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“I think this game is over,” said play-by-play announcer Elise Woodward during Monday night’s Michigan-Oregon women’s basketball game. You’re imagining, maybe, that an electric Syla Swords shooting night gave Michigan a 50-point lead at halftime, leaving Oregon head coach Kelly Graves with no choice but to yank his starters and wave the white flag of over-ness. A likely scenario. But Woodward said these words in a tie game with 5.2 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter. This would seem to be one of the least “over” situations ever. When Woodward said the game was over, she suspected this quarter had literally already ended, and that the game needed to be sent to overtime.  After close to 40 minutes of heinous free-throw shooting and long scoring droughts, Michigan and Oregon were tied at 69. The Ducks had clawed back from a 16-point hole at halftime to tie the game with 1:30 left, and it would stay that way as the teams frantically exchanged misses. The Wolverines defended well enough to force a long and doomed Oregon possession so that Michigan got the ball back with 21 seconds left. After they’d dribbled the clock down to 12 and taken a timeout, Michigan began a long and doomed possession of their own. Swords tried breaking down a defender with 5.2 seconds left, to little success. She was left to heave something up with 5.2 seconds left. Her teammate Te’Yala Delfosse grabbed the offensive rebound with 5.2 seconds left, and got her own putback attempt up with 5.2 seconds left, at which point someone finally realized the clock had stopped at 5.2 seconds. 

SAN JOSE, Calif. — When the podcasters arrived, they bypassed the wide talk show armchairs. Instead, they sat at the edge of the stage, heads barely above the crowd of adoring fans in front of them, and let their legs dangle. It was as if we were all hanging out in their living room.  Tobin Heath and Christen Press, the just-retired American soccer stars, were doing a live taping of their podcast, The RE—CAP Show. Following the show, fans would have the opportunity to take a photo with the pair at a meet-and-greet. The show was in an industrial bar and event space in downtown San Jose called the Guildhouse, which the banking brand Ally had taken over for NWSL Championship weekend and dubbed "Ally House." A rotating cast of women's soccer-media figures held free-to-attend events there, and this one, taking place just hours before the match, was packed to the brim. 

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking LLMs, bandwagon fans, and more. Hello! Drew is still on vacation, so I will be fielding your questions this week. How fun! 

If the commenters of this site and also the Defector Twitch chat are to be believed, I have many problems, but there's one that haunts me every single day: I am terrible at finishing video games. Just an absolutely dog shit completionist, that's what I am. I played a lot of games in 2025, thanks both to how I am as a person and also The Backlog, which forced me to power through games when I felt the itch to start something else. I'm proud of that effort: I finished every Backlog game but one, which was so average that I simply could not force myself to spend any more hours on it; that game is on the list below. Aside from the games I finished for The Backlog, though, I only finished one game all year. That game was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, winner of a ton of end-of-year awards and subject of excruciating discourse. (I also wrote about that game, and I won't pretend the allure of a complete blog wasn't a big part of me finishing it; it was also just a really good game). Other than that, though, by a rough tally of my libraries on my Switch, PS5, and PC, I started 26 games this year that I did not finish.

If you can name just one current college hockey player, I bet it's freshman Penn State winger Gavin McKenna. After carving up the ice with the Medicine Hat Tigers and establishing himself as the likely top prize of the 2026 NHL draft lottery, the kid from the Yukon moved to the Big Ten, where he was expected to play one impressive year before signing with whichever bad pro team got the luckiest. He's a little on the small side, though he literally just turned 18, but McKenna's wowed scouts with fantastic production at the WHL level, finesse skating, and brilliant playmaking when the puck is on his stick. At Penn State, however, there's been a bit of an adjustment in expectations. McKenna's picked up four goals and 14 assists across 16 games, so he's certainly having a very good season by most standards. But there are new questions about how much McKenna can impact the game when he's not working magic with possession, and against the toughest competition that the NCAA can muster—namely Michigan and Michigan State—he's suffered through some outright bad nights. There's nothing entirely alarming about one of the youngest kids on the ice facing adversity at a new level, but the team that falls into the No. 1 pick next year will surely want to take a long, long look at the more aggressive Swedish winger Ivar Stenberg and the prototypical top defenseman at North Dakota, Keaton Verhoeff, even if they pull the trigger on McKenna in the end.

Told one way, the story of Major League Baseball's steroid era is a fairly simple tale: Jose Canseco and the sluggers of the 1990s ate the forbidden fruit, forcing their peers and competitors to cheat. The alternative, for anyone who wanted to make a living playing baseball, was oblivion, and the poor owners were made fools of by the evil players who dared besmirch the honor of the game by juicing. That's an oversimplification, and it ignores the critical labor context directly preceding and setting the stage for the '90s. On this episode of Only If You Get Caught, we tell the story of the steroid era through the labor history of baseball. The 1994–95 strike set the stage for the now-shameful feats that came after, and I argue that those twinned ruptures were the products of baseball's labor and management classes' continual warfare over the preceding decades. It's a big story, and I was lucky enough to be joined by Tim Marchman, formerly our boss at Deadspin, currently Wired's director of politics, science, and security, and always a baseball knower extraordinaire.

Marty Supreme’s title card is a stream of sperm swimming up a vaginal canal. They fertilize an egg, which becomes a white Marty Supreme ping-pong ball and soars down toward a primordial green table. Ball is life, indeed!  The progenitor of said sperm, 23-year-old Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), has just slept with his childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) in the storeroom of his uncle’s shoe store. Marty is already an international ping-pong star, but ping-pong doesn’t pay the bills, so meanwhile he lives rent-free with his mother (Fran Drescher) and Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman), slings wingtips, and has an affair with the married Rachel. He’s slated to compete in the 1952 British Open, but Murray owes him $700 in pay that will get him to London. To secure it, he stages an armed robbery of his coworker Lloyd (Ralph Colucci), the first of many escalating schemes to fund his table tennis career and, more immediately, his bid for the 1952 World Championship in Tokyo.

This week, like so many of you, the co-hosts of Nothing But Respect went to the movies and saw Marty Supreme. We both liked it a lot, and found that it resonated with many discursive strands both within and adjacent to the basketball universe, so we decided to build an episode around talking about it. We invited movie critic and podcaster Eddie Averill on for what wound up being a pretty fun, arguably relevant episode. There are mild spoilers, but it's less a detailed run-through of the plot and more an NBR-style vibe discussion.

This is what the Defector staff enjoyed eating in 2025. Objectively Mid Sichuan In Grenoble

The Colts did it. After beginning the season with a record of 8–2, Indianapolis has now been eliminated from the playoffs. It's a pretty exclusive circle of hell, where they've landed: Since 1990, when the NFL playoffs expanded to 12 teams, only three teams have missed the field after such a strong start, and it certainly goes without saying that the Colts are the first to manage this fall since the playoffs expanded further, to 14 teams, in 2020. Fate pulled some incredible horseshit to produce this outcome, without even getting into Indianapolis's miserable quarterback situation: The Colts' ongoing losing streak, run to six games after Sunday's 23–17 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, coincides with a combined 15 consecutive wins (!) by the two teams now ahead of them in the AFC South. The universe wanted to be absolutely clear about this: The Colts could not be allowed to carry so much as a vague waft of relevance into the new year. One fellow who is not going to let this wretched and historic collapse ruin his good time is old man Philip Rivers. "Other than us not winning," said an upbeat Rivers after his team's latest loss, "it's been an absolute blast for three weeks." Included in that "blast" was Rivers tossing a horrible fourth-quarter interception Sunday that eventually set up Jacksonville's go-ahead field goal. The pick cannot really be described as any very serious form of "backbreaking," for the simple reason that the Colts were officially eliminated from playoff contention Saturday, when the Houston Texans beat the Chargers in Los Angeles. That Rivers, who was already old by professional-athlete standards when he retired way back in 2021, was even out there Sunday, slinging it around for the no-hope Colts, is a kind of personal moral victory. "It's been absolutely awesome," insisted Rivers Sunday afternoon. I'm not sure the satisfaction and delight are quite shared by those teammates of his who were around before the beginning of this hateful second-half swoon.