NowLoop

The New Orleans Pelicans are 0-6 to start the season. Of those six losses, three have been by at least 30 points. No team in NBA history has accumulated three 30-point losses this early in a season. The Pelicans rank 27th in offensive rating and 29th in defensive rating. They are playing "an unserious brand of basketball," longtime Pelicans reporter Will Guillory decreed Sunday evening. The players "seem to have given up on" head coach Willie Green, per Rod Walker at NOLA.com, who wondered if the coach's time was up. Green, the coach since 2021 and a holdover from a previous front-office regime, nevertheless kept his job during the offseason, which would have been the most natural time to replace him.

One of the underrated aspects of the last few years of Miami football is that, with the decline of UF and Florida State, the Hurricanes have in-state recruiting locked down. For the most part, this has paid dividends. Miami regularly boasts a slew of first-round NFL talent on both sides of the ball, and those players have driven this new era of Miami football. After an excellent couple months to start the season, hopes were high that The U might really be The U again. But now that November is here, they've reverted to type, getting themselves in position for something great only to blow it. Even in these respectable years, Miami can't quite get over the hump. Or even the hump before the hump. On Saturday, Miami lost another game to an ACC opponent—this time, SMU—that they were expected to beat by nearly two touchdowns. To SMU's credit, Rhett Lashlee has made this team a tough out, and unlike Miami, they've been to a playoff before. But after a dramatic loss to Louisville a couple weeks back, Miami needed a flawless end to the regular season in order to control their playoff destiny. The fact that they now have two losses on their record, and very well could lose more, means Miami's playoff chances are starting to circle the drain.

Eleven years ago, when I was a college sophomore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I made an impromptu drive to Detroit with four friends for the express purpose of seeing Max Scherzer. It was his final home start as a Tiger, and while I'd be lying if I said I remembered much of the game itself—I have a sharper recall of learning in the parking lot that Derek Jeter had walked it off in his last Yankee Stadium AB—what sticks with me most is that we'd made the effort. And somewhere along the line, I bound myself to Scherzer for the remainder of his career, even as that career took him out of Detroit. He would leave in free agency for the Nationals. A 2014 playoff blowout at the hands of the Orioles and an ensuing three-game sweep would be the final playoff series for the Tigers for a decade. The last time I saw him, and the last time my hometown team was good, were tied together in my brain.

So after nine weeks of the NFL season, give or take a shared and very valid dread at the condemned warehouse that is the Cardinals-Cowboys Monday night matchup, we can all agree that the only thing we can all agree on is that Dan Quinn really filled his trousers by not taking Jayden Daniels out of last night's lost cause of a Seahawks-Commanders game. It is a rare point of consensus in a season that has mostly been unsettled and uneasy—it is indeed suboptimal to have your starting quarterback/franchise future mangle his elbow trying to make a play he doesn't need to make late in a game his team is losing by four and a half scores. But that's the only thing on which there is anything remotely close to universal agreement; everything else in this year's NFL can be considered day-to-day and highly questionable. Baseball fans can snark away in the direction of their Dodgers-shaped straw man, basketball fans can opt in to All Wemby All The Time, and college football will always be able to find that get-your-ass-off-our-campus energy every Saturday, but the NFL has no galvanizing player or team at this moment. The best teams are all vulnerable, and not just because the odd coach will occasionally forget that there aren't any 32-point plays.

Manchester City has five players who have scored exactly one goal this Premier League season: Matheus Nunes, Phil Foden, Rayan Cherki, Tijjani Reijnders, and Nico O'Reilly. That makes for a five-way tie for third-most goals for the club, behind Burnley's Maxime Estève, whose two own goals on Sep. 27 rank second on the Manchester City Goal Sources Rankings. In first place? That would be Erling Haaland, whose 13 goals are far and away not just the most on Manchester City, but more than double the next highest mark in the Premier League (Brentford's Igor Thiago, Brighton's Danny Welbeck, Bournemouth's Antoine Semenyo, and Crystal Palace's Jean-Philippe Mateta are all tied for second with six goals each). Haaland has been pretty much the entire Manchester City attack, as he demonstrated again with a 16-minute brace on Sunday against Bournemouth in City's 3-1 win, which helped the club keep within range of high-flying Arsenal at the top of the league.

Imagine you muster up the courage to finally do that thing you've been meaning to do. It's hard enough to overcome your own momentum to get out of the house, but once you've made the leap you might be confronted by the reality of a thousand unspoken rules and norms you never considered. One of the most stressful parts of trying anything new is the unspoken world of context and rules that people seem to just know. When Josh Gondelman told me he wanted to play pickup basketball for his episode, I was fixated on the unspoken norms that underpin the idea. I have never played in a pickup basketball game, and I don't really have any desire to start now. But how the hell does someone learn what "first to 11 by ones and twos, call your fouls" means?

There is only one possible silver lining to facing down a 31-point deficit in the fourth quarter of a football game, and that is the opportunity to get your young, recently injured franchise quarterback off the field before anything bad can happen to him. Washington Commanders head coach Dan Quinn failed to understand this during Sunday night's 38-14 loss to the Seahawks, and now another football season in Washington, D.C. has died in the dirt. With 12:30 left in the game, Quinn kept starting quarterback Jayden Daniels in and watched him drive the Commanders down the field in pursuit of a meaningless consolation score. On the 10th play of the drive, Daniels faked a handoff at the Seahawks' 2-yard line and took off for the end zone. He was sacked while sprinting to his right, and reportedly dislocated his elbow as he hit the ground. The replay angle of the injury is fairly gruesome, so view it at your own risk.

This puzzle was constructed by Hannah Binney, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hannah is a crossword constructor living in Cambridge, Mass. She began constructing in 2020, and she has had puzzles appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Universal, AVCX, and Puzzmo. When not constructing crosswords, Hannah is a particle physicist.  She has an orange cat named Julius. 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. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1.

Baseball makes you feel bad. I don't mean that in a literate sense ripping off Bart Giamatti's lede, the sense of dreading a sullen winter spent longing for the sensory pleasures of the game. I mean that baseball at its best, when the beats are on rhythm and when the high notes are hit, can be downright torture to watch. At the most stressful moments, the time between pitches allows you a regular moment to be alone with your agony—to bite fingernails or breathe shallowly or pace your living room. Then the pitch is delivered, and there's just enough time to hope or fear, but, likely as not, a ball is fouled off and you get to do it all again. And again and again and again. Sometimes, several unexpected bonus innings of it. Heart disease as a hobby. Whoever invented baseball had a cruel streak. Whoever enjoys it has a touch of masochism. If your team wins, the bad memories dissipate. This is a favor from the brain, a thank-you for the dopamine. Dodgers fans won't long be able to truly recall how they felt in the interstices of Game 7. They'll remember the triumphs big and small that broke the stretches of torment, and the elation that followed, but the rest of it will fade. Most teams, however, don't get to win—not the big one, anyway. Most fans get to sit with their what-ifs for the winter and, if they're unlucky enough to have a team good enough to raise their hopes and successful enough to reach October where true heartbreak grows, they'll sit with it for the rest of their lives. Few fans have it worse here than Blue Jays fans.

You can take your World Series and push it up your tush. The NFL delivers excitement similar to that of the high-stakes, edge-of-your-seat extra-inning baseball the Blue Jays and Dodgers gave us last week. To see the heroics of Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto or even Miguel Rojas, you have to stay up late or risk missing out something incredible (with Ray Ratto deservedly putting salt on your wound). But to see the heroics of Caleb Williams or Joe Flacco, you just need to have a free Sunday afternoon. The Bears and Bengals played a funny, fascinating, fantastic game. Next up: Dinner. Deep dish pizza, maybe. Now let me yell at you: What were you possibly doing that you didn’t watch a Week 9 football game between two crap teams on a Sunday afternoon? It is no excuse that the game aired mostly in states that border the Great Lakes. The Bears' 47-42 win over the Bengals was tremendous.