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We were worried for a few moments that the athletic directors/state governors/rich swine who run college football would forget about their seven-week streak of coach firings, but that is a personal failure of faith in the power of administrative bloodlust. They know what must be done, and they never hesitate to do it. So hello and goodbye to Hugh Freeze, who just got the cardboard box at Auburn after a humiliating (well, for Auburners) 10-3 loss to Kentucky on Saturday. Freeze had the mark of the goat upon him almost from the moment he was hired at Auburn based on the NCAA's skepticism stemming from his cavalier view of rules at Ole Miss, and losses in his three-year tenure to powers like pre-NIL Vanderbilt, Cal, Oklahoma and New Mexico State convinced whoever makes decisions at Auburn to make the call on Freeze. Interestingly, the interim coach is D.J. Durkin, the former Maryland coach who was fired in the wake of a school investigation following the death of offensive lineman Jordan McNair due to heatstroke following an offseason workout. "Toxic environment" was the key sentence here, so whatever the Auburn fanbase may think, they are hardly out of the frying pan, let alone the fire.

The Toronto Blue Jays sent 57 batsmen to the plate in the 25 hours between Yoshinobu Yamamoto's last pitch of Game 6 of the World Series and his first pitch of Game 7, so it isn't like they didn't have plenty of chances to avert the doom that was ultimately theirs. Indeed, the last World Series like this one was actually the cafeteria scene in Blazing Saddles, and that was 51 years ago. Too many deeds from too many people, too many defining achievements and agonizing near-misses, too much to absorb and too many details into which you could lose yourselves. Somehow, though, the longest and least-hinged World Series since the Black Sox invented gambling found its equilibrium in the last place a rational baseball knower would have expected to look, and at the last possible moment—with Yamamoto providing the one bit of comprehensible order this ziggurat of chaos could permit.

This thoroughly excellent World Series will go seven games because it needs to go seven games. Not "needs to" in the wishful sense employed by my colleague Ray Ratto, the inveterate maximum-sports-wanter—who, by the grace of the blog gods will be in this chair to write the gamer—but needs to because six games has settled nothing. The Dodgers and Blue Jays bring out the best in each other, or barring that the most histrionic. They are well-matched teams, each with clear strengths and flaws, to be in turn maximized or minimized or exploited. Even in a low-scoring Game 6 which saw the Dodgers improbably protect a 3-1 lead in a wild ninth inning, 25 outs weren't enough to settle anything. Outs 26 and 27, which did, came in the blink of an eye and the beat of a heart, or, anyway, would have if one's rooting interests allowed for either. With the tying runs in scoring position and one out, Andres Gimenez made solid inside-out contact on a pitch from Tyler Glasnow, the presumed Game 7 starter, but in to try to preserve a victory that felt like it was slipping away. Addison Barger at second was off on contact; he said he didn't realize Gimenez got quite so much of the barrel on it, and that he thought it was going to bloop in just over the shortstop, and that he knew he needed to at least advance to third so he might score on a sac fly. But the ball hung up, and Barger roamed a bit too far, and emotions were rent and reversed in an instant.

We followed the Owl Whisperer around the gun battery toward a grove of pitch pines, where he had seen the saw-whet owl. Then I heard someone ask behind me, “Where are they going?” I turned around and saw a couple I had met earlier. My heart sank. I had learned that they were getting into birding and that we lived in the same neighborhood. I wanted to tell them. I really did. I knew how exciting this could be for them. But there was an owl code in New York.

Hear me out: Evan Bouchard is the Oilers' most important player. This does not mean they'd suffer the most if he were removed from the equation; their pair of all-universe forwards obviously qualify there. It also does not mean he's a constant shortcoming holding the team back from a Cup; that person wears a lot more pads. What Bouchard is to Edmonton is pivotal: a No. 1 defenseman who's now paid like it, who has the puck on his stick more than just about anyone, who quarterbacks a lethal attack, who is a threat from anywhere—and who can't seem to stop doing very silly things that cost games. As Bouchard goes, so go the Oilers. It makes thematic sense that Edmonton's identity—potent! yet flawed; sexy to watch! yet prone to disaster—would be so tied up in an offensive defenseman. Bouchard clearly does enough on the attack to make the trade-offs worth it. He was third on the team in scoring last year and in their last two deep postseason runs. He's got a heavy slapper and he's a great puck-mover, and his chemistry with McDavid and Draisaitl is real, and tight. The Oilers locked him up as their No. 1 blueliner for four years for a reason. But he's also more than occasionally confounding, making turnovers you wouldn't want to see from an AHL guy, and at age 26 it's pretty safe to say this is just Who He Is. It's easier to deal with when he's scoring, and the Oilers are winning. When he's not and they're not, it's crazymaking. Here's how the scoring opened in Rangers-Oilers on Thursday:

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. Ray: Good news for SEC teams across the land: The next coach at LSU is almost certainly going to be a spectacular failure. This news comes after Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry suggested, and probably not tongue-in-cheek, that "Maybe we'll let President Trump pick it. He loves winners.” This came in a presser in which he also announced that soon-to-be-no-longer athletic director Scott Woodward, whose last two football hires totaled $124 million in buyouts, would not be picking Brian Kelly’s doomed successor, adding, “We're gonna put metrics on it because I'm tired of rewarding failure in this country and then leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill." Ignoring the fact that Jeffy was deeply involved in the process when the Kelly contract was negotiated, this leads to the obvious conundrum: If you had only Trump, Landry or Woodward to pick your next coach, how soon would it be before you shut down the program? However badly it plays, it’s all good news at the other 15 campuses—even Kentucky.

You might think of Werner Herzog’s new book, The Future of Truth, as the story of two animals.  On the front cover, you see the silhouette of a lone penguin, somewhere in the middle distance, setting off from icy tundra to the mountains. While never made explicit in the text, this image is an obvious reference to a memorable vignette from Herzog's 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. While speaking to a penguin scientist, Dr. Engli, Herzog inquires about the possibility of "insanity in penguins."

It is a truism, but it is also actually true that you should be careful what you ask for. Distraction episodes are typically right around an hour, and almost always on the short side of the 60-minute mark, and commenters and correspondents have in the past groused that they sometimes can seem to end somewhat abruptly. I'd argue that they always begin much more abruptly, but it is just how we do it. This week's episode, though, despite being a just-the-two-of-us affair, is not like that. It ends normally, and something like 15 minutes later than usual. And a great deal of those 15 minutes are about politics. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy with this?

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. I have to start with Bill Belichick. I promise I won’t linger on that washed-up piece of driftwood for very long, but he serves as a useful, if minor, example. Here is Bill Belichick’s official website. It’s a terrible website. The design is so old that I half expected a pop-up alert telling me that I needed to download Flash. And the copy is so weak (example: "In 2000, Belichick led the Patriots to 20 winning seasons") that Belichick’s weird-ass girlfriend probably wrote it herself.

Last year, Defector’s operations geniuses submitted our annual Tip Jar drives for consideration in the Online Journalism Awards category of “Innovation in Revenue Strategy” for mid-size newsrooms. We did not win. The award instead went to the Kyiv Independent for “building a sustainable media business during war.” While we maintain that “sending David Roth to…