NowLoop

Two NFL players were arrested in recent days as part of domestic violence criminal cases. On Monday night, Rams offensive lineman Alaric Jackson was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of felony domestic violence, first reported by NBC4. Earlier on Monday, Broncos outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper entered a plea of not guilty in a Colorado court after he was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence. Jackson was arrested at his San Fernando Valley home, NBC4 reported. Police sources told the TV station that Jackson and a woman got in a verbal fight and, when Jackson believed the woman was recording him, he tried to take her phone out of her hand. Per NBC4, "investigators said the woman had scratch marks on her arms." The Los Angeles district attorney's office told the Los Angeles Times it was reviewing the Jackson case. Jackson previously was suspended for two games in 2024 for a violation of the NFL's personal conduct policy. At the time, no specifics were given by the league or team about the nature of the violation. A year later, a woman sued Jackson saying he had filmed her without her consent while they were having sex. In her lawsuit, the woman said she told the NFL what happened. The case was dismissed with prejudice at the request of the woman and Jackson.

The World Cup is continuing to suck, and here’s the latest reason why: CBP goons denied referee Omar Artan entry into the U.S., where he was set to become the first-ever Somali to officiate a World Cup game. Artan arrived in Miami on Saturday to attend a mandatory training hub for the tournament’s 140 officials. (Because all on-pitch refs have to stay at the base in Florida, he can’t just go to Canada or Mexico to officiate matches.) Instead of allowing him through, however, immigration officials interrogated Artan for 11 hours before locking him in a holding cell for several more. Then they put him on a flight to Istanbul without providing a reason for his denied entry. Since then, CBP cited vague “vetting concerns” in an official statement. As a result, Artan will not fulfill what he says is “the biggest dream” of his life at the 2026 World Cup, despite the Confederation of African Football naming him as their top male official last year. FIFA regards Artan like they do most of the fans, players, and professionals who populate their World Cup: They could not give less of a shit about him. They deferred responsibility for his detention and ejection to “host country immigration processes” which the organization is “not involved in.” Artan is out, and they will not lift a finger to challenge that.

Blocks of "frozen zones" established by NYPD barricades. Roaming cops and security forces corralling people onto the sidewalk or standing around like an unspoken threat. Leaders' allusions to potential danger so they can justify the militarized spectacle they have set up on the street. The husk of the community that was building up where the police now stand. Game 3 of the NBA Finals really took me back to my college days. What I hope remains the lowest point of my life came the morning after the raid on Hind's Hall at Columbia University. On April 30, 2024, I ran from the SRG officers that had stormed onto my college campus to unleash brutal force on students both inside and outside the gates. Afterwards, I waited until the early morning on the sidewalk of 1 Police Plaza for my friends to be released, and I sat with fellow students trying to make sense of what we had experienced. When I emerged from the subway at 116th that morning, I was greeted by the same barricades, the same police officers, the same lines of cop cars down my block as the night before. As if the previous night never happened. What started as an extravagant use of force became a normal part of student life. I had to swipe an ID to get into the gates of campus, leave for class earlier so as not to get stuck in security lines, sign in out-of-town guests just so we could sit on the steps, and keep lists of ways to sneak onto campus if I didn’t want to be tracked by ID swipes and security cameras. I couldn't walk across Columbia's brick paths without the eerie, disturbing awareness that I was being watched.

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Over the last eight years or so, no team has been better than England at establishing a gap between the anticipation created by the overabundance of talent on its rosters and the excitement created by actually watching that roster play soccer. The results have been fitting: a loss in the semifinals at the 2018 World Cup, losses in the final at the Euros in 2020 and 2024, and a quarterfinals flameout at the 2022 World Cup. If you're an England fan, or just someone who wants to see great soccer players do cool stuff, the Three Lions' performances in those tournaments would have really ground your gears. One of the most talent-rich countries in the world set aside concepts like "attacking" and "having fun" to deploy a cagier, more structured style that is meant to be more suited to international competitions. All that strategy has yielded so far is underachievement that is also shit to watch.

So you think Jacob Misiorowski is a big deal, do you? The next big thing in ball, you say? The scourge of hitters now and for years to come? Yeah, well, let's see you do it in Vegas. Throw a hundred on a hot, dry, hundred-degree night in a Triple-A park. Then we'll talk, big shot. He won't get the chance, sadly, so we won't know for at least a year and maybe several. The new face of Milwaukee Brewers baseball doesn't pitch again until Friday at home against Philadelphia, which means he will miss the brand new and objectively hilarious experience of pitching in a big league game in Nevada in 2026. Yes, one game is a small sample size, but this was one hell of a loud sample. Ask Jeff Levering, one of the Brewers' TV broadcasters, who described A's Jonah Heim's game-ending fly ball with relief as "a popup." Or Brewers catcher William Contreras, who tapped his glove in triumph on that play. Or pitcher Aaron Ashby, who dropped his head and prepared to accept congratulations on his 10th relief win of the season. They were all wrong. They were wrong because Heim hadn't actually ended the game at all; that popup just kept on carrying in the desert air, and became a homer that tied the game up at 14-14 in the 10th. It was a homer that could not have happened in any big-league park, but because the A's were house-sitting for the Triple-A Aviators, it happened. And, once again, it tied the game at 14-14. 14-14!

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 60 Minutes, LLMs, sandwiches, great history class movies, and more. Your letters: Kevin:

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Every country heading into the World Cup faces pressure, but not in equal amounts. For a side like Brazil, who hasn't won the World Cup in an unacceptable 24 years and hasn't even made it to the semis in either of the last two tournaments, the pressure can be suffocating. That's the type of pressure Argentina had heading into 2022, but thanks to one of the greatest soccer matches of all time coming out in Argentina's favor, the level of pressure heading into the 2026 edition has to be at a decades-long low.

The National Hockey League is no more prone to imitation than any other species of parrot, particularly when something that seems counterintuitive works out well. It is for that reason and that reason only that the news out of Edmonton this day is not as gobsmacking at it seems. Wait, Edmonton? What the hell does Edmonton have to do with anything, and why should it pull one's attention from what may be the most weirdly compelling Stanley Cup Finals in decades? Well, grab some pine, meat, and belt up, because we have finally reached the throbbing nucleus of organizational WTF-ness. While the Final is in Vegas and being minded by noted former-and-future head coach John Tortorella, the Oilers are about to hire Mike Babcock, the Captain Philip Francis Queeg of coaches, who is noted in the distant past for guiding championship teams in Detroit and noted more recently for destroying his reputation through a series of bizarre psychological gambits against players that helped get him fired from one job and forced him to resign from another. And because hockey management is an inward-facing phenomenon along the lines of the Habsburg dynasty, the Babcock hire ties directly into these Finals. In other words, you couldn't make this up, and if you could, you should check into a mushroom detox center.

In October 2024, a few months before Heated Rivalry was greenlit by studio producers in Canada, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was adapting the popular hockey romance book series Off Campus. Set at a fictional Ivy League school called “Briar University,” author Elle Kennedy's series follows four rakish men’s hockey players on the Briar U team as they meet the women who convince them to commit to a relationship. With Amazon Prime Video already riding a wave of romance show success with The Summer I Turned Pretty, optioning Kennedy’s Off Campus made sense. Around 2023, hockey romance, a niche subset of the romance genre, began to surge in popularity on BookTok. Romance readers everywhere became obsessed—some to the point that they started showing up to NHL games and borderline sexually harassing players during warmups. It seemed like every other day, some romance imprint was announcing yet another hockey romance novel, often taking gleeful advantage of the punny titling opportunities offered by the word “puck.” Kennedy was one of the early pioneers of hockey romance, publishing the first book in the series, The Deal, in 2015. The series has sold millions of copies, and like Netflix’s Bridgerton, each book focuses on a different hockey player on the Briar team, which makes for an easy book-per-season cadence.  I read The Deal in high school, and learned that Kennedy’s writing has all the markers of a 2010s heterosexual romance that leaves you feeling like you might have sent the women’s rights movement back by a decade. She also doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of how and when NHL prospects are drafted, which irked me. Garrett Graham, the main love interest in The Deal, is hailed as a top college player and he spends a lot of time thinking about how he’ll declare for the draft after his senior year of college—which doesn’t make sense because he would lose draft eligibility by age 20.

Spencer Pratt will not be the mayor of Los Angeles. There should be no need to utter this sentence, much like “You do not have to swallow a rhino whole, tonight” or “Human shit will not rain down from the sky.” Well, of course not. Should I have been worried about that?  According to more than a few self-styled Serious Thinkers—perhaps still haunted by the shock they experienced on the night of Nov. 8, 2016—who insisted on treating Pratt’s mayoral primary run as a legitimate rebuke of status quo politics: Yes. The Free Press worked harder than anyone has ever worked before to imbue Pratt's candidacy with a sense of “woke Democrats just might lose because of woke” verve.   https://bsky.app/profile/passantino.bsky.social/post/3mnqlfoemb42g