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Rayan Cherki is not the best soccer player in the world. In fact, he's not even a locked-in, sure-fire starter for either of the two teams he currently plays for, Manchester City and France. But though there are certainly several other players who make a bigger, more consistent impact on their teams' performances, I don't think anyone in the sport today can match the volume of spine-tingling, head-smacking, astonishment-inducing plays Cherki so effortlessly produces when he is on his game. Because I decided to spend my Sunday afternoon watching Barcelona Femení dropkick the remaining teeth out of Real Madrid's skull, I had to miss the France vs. Colombia friendly that started at the same time. While I do not regret my choice, it was a shame that my viewing of the latest gruesome Clásico beatdown meant I couldn't also get to see the much more elegant display in Maryland. Aside from the cackling Blaugrana fans, almost every tweet I scrolled past during that aforementioned time slot on Sunday featured messages of almost coital bliss inspired by how France was playing, and specifically what Cherki was doing. Though I was bummed not to see the Cherki show live, in a match that ended in a comprehensive 3-1 France win, I knew I'd have a individual compilation to sink my teeth in later, and neither the comp makers nor Cherki himself disappointed. https://twitter.com/datafutebol/status/2038371321470488709

The phrase "31-0 run" in basketball might trigger visions of rhapsodic, jogo bonito ball movement, virtuosic shooting, and impregnable defense. The actual 31-0 run achieved by the Toronto Raptors on Sunday looked a little more ordinary than that. If there was anything spectacular on display, it was the incompetence of the team on the receiving end: the Orlando Magic, who have now lost seven of their last eight games as they slip into play-in territory. In truth, it requires both the goodness of one team and badness of another to produce such a historic event. The Raptors' 31-0 run was the largest of the NBA's play-by-play era, which began with the 1997-98 season. They would only build on that run to win 139-87, delivering the worst loss in Magic franchise history. Give Toronto precisely as much credit as they deserve. They are ranked fifth in the league by defensive rating, and they're a strong team on that side of the floor even when missing one of their best defenders, the faintly Draymondian rookie Collin Murray-Boyles, as they were last night. Scottie Barnes is a rare gem who, during this game, accumulated 100 blocks and 100 steals in a season, the first to do so since Andre Drummond in 2018-19. The Raptors employ one of the more aggressive schemes in the league, and they applied brutal ball pressure on Orlando, mixing in sudden traps, too. But this defense is not so special that it should ever look quite this difficult for an NBA team to advance the ball past halfcourt in a late-March game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s5jyRggscc

Formula 1 has a qualifying problem. This, the FIA acknowledges—that the new power unit regulations have resulted in unfortunate and confusing qualifying laps in which the cars physically cannot go, by some definitions, "as fast as possible." The actual racing, however, is more in dispute. At the Chinese GP two weeks ago, the new engine specifications and overtake mode were a considerable success for racing; by the fickle nature of F1, the Japanese Grand Prix this Sunday proved that they are a disaster. One crash is all it takes. The issues in racing, too, stem from the new power unit regulations. While power units under previous rule sets were also hybridized, this year's have shifted from a roughly 85-15 percentage split in provided power between the internal combustion engine (ICE) and electric motor (MGU-K, which alternately charges or deploys battery energy) to a 50-50 split. To get into the nitty gritty numbers, cars can regenerate roughly 8.5 MJ of energy over the course of a lap—that is, roughly 8.5 MJ of energy, as the precise amount varies depending on track, session, and race state—but can only store up to 4 MJ of energy at any given time. F1 cars, then, have to deploy and recharge battery at optimal points over the course of a lap, whether on the straights or in the corners. (As always, Chain Bear has a helpful video visualization of the phenomenon.) Combined, this battery cycle and power split has resulted in some funky and fresh issues: superclipping, energy starvation, and software-dependent energy deployment. Ordinarily, hybrid engines recharge their batteries in braking zones, where the MGU-K converts the kinetic energy of the car into electric energy. The MGU-K can also be programmed to steal power from the ICE to charge the battery while the car is still at full throttle on a straight, resulting in a massive drop in straight-line speed—the dreaded superclipping phenomenon.

In the supermarket or at the taco truck, whether it's government subsidies for agriculture or the working conditions of food workers, food and politics are never far apart. Under the second Trump administration, the government has used food stamps as a political football, showing a willingness to expose poorer Americans to malnutrition to score political points. ICE agents have kidnapped street vendors in Los Angeles, leaving hot dogs sizzling on unattended griddles. As of this writing, American attacks on Iran make fertilizer much more expensive for American farmers, since not just oil but also fertilizer ingredients must transit the Strait of Hormuz. And, of course, food prices in American supermarkets continue to climb, in part due to tariffs whose legality and constitutionality seems dubious. Between January 2025 and January 2026, the average cost of ground beef went up from $5.54 per pound to $6.75, even as Donald Trump, in his State of the Union address, insisted that the price of beef is going down. This is the most Americans have ever paid for their hamburgers, and yet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is urging all Americans to eat more meat.  The Trump administration seems to break new things every week. The things Kennedy has helped to break so far include our collective herd immunity by vaccination, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention itself, firing thousands of employees there. He has now moved on to breaking our understanding of the relationship between food, personal health, and collective health. Kennedy's interest in meat—he has stated that he eats a "carnivore" diet consisting of meat and fermented foods like sauerkraut, fasts intermittently, and touches no processed foods—is so larded with symbolism and minimally marbled with facts that it deserves special attention. Insisting on meat, to the point of recommending offal if we cannot buy steak, RFK Jr. has also unearthed that well-known diagram, the food pyramid, which was abandoned under the Obama administration in 2011 and replaced with a plate subdivided into types of foods. But this new pyramid is flipped: Grains are at the pyramid’s tiny pointed bottom, and meat, along with vegetables, is at the broad top. If Kennedy's offal advice is a comic turn, the inverted food pyramid attempts to institutionalize the MAHA dietary agenda with potentially serious consequences.

Here's one mark of a legendary highlight: You can show it to someone who hasn't seen a minute of the sport in years, with no explanatory context, and get a reaction that's something like, "Wow!" Such is the case with UConn's Braylon Mullins and his shot to beat Duke in the Elite Eight. Everything about the play itself and the production around it felt practically scripted for maximum excitement, all in the span of half a minute. https://bsky.app/profile/cjzero.bsky.social/post/3miac26ffqk2l To start, even the uninformed knows that Duke are the bad guys, so that's helpful. But if you're stepping into this highlight with no prior context—as fans will be doing for years to come as they cue up "March Madness shots but they get increasingly more insane" Youtube videos—Ian Eagle tells you the situation immediately after the made free throw, without forcing you to study the scoreboard. "72-70 Duke. Ten seconds to go."

Desperate times call for desperate measures, which of course means that Tottenham Hotspur and John Tortorella are in the news simultaneously. Sadly, their paths do not converge, or anyway do not yet converge, beyond the fact that Spurs have fired another coach in their Salute To Catastrophe season, and Torts got another coaching job in a different sport, on a different continent. But we must live in hope when hope feels like a pointless exercise. You know, like five days out of every seven. Spurs are a cavalcade of garbage all their own, which is why Igor Tudor lasted barely six weeks before the toe tag was applied, but Torts getting pulled off television to coach the last eight games of the Vegas Golden Knights' regular season plus whatever playoff stint they can steal is its own tale, and worth telling in its own right. Within it is a bet that the team that won the Stanley Cup three years ago and has missed the playoffs only once in its entire existence desperately needs a swift boot up the jacksey. And whatever else can be said about him, and there is a lot, nobody is better booted that Torts.

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Rafael Musa and Owen Bergstein, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. 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. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1. 

Barry: The first dedicated reliever entrance song was, of all things, "(Won't You Come Home) Bill Bailey," played on the ballpark organ. This is absolutely true. Betty Boop probably loved it, and there was a pun involved, which I must respect—the pitcher’s name was Bill Dailey—but it did not rock. Sparky Lyle, one of the first and best proto-closers, used “Pomp and Circumstance”—the graduation song. If it’s good enough for Randy Savage it’s good enough for me. But again, it did not rock. Baseball rocking was only invented in 1998, when Padres closer Trevor Hoffman began coming out to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells.” All of which is to say that the entirety of baseball history and music history have been leading to this moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HuM8_CJ2RU

Even with all the testing data from the minor leagues and spring training, it was hard not to wonder how MLB’s new automated ball-strike challenge system would feel in big league games that count. When would teams use their challenges? Who would use them? How often? Might we see a hotheaded pitcher go rogue, burning his team’s precious challenge in a fit of rage?  The potential entertainment value of ABS, though, was something I didn’t question. For one thing, it ends up being a rather tidy rule change. Unlike, say, basketball reviews that have refs clustered at the monitors for eons, an ABS challenge is resolved in something like 15 seconds max. (MLB’s study of the challenge system in spring training last year showed that it added only about a minute to the average game.) Tennis fans can also attest to the great spectacle that was the old Hawk-Eye challenge system, the crowd slow-clapping in unison as they waited for the animated tennis ball to streak across the rendering on the scoreboard and deliver the result.  The slow clap hasn’t caught on yet in America’s ballparks, but the crowd is still having some fun with this new addition to the game. Under the ABS challenge system, a team begins each game with two challenges. If a player gets an umpire’s call overturned, their team retains the challenge. In effect, this means a team has unlimited challenges until they get two wrong. So a team on a challenging heater can really show up an umpire who’s off his game. C.B. Bucknor, one of MLB’s longest-tenured umps and one of its least accurate, found this out for himself behind home plate in the sixth inning of Saturday’s altogether weird Red Sox-Reds game, when Eugenio Suárez successfully challenged his way out of two would-be third strikes on back-to-back pitches. 

UConn freshman Braylon Mullins watched his last shot Sunday night arc toward the basket from 35 feet away. If his eyes had been shut, he still would've known, not only from the pandemonium of the crowd and the euphoria of his teammates, but from the wonderful knife-plunge noise of a swish from great distance. Chuh! That's the best sound basketball has to offer. It's very much like the sound of Michael Myers jamming a large blade into someone's chest, which is fitting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWfmFK3lsag The shot completed an incredible second-half comeback for UConn. Its win sends the Huskies through to the Final Four, for the third time in four years, and it sends the top-seeded Duke Blue Devils to hell. The shot also should not have happened. Duke had the ball up two points with exactly 10 seconds left on the clock. Because a 10-second violation is not really a danger under these circumstances—you can afford the turnover if as a result the ball is going to your opponent on a side-out with some tiny fraction of a second left on the clock—Duke accomplished everything it needed from the possession the moment they escaped UConn's frenzied first trap. The Huskies were just planning to foul a Duke player before too much time had run off, and were prepared to hope for that Blue Devil to miss a free throw. "That was kind of the whole goal," recalled Mullins, a bussin' teenager who will now be remembered forever as a hero of March. "But then they made a little mistake."