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We are once again faced with a fake-ass work week, so things will be a little slow around here until Friday. Take this opportunity to amuse yourselves in an open thread!

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. The first round of the expanded playoff was, predictably, a bit of a dud. But hey, the second round is here and the games should get better, or at least we hope they will. The potential for blowouts still lurks, and who knows what effect a three-week break from football will have on some of these teams.

New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs has been charged with one count of felony strangulation or suffocation, and one count of misdemeanor assault and battery, according to Massachusetts court records. The charges were first reported by Boston 25 News. According to a police report, made public Tuesday by a judge and obtained by Boston media, a private chef who had been working for Diggs said he tried to choke her when they got in a fight earlier this month about money the chef believed she was owed. On Tuesday, Diggs's name appeared on the daily list for Dedham District Court, prompting today's news reports. At the hearing, a lawyer for Diggs, Michael DiStefano, asked a judge to seal the police report, Boston 25 reported, and added that a financial settlement was already in the works. The judge, per Boston 25, said she would make a decision soon and she was true to her word.

“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 dogshit 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.