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It's a tough situation for Drew. While he has dialed up his football fandom to super-sicko levels (complimentary) in recent years, my interest in the sport has remained stubbornly around average. When we discussed having an NFL Draft-focused episode of The Distraction, we were politely avoiding talking about the fact that I can't go nearly as deep on the subject of sleeper mid-round edge rusher values. Thankfully, we hit upon a compromise that worked for all of us: having the legendary Aaron Schatz, now of the sports analytics site FTN and the founder of Football Outsiders, as a guest, then spending half the episode talking about how awful online media is. Something for everyone! Aaron had a lot to say about his (highly negative) experience with the venture capitalists who bought and ultimately killed Football Outsiders, which Mike Tanier wrote about for us a couple years ago, and which finally wound down once those owners just straight-up stopped paying anyone. That URL, which once contained nearly decades of football analysis, from writers who became stars in their field and also in pro teams' front offices, is now a dead link.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. The NFL Draft starts tonight in Pittsburgh, and no one gives a shit. Occupancy rates at both hotels and Airbnbs in the Steel City are falling woefully short of initial projections. Fans who live in other cities are uninterested in paying up to four figures for a single hotel room, and locals aren’t exactly pleased that their public school system was compelled to switch to remote learning for three full days this week just to accommodate the event. The hype for this weekend is at such a low ebb that Fernando Mendoza, tonight’s No. 1 overall pick, has decided not to attend. This draft is deader than your love life, and everyone knows it. This shouldn’t be the case. Even with a draft class that’s unremarkable by nearly everyone’s standards, the streets of Pittsburgh should still be teeming with drunken yinzers and myriad Jets fans who made the drive just so that they could boo the selection of Arvell Reese in person. Hell, I should be at the draft right now, rocking my Kevin Williams jersey and keeping my eyes open with broken toothpicks so I can stay awake to see the No. 18 pick announced live. Then I could fall asleep in my hotel room and wake up the next morning to enjoy a traditional Pittsburgh breakfast of a scrappleburger with two McGriddles for its bun.

PHILADELPHIA — On the afternoon of April 9, 2026, partisans of the Alberta separatist movement—who rally for the landlocked province’s secession from the broader, united commonwealth of Canada, and the establishment of a self-sufficient petrostate bankrolled by its ample oil, gas and mineral reserves—scored a major endorsement. “I officially RECOGNIZE the NEW INDEPENDENT NATION of ALBERTA,” the comedian, actor, and adult Catholic convert Rob Schneider posted on Twitter, “and its separation from the People’s Republic Of Canada and the socialist morons in Ottawa.” That’s right. Renegades and heretics of the Wild Rose Province, take heart: Deuce Bigalow, the male gigolo, has your back. This foray into the crankiest corners of Canadian politics might seem a little odd—if you haven’t been paying attention. Rob Schneider is probably still best known for his five-year stint as a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the early ‘90s. He was part of a cohort of young comics (Adam Sandler, David Spade, Chrises Rock and Farley) who would leave a more sizable imprint on the landscape of American comedy. On SNL, Schneider distinguished himself with such classic characters as Richard Laymer (a.k.a. the “makin’ copies!” guy) and … well, that’s the main one. 

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. The first time I ever noticed that I was being sold to by the shadowy music industry in a way that didn't feel genuine to me was with the arrival of a little superstar known as Avril Lavigne. She was the "anti-Britney." She was crass and rude and punk. She wore a white tank top and cargo pants instead of tight spandex. She had Attitude™️. It was a particularly cynical way to sell a new pop star, but these were particularly cynical times, and treating teenagers like they're dumb is an effective marketing tactic. But once I knew enough about music and the music business to pick up the signs of artificiality, I could see them everywhere: in the phony rebellion of Good Charlotte to the fake cool of Bow Wow. I didn't have a word for it when I was a kid, but I was trying to identify what became known as The Industry Plant©️. https://youtu.be/5NPBIwQyPWE?si=gFnQVP2oYNbeCZTO

There are 30 Major League Baseball teams, and every summer they play a combined 2,430 games. There is baseball on every day, all the time. Someone is always hitting a ground ball into a 6-4-3 double play, or going on an eight-game losing streak, or smashing a home run deep into center field. These are all interesting things, but you will see them each a zillion times in your life. But here, Wednesday, was something new. Or rather, somewhere new for a baseball to go. Up 5-4 against the Texas Rangers in the top of the ninth, the Pirates' Oneil Cruz came up to bat with runners on first and second. He took a strike at the top of the zone, smoothed out the dirt in the box in front of him with his foot, and calmly waited. Here came an 80 mph cutter right down the middle of the zone: a mistake or a present, depending on your perspective. Cruz, his hands so fast and his bat so flat, twisted his body through the ball, and there it went at 116.9 mph off the bat, the hardest-hit home run of the season so far. The ball screeched into right field, looping every second a little more toward the foul line. Would it stay fair? In the box, Cruz watched the ball swerve, maybe prayed for it to stay fair. And his prayers were answered by the thinnest of margins.

A couple of members of Defector’s Philadelphia bureau received an invitation, approximately one year ago, to attend the official launch of the city's F1 Arcade (pretty much what it sounds like), with DJ Jazzy Jeff. None of us were able to attend. Ever since then, until this very week, we have been talking about visiting, and failing to visit, the F1 Arcade. Here, in our own words, is the story of our visit. Kathryn Xu: I suppose the most important piece of information here is that we have been meaning to go to the Formula 1 Arcade in Philly from the day it opened, and after some punting and faffing about, we finally managed to do so approximately one year later, which is a huge occasion unto itself—if just for the fact that I was so sure the F1 Arcade would fail and close before we would ever get the opportunity! Surely F1 simulator racing was not so popular in Philly that it could be a sustainable enterprise. Yet month after month passed, and the arcade lived on, and each time I happened to pass by, I would take a photo and text my beloved coworkers, "We should finally go!" And we finally did. Kelsey McKinney: We ate dinner before at the delicious Nan Zhou Hand-Drawn Noodle House, and I ate so much beef noodle soup that my tummy felt warm. And suddenly, while I was eating I was hit with a wave of panic. Was the F1 Arcade even open still? Was it open on Tuesdays? I hadn't checked! Had anyone checked? Because we've been talking about going for so long, I took it as an inevitability that it would be ready for us whenever we wanted it. Luckily, that was in fact true. 

As of Wednesday, three teams in the Premier League have fired at least two managers this season. Two of the clubs are Nottingham Forest (who has fired a whopping three managers within one season) and Tottenham Hotspur, both mired in the relegation battle to varying degrees. In those cases, the firings make sense: These are two clubs who had European qualification expectations, and they are cycling through managers to try and avoid dropping into the Championship, even though these replacement hires have left no room for a bright side. Chelsea, the third club, doesn't have relegation woes to contend with, which makes its decision to fire Liam Rosenior on Wednesday all the funnier. Rosenior was always going to have one foot out the door at Chelsea. After all, every manager at Chelsea, dating back to the Roman Abramovich days, has had one foot out the door, so that's not saying much. But Rosenior was an especially bold hiring back on Jan. 6, when he took over after Enzo Maresca was fired. Rosenior's main qualification for the job seemed to be that he was already in the broader Chelsea ecosystem: Prior to taking the top job at Stamford Bridge, Rosenior was the manager at Ligue 1's Strasbourg, the other club owned by BlueCo, Chelsea's owning company. This internal promotion earned him a new six-year contract at the time. As Billy Haisley wrote when Chelsea fired Maresca, this type of move was perhaps doomed from the start for everyone involved. Rosenior's record at Chelsea speaks for itself, but I'll reiterate it anyway: In 13 Premier League matches with the 41-year-old at the helm, Chelsea picked up just 17 points: five wins, two draws. Even that record flatters the trajectory of his tenure. Four of those wins came in his first four matches, a clear example of a new-manager bounce; the opponents in those four matches were Brentford (ninth place), Crystal Palace (13th place), West Ham (17th place), and Wolves (already relegated). Draws against bottom-third teams Leeds and Burnley followed, as did a 2-1 loss to Arsenal, before Rosenior's final Premier League win, a 4-1 victory over Aston Villa on March 4.

Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel has another life update for us. Here's what he had to say at his second press conference of the week, on Wednesday evening: As I said the other day, I promised my family, this organization and this team that I was going to give them the best version of me that I can possibly give them. In order to do so, I have committed to seeking counseling, starting this weekend. This is something that I have given a lot of thought to and is something I would advise a player to do if I was counseling them. This comes a day after Vrabel announced that he's had "difficult conversations" with his team and family following the publication of photographs showing him getting cozy with then–NFL insider Dianna Russini at an adults-only resort, which Vrabel called a "completely innocent interaction" and insisted that "any suggestion otherwise is laughable" in what remains his only direct comment on the photos.

This isn't Berghain; they're not going to turn you away at the door; the more the merrier. Everybody who's anybody is in the penalty box in South Philly, from the generation's greatest skater to the lowliest goon. And by the time the lights were turned on and everyone scurried home, 10 guilty men watched simultaneously from the sin bin as the Flyers reversed the game's momentum and 86ed the Penguins to take a 3-0 series lead. We should have known the box was The Spot from the start, when Sidney Crosby was sentenced for the first embellishment penalty of his long career. He took a legitimate high stick from Garnet Hathaway before a faceoff, but went down like he'd been shot. "Sid doesn't embellish," insisted Penguins head coach Dan Muse, but Sid might admit otherwise, after he watched the replay on the jumbotron and he offered a sheepish little welp face. The game started and stayed chippy, and the Philadelphia crowd sounded especially bloodthirsty. They've waited a long time for this. The last time the Flyers won a playoff game at home, Barack Obama was president. Just one player on the entire roster was even here for that. "That was the craziest building I've ever played in," said veteran defenseman Nick Seeler, whose first career playoff goal would prove to be a big one. The Flyers are a young team, still figuring out what they have and who they are, but showing all the signs of one of those "too naive to know they shouldn't make a deep run" teams that make a deep run. There's no particular reason these kids should play a game similar to the Broad Street Bullies of yore, or really every edition ever of the Flyers. But some bone-deep genetic memory, something about that logo or perhaps that city inevitably turns a man's thoughts to pugilism.

There's no predicting which silly story will become the next unhinged national sociopolitical argument. It is clear how it happens—enough people pretend to be upset about it on television and social media that some other, softer-brained people get upset about it for real—but trying to guess which outrage will land is the new psychic Jenga, and not just because the concept of collapse is both implied and guaranteed. This is why the seemingly tossed-off story of the New York Yankees players who would like to wear the team's navy batting practice jerseys as the first alternate road kit in club history is so rife with idiotic promise. It's not the story itself. The Athletic's Brendan Kuty accurately (we presume) presented the facts as they exist, which are that players pitched the idea of alternate jerseys to the club. This is notable only because the Yankees are one of the last two teams in North American (and maybe any continent's) sports to eschew the idea of a third jersey. (The other holdout is the MinnesOakLAOakAgainVegas Raiders, who have only diverged from tradition with their silver-numerals-with-black-trim version on the road whites, which they originally trotted out in the early 1970s and quickly scratched.) The Yankees' singular fashion statement is based on the time-honored couture philosophy of "No." The home jersey has pinstripes and an entwined "NY" on the left side of the chest, the road jersey is gray and has "NEW YORK" across the front, there are no names on the back except for that of the company that makes the shirts, and it's been that way with only the tiniest affectations since 1913. No changes, no alterations, not even advertisements until they inevitably cut an eleven-figure deal with some fly-by-night insurance operation. Every other team has not only embraced but actively become addicted to alternates, and as a result, the certifiably insane Chris Creamer's SportsLogos site has become a compendium of the weirdest color palettes devised by history's weirdest marketing experts, imagining the weirdest ideas for the weirdest teams' players.