For a little while there, it looked like Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby was going to wriggle out of this jam. After committing the historically career-ending sin of gambling on his own team , he won a preliminary injunction against the NCAA , overturning their ruling that made him ineligible to play college football. When Texas Tech's embarrassing PR campaign wasn't enough to fend off further legal challenges from the NCAA and the Big 12, Sorsby decided to hit the eject button and head ...
about 2 hours ago
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Miami has been of two minds on the anti-aging serum that is Pat Riley for about a decade now, roughly since LeBron James pissed off back to Cleveland. This is mostly because 1) Riley was getting old, except of course facially, where he's been 45 since he was 20, and 2) because he didn't get another generational player to replace LeBron. The Miami Heat reached two NBA Finals in that intervening decade, as a five-seed and an eight-seed, with Jimmy Butler as their best player, and that is not not...
about 3 hours ago
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As if they were trying to win the 2019 NBA Championship seven years too late, the horrible Washington Wizards made two of the most interesting moves at the deadline last year, relieving the Dallas Mavericks of Anthony Davis in exchange for basically one good first-round pick, and taking Trae Young off the Atlanta Hawks' hands for some expiring contracts. Despite Young's considerable flaws , the deal was a fine one for the Wizards, since they didn't surrender any real assets, happily allowing t...
about 5 hours ago
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The first round of the NBA Draft is tonight! Who will go first overall? Will any of the top four teams deviate from consensus? In what order will the huge swarm of point guards go after the fourth pick? On this week's Nothing But Respect , we answer some of these questions, but we also get into larger-order matters of draft philosophy, scouting, and why draft people use such crazy language. Our guest this week was David Lee, the writer and analyst, not the former NBA All-Star.
We also discu...
about 5 hours ago
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Thanks to the luck of the draw and the blessing of the soccer gods, Monday was the second matchday of this World Cup in which all three of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland took the field in back-to-back-to-back matches. Thanks to sheer superhuman talent on display from the trio, Monday was also the second matchday of this World Cup in which all three of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland scored at least two goals each.
If the World Cup is a global celebration of ...
about 5 hours ago
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For half a century, a house on the coast in southern Lebanon has kept vigil over Al-Mansouri beach and the blue Mediterranean waters beyond. Mona Khalil's grandfather built the house in the 1970s, around seven miles from the border with Israel. A decade later, the Khalil family fled the Lebanese Civil War and left the house behind. Khalil eventually settled in the Netherlands and found work as a porcelain restorer. In 1999, on a visit to her grandparents' old home, Khalil walked along the shor...
about 6 hours ago
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If there is a funnier MLB broadcast duo than Jason Benetti and Andy Dirks, I am not familiar with their work. Regardless of how the Tigers are playing, you can guarantee that Benetti will arrive at the booth ready to pepper his play-by-play with clever one-liners, deep-cut references and an extended bit or two. Of all his rotating partners in his couple years calling Detroit baseball, the modest, folksy Dirks has proven the most able and game to follow along with Benetti and—perhaps occasional...
about 7 hours ago
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Waist Deep , the debut novel and international bestseller by Danish writer Linea Maja Ernst, reads like it's inspired equally by television sitcoms and A Midsummer Night's Dream . The premise of Waist Deep fits both genres, with an ensemble cast in a cinematic location: Five old friends from university, plus two partners, plus two children, all reunite at a summer house on a remote lake in Denmark for a week. The one where the gang gets back together!
Once everyone is there, the hosts, Kar...
about 8 hours ago
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It's over! The Milwaukee Bucks finally did it: Late Monday night, they picked the better of two competing offers and finally agreed to ship out differently gruntled superstar and franchise icon Giannis Antetokounmpo. That deal sent him to the Miami Heat in exchange for a blockbuster haul of players and draft picks.
It's been a long and torturous process for Antetokounmpo and the Bucks, who for the most part have enjoyed and profited by one another for 13 years now. Milwaukee, understandably...
about 8 hours ago
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In March, Vivian, an undocumented transgender sex worker from the state of Chiapas, Mexico, was driving from San Diego to her house in Santa Ana when her biggest fear came true: She was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a traffic checkpoint. "Thank God they let me go," she says.
But she fears one day they might not. Last year her friend Sadis was working at a hotel in Saddle Brook, N.J, when police attempted to detain her. "She jumped into an Uber to try to get away," Vivian...
about 9 hours ago
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After a few months of cheeky silence and misdirection, plus an experiment on the doubles court, Serena Williams is completing her comeback to professional tennis. The 44-year-old has accepted a wild card into the singles main draw at Wimbledon, which begins next week, causing the traditionally stodgy tournament to post heatedly about the occasion.
Williams retired from competition after a third-round appearance at the 2022 U.S. Open. Her first-round match at Wimbledon will mark her first pr...
The San Francisco Giants are a stinking cesspool of bad vibes and bad baseball. That is not the newsy part of this post.
Sure, the Giants' place in the standings (currently 15 games below .500) and the collection of petulant homophobes on the roster have given the public plenty of reason not to prod this smoldering heap of a franchise with a ten-foot pole. But the Giants seem determined to expose every part of their dysfunction, and will not rest until they have created a public nuisance to...
Fresh off reasserting his extraterrestrial talent by opening his sixth World Cup with a hat trick, Lionel Messi proved on Monday that he is in fact still human. Seven minutes into the match between Argentina and Austria, Lautaro Martínez sprinted through on goal only to be taken down by a pair of Austrian defenders. After a VAR review, the play was correctly called a penalty. Messi took the ball, placed it on the spot, and proceeded to do what he has done many times before: miss.
The failed...
Alan Greenspan died Monday . The longtime Fed chairman was once hailed as the most powerful man in the world . Greenspan was 100 years old.
Back to me: A couple of cool, smart, and nice D.C. friends of mine wrote a book that came out in the summer of 2009, and other cool, smart, and nice D.C. friends threw them a party. Some of the most powerful people in the city, meaning some of the most powerful people in the world, were invited. They also put me on the guest list. The invite said the pa...
Every international tournament, the widely used and abused "dark horse" designation is bandied about as pundits, fans, and cretins (gamblers) try to be the first to predict a deep run for an unexpected team. The term itself is vague enough to apply to about half the field, depending on one's own criteria. It fits a team that could be a sneaky knockout-stage qualifier from a tough group, it fits a small nation that could even win a knockout match, and it fits a surprise quarterfinalist.
Howe...
Things big and small are going bad for Donald Trump. He's losing bad enough on land and at sea in Iran, but worse at a pool back in D.C. One might say the growing algae debacle on the National Mall left him up shit's creek without a paddle, and so he had an Olympic canoer arrested.
Trump painted himself into an American Flag Blue corner with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, so somebody has to pay. Now arrests are being made. It's another sign of how far the republic has fallen that the...
The Father's Day crowd in downtown Detroit was likely unanimous in its disappointment that Keider Montero was on the hill for the Tigers. It's nothing personal against Keider, but until a few days prior, this game against the White Sox was looking far more momentous. Justin Verlander, finally healthy again, would be appearing for the first time at home in a Tigers uniform since he was traded to Houston in 2017.
Except Verlander wasn't quite healthy again. Despite a couple of rehab outings w...
Special solvers solve special crosswords. This week's puzzle was constructed by Erik Agard and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Erik is a crossword editor and would like to dedicate this puzzle to his dad John and brother Vince, the football fans of the family (left hand up!).
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 . The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games o...
Last week, the U.S. military killed eight people and stranded six others in three illegal boat strikes, bringing the total number of people killed by “Operation Southern Spear” to at least 215 . The ongoing campaign—allegedly targeting drug smuggling—has long ceased to be major news, fading, like so much else, into the constant background hum of inconceivable violence wrought by the current administration. Tracking the carnage is made easy by the military division that conducts the strikes, wh...
Brady Tkachuk will join his co-podcaster Matthew on the Mar-a-Lago Panthers. Let's address the hockey stuff first. A scary forward group gets even scarier, and more irritating to play against; there are no real soft spots or ceded shifts in the three top lines. After a lost season following two straight Cups, Florida figures to come back as strong as ever. This is a mixed bag depending on your tolerance for the Panthers.
The Panthers, who appear to have fully subscribed to the "fuck them pi...
On Sunday, Cape Verde scored one of the best and most meaningful goals of the 2026 World Cup. In the 21st minute of their group-stage game against historic powerhouse Uruguay, just the second World Cup game in the tiny archipelagic nation's history, midfielder Kevin Pina stood over a free kick from about 35 yards out. Having drawn 0-0 with Spain in their first World Cup game, the Blue Sharks were looking for their first-ever World Cup goal. Pina lined up his shot, blasted it through Uruguay's ...
There's really no such thing as a "team." If you've ever come across a guy in an Argentina jersey playing with a soccer ball at the park, and watched as he managed about three clumsy kick-ups before accidentally toe-poking it down a hill (by the way, next time you see me out like that, feel free to say hi!), then you too know that what matters in this game isn't the shirt itself, but the body inside it. As such, it's no surprise that the "Spain" that played Goliath in the monumental upset agai...
If there has been a worse performance in World Cup history than Tunisia's, be content. They still have one more chance to cement their place.
The Eagles of Carthage are already eliminated from the competition after failing to keep an audience against Japan last night somewhere along the Saturday/Sunday border, depending where you call home. But lots of teams get eliminated after two games; it is in the nature of the competition that this happens to the minnows of world football, like Haiti,...
Among the things COVID does not get credited for—and think of the last time you read that sentence—is the way it has helped bad baseball teams perfect the art of bottoming out. Since the pandemic made us more comfortable with the idea of catastrophes, we have seen the worst teams in the majors choose to be, or accidentally become, spectacularly awful.
Sadly, though, that may be coming to a temporary end. After all, on the theory that if you're going to stink, be a sewage plant explosion, 20...
We can cancel the last 66 games of the World Cup right now and fast forward to the final, because we've seen all we have a right to see. Put Curacao and Cape Verde in the final, make it The Revenge Of The Postage Stamp Nations and call it a win. The final may take three days before we get a goal, but that's still a far more economical system than the one we have.
Not that the other games haven't had their moments , mind you. It's actually been quite the dandy pigpile so far, with the big na...