick's resignations. The university's statement described "a thorough and independent investigation into allegations related to culture and climate within the Carolina football program." It went on to say that the investigation found that what happened was "isolated in scope and not a systemic failure."

Rory Dames—the women’s soccer coach currently banned for life from the NWSL, and who has been accused of abuse by more than a dozen former youth players—is no longer listed in the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s centralized disciplinary database. According to a document reviewed by Defector, Dames was removed from the database because a one-year suspension by SafeSport has ended. Per the document, he remains on probation for five years and under a no-contact directive, but those sanctions do not limit his involvement in soccer. The document did not say if his probation started after his suspension ended, or if it ran concurrently. A person who was interviewed for SafeSport’s investigation told Defector they were informed about the sanctions against Dames on July 28 of last year, at which point the former coach and SafeSport were already embroiled in a legal battle. The interviewee was therefore under the impression that the decision was not final, and that the one-year suspension had not started yet.

Following this week's news that the brilliant writer Annie Dillard has died at age 81, some Defector staffers wrote about what her work and example have meant to them. Much is made of Dillard’s genius, her wizardry with language, her talent. But the Dillardism that has stuck with me strongest over the years comes from Alexander Chee's essay "The Writing Life," in which he describes taking an undergraduate course with her at Wesleyan in 1989: "Talent isn't enough, [Dillard] had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work."

There is a cottage industry in publishing dedicated to understanding Donald Trump and his followers. Since his election in 2016, a spate of books have attempted to contextualize, deconstruct, and analyze the President’s ascendency. The second Trump term has been no less prolific. This year alone has seen juggernaut bestsellers like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and the upcoming Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg. “Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past,” Susan B. Glasser wrote in a 2025 New Yorker column.  Over the years, Trump’s been called a number of epithets. Cruel, heartless, old, stupid. There remains a collective nervousness around calling Trump a fascist, and few writers avail themselves of words like “evil.” Susan Neiman has been interested in the problem of evil for most of her career as a moral philosopher. Her 2002 book, Evil in Modern Thought traced the history of philosophy as a matter of different responses to the existence of evil. So it’s surprising that her latest book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, is curiously cagey about the current President’s alignment.  Neiman has written multiple books about theodicy, the problem with woke culture, and why progressives would benefit from more moral clarity.  Her new book allows her to play the hits under a provocative title, but with little novelty. She never quite gets around to taking on Trump directly despite the little book’s title. Across seven chapters, Neiman considers the importance of discussing morality, the empty ideology the Trump admin has used to justify its actions, and how we must shift away from identity politics and liberalism and towards socialism. She argues that the left has ceded moral ground by claiming materialism instead of ideology—though her thinking about both seem muddy. Her ideas about ideology contain a lot of materialism and her ideas about materialism are undergirded by ideology. She dives into the discourse with a lot of cynicism around Marx, communism, Judith Butler, and big woke. “Many progressives were sick at heart about it, though they confessed it only to close friends, preferably after a glass of wine,” she quips about the latter. Identity politics is tribalism, rather than materialism. Like many philosophers, she seems to let the distortions of identity politics on both the right and the left distort the idea of standing up for minorities as not just a social issue, but a civic one. Whose materialism matters? 

This week on the show, Harry and I hung out with the hosts of the State of the League podcast for an hour of classic offseason nonsense. We talked about Paul Schrader getting really into AI, which aging stars should be allowed to do steroids, and Brice Sensabaugh. Oh, you're not familiar with Brice Sensabaugh, the fourth-year shooting guard for the Utah Jazz? Well, you're about to be, as I am confident no other NBA podcast has dedicated this much of its runtime to talking about Brice Sensabaugh. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!