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 about flawed domes, office condiments, life on one leg, and more.
Your letters:
Baron:
This is card No. 1 from the first season of officially licensed, Fanatics-owned, Topps-branded NFL cards. And it brings all the awesome enshittification we’ve come to expect from the company that swallowed sports. I almost don’t know where to start, but, for one thing, the answer to the trivia question is listed as “hlndianapolis.” And what’s up with that stat line entirely comprised of “N/A?” Why even include that? Do we think this a product of AI? Or was it actually done by humans, just with Fanatics-level quality control?
Of course that card was Powered By AI™. Why would Michael Rubin, perhaps the worst person in sports right now, pay humans to design his shoddy wares when he can just ask GorfGPX to do it for him? AI is a tool for lazy people, and nothing screams “I didn’t want to work on this!” more than a piece of Fanatics merchandise
A group of pissed-off sports fans actually attempted to sue Rubin and Fanatics—which now owns Topps trading cards—for violating antitrust laws. Their case was ultimately dismissed by a judge, and do you know why? Because none of the plaintiffs named in the suit had actually purchased any trading cards from Fanatics when they had claimed having done so in their complaint. In other words, these fans were undone in court by their own sense of good taste. And also lying, but I still support their case, because fuck Fanatics.
Ben:
I had a medical emergency in February that resulted in my right leg being amputated above the knee. I have a prosthetic and have been going to physical therapy to relearn how to walk. It is soul-crushingly hard for me in ways that are hard to describe. One of the therapists is a BRO who loves to talk about himself. He spent 10 minutes a while back talking about making a teacher cry back when he was a student, and is still gleeful about it decades later. I’ve gotten to dread going to therapy knowing he’s gonna be there, which makes the therapy that much more difficult. Is it worth it trying to find another therapy place or should I just suffer through it?
First of all, holy shit. Second of all, I wish you the best possible recovery, Ben. Third of all, find a new PT. I have far more experience with physical therapy than I would prefer, so I know of what I speak. I’ve had to get PT after three different back surgeries, for bladder issues, and after brain surgery. That last one involved me re-learning how to walk again, much like you. It was punishing work that made me very cranky, but I stuck with it because I was in the care of therapists who knew what they were doing and had good bedside manners.
Most important, those PTs spent our sessions focused exclusively on helping me get better, and not prattling on about needless bullshit. You lost a leg, man. You don’t have time to waste with a PT who’s got Friday Night Lights Syndrome. It’s one thing to suffer through having to walk 20 paces with a resistance band tied around your ankles. That’s suffering with a purpose. It’s another thing to have a PT who’s distracted and self-centered. Small talk is fine, as long as it’s small. Otherwise, a distracted PT will stall your progress and surreptitiously discourage you from any future PT. So fill out a survey trashing that guy and ask your doctor for a referral to someone new. You should dread going to PT because it’s hard, not because it’s worthless.
Joe:
I just heated some ramen here at work in the breakroom microwave. Unfortunately, I was unable to procure the spicy type I enjoy. In the fridge was a bottle of fermented kimchi hot sauce just sitting there. After about a 2-3 second deliberation, I decided to just go ahead and use it. I feel that some breakroom fridge condiments are okay for use by all. I would say no to salsa but maybe yes to hot sauce and possibly mustard. Do you have a mental list of typical items you deem acceptable to be used by everyone?
I go by instinct. If there’s a full bottle of hot sauce in a communal fridge and I know I’m only gonna use a splash of it, there’s no harm. I’m not taking the whole bottle home with me or anything like that. Maybe I back off if the bottle is nearly kicked, or if it’s some fancy sauce that goes with a highly specific lunch dish. But otherwise, I’m using that shit if I know I won’t be ruining someone else’s meal.
All of these dilemmas can be solved with a post-it note, by the way. If you have a bottle of gochujang in the office fridge that you want to keep for yourself, just stick a note on it that says, “Please do not use.” Post-it notes are legally binding, which means no one can mess with your shit. Except for maybe Ben’s shitty physical therapist.
Matthew:
Do you think any of the many celebrities shilling for online gaming companies have any qualms about doing it?
Not when the check comes in the mail, especially when you’re Sydney Sweeney and you own a stake in the very company you’re shilling. Most celebrities are either too greedy or dumb (or both) to turn down that kinda blood money.
More important, this country has grown so nakedly corrupt that it has conditioned everyone, rich or poor, to adopt a Get Mine philosophy. The thinking is, “Well, if everyone else is profiting off this shit, why shouldn’t I?” In 2026 America, you’re either being ripped off, or you’re the one ripping people off. That’s the calculus Donald Trump went by when he began his criminal career half a century ago, and now it’s filtered down to the rest of us. Such a precious gift. I’ll be sure to thank him when I’m pissing on his grave.
Eric:
If a white player scored a TD and did the Nazi salute, how many games are they getting suspended. Has to be a full season, right?
If the player is a scrub, yes. If it’s Nick Bosa, one game. Then Bosa gets an invite onto Pat McAfee the following week to complain about how Americans don’t know how to take a joke anymore. I’d like to think that will change after the midterms, but HA! Please. I’m too old now to believe that this country will ever get its shit together.
Amanda:
None of my the four pro sports teams in my town mean that much to me. Given that, which one of these criteria should I use to choose “my” NBA team?
– In college this guy I knew took me to a Sixers game. I didn’t like him, but it was something different to do. I don’t even remember who they played or if they won, but they remain the only pro basketball team I’ve seen in person.
-I was working in Toronto when the Raptors won their title. I didn’t attend a game, but it was cool to be part of the excitement in the city when it happened.
So, should I be a Sixers or Raptors fan? (I live just about equidistant from both.) For what it’s worth, I was a Bulls fan all through grade school. But that was the Jordan era, so pretty much everyone was.
I would tell you to just stick to being a Bulls fan, but owner Jerry Reinsdorf will bring the corroded husk of that poor franchise into the grave with him when he goes. It’s a tragedy for the millions of us who got to enjoy the Jordan years, but it is what it is. As for your other chosen options, A) the Sixers are shitty and annoying, and B) that one Raptors title is probably the last one they’ll win. If you’re that casual in your team selection, you may as well bandwagon the Knicks, or latch onto the Wemby Spurs for the next decade and change.
Or, and this is the advice I give to everyone looking for a team: Just watch the games and see which teams/players excite you the most. Allow yourself the freedom to NOT pick a team, so that one of them can win you over. I grew up a cursory T-Wolves fan, but never REALLY cared about them until Anthony Edwards came along. Why? Because Anthony Edwards is cool as shit. That’s the organic way to become a fan. Teams find you, instead of the other way around. You can force it, but it will not come. Let it happen, otherwise the fandom won’t stick.
Matt:
I have been buying store brand sliced cheese lately. The first time I opened the package, I was surprised to find the slices were all touching each other directly, without any sort of individual wrapping, a la Kraft singles. Is this a recent development in generic cheese? I swear the cheap stuff before I bought before was still wrapped.
We buy packaged cheddar slices at the store, and each one is separated by a small square of paper to prevent sticking. I don’t like having to do an extra 0.5 seconds of legwork to begin eating my cheese, but I understand that Sargento is acting in the interest of freshness preservation. As for 64 slices of American cheese, I’m pretty sure the last package of Kraft Singles we bought were individually wrapped in plastic. This is necessary, given that American cheese isn’t really cheese at all. But it’s so goddamn wasteful. I’m your typical suburban liberal who abhors waste while having a personal carbon footprint the size of a Texas Instruments factory. So I can’t tolerate that kind of packaging with a clean consciousness.
You know what REALLY irks me? When individual candies come prewrapped. If my son grabs a bag of tasty gummies on a trip to H Mart, each fucking gummy bear will be housed inside its own little plastic wrapper. WE ARE KILLING OUR OCEANS, DAMMIT. At least wrap that shit in wax paper so that I don’t feel like that much of a selfish prick. Also: I just opened a bag to get my candy, now you want me to open even more shit? What do I look like, Charlie Hustle? Candy should not require this much sweat equity.
HALFTIME!
Ethan:
When you’re taking a shit, do you ever flush in between the shitting and the wiping? I’ll do this occasionally and I want to know if this is a sitting/standing to wipe like divide or if I’m just a lone weirdo on this.
I believe you’re asking about what’s commonly known as the “courtesy flush,” in which you flush the turd down to minimize odor before cleaning up after yourself. Now here is where I make a confession: I have never in my life, not once, performed an earnest courtesy flush. Not even back when I still possessed my sense of smell (I lost it in 2018; long story). It’s a bathroom. It’s gonna smell like shit after someone has taken a shit in it. What does flushing a turd down 60 seconds before you flush the paper really gonna accomplish? It’s not like a wad of soiled toilet paper smells like a bouquet of zinnias. The best way to get rid of the stench in any bathroom is to turn on the exhaust fan, and if the bathroom in question has no exhaust fan, that’s on the bathroom owner. You built a shitter with no escape hatch for doody fumes. Don’t expect your guests to pick up the slack for you.
Now, this doesn’t mean I’ve never flushed mid-session. I have, many times. But it’s never for the purpose of odor mitigation; it’s to make certain that I don’t clog the toilet. Because if you drop a large enough anchor in there, and you need a few rounds of paper to clean it all up, that’s a LOT to ask one toilet to swallow. That means I have to occasionally flush in stages, just to make sure that I’m not scrambling for a plunger with half a loaf still stuck inside of my asscrack.
Adam:
There are too many pasta shapes nowadays. Please eliminate three. I am NOT a crackpot.
I tend to prefer certain shapes than I do dislike others. One person in my immediate family can’t stand penne, which I’ve never fully understood. But hey, we’ve all got our little quirks. Penne can stay in our pantry, as far as I’m concerned.
But now I must knuckle down and answer Adam’s question to the best of my ability. I don’t have much use for linguine, when I think about it. I know that linguine with clam sauce is super mega clutch, but I’d probably enjoy it just as much if you subbed in plain old spaghetti. And if we’re doing wide noodles, why half-ass it? I’ll take pappardelle or tagliatelle any day over linguine.
Next up, pasta rings. I loved Spaghetti-O’s as much as any other kid back in the day. But I’m not a kid anymore. I’m a grown-ass man, so if you bring me a plate of lobster fra diavalo with little baby rings as the selected pasta, I’m gonna throw the whole plate in your face and then never eat at your Olive Garden again.
Third one is macaroni, because Annie’s Shells & Cheese beats Kraft Mac every day and twice on Sunday.
Chris:
Would you rather coach a team like the Dolphins or Jets where you already know it’s going to suck, but at the beginning of the season it’s clear you will hit rock fucking bottom by December? Or would you take a chance with a team like the Steelers where you’re supposed to compete, but your indispensable old man quarterback is already busted?
I wanna build a team from scratch, not from some fired asshole’s leftovers. There are a million other factors to consider in taking the job, including: “Is the owner cheap?,” “Is the owner a meddler?,” “Did the owner put one of his dipshit poker buddies in charge of personnel?”, etc. But all of those concerns feed into a single, overarching idea. If I’m gonna be a head coach in the NFL, I want the time, resources, and autonomy to execute my vision for the team. That’s not possible when trash-ass Aaron Rodgers is already running the place. I want my own hand-picked QB, and I want the ability to build a proper roster around him.
As you can tell, I have thought about this sort of thing WAYYYYY more than I should. I will never be the head coach of an NFL team. But in my imagination, I’ve already done more interview prep than Rex Ryan ever did.
Jonathan:
While arguing with my GPS in rush hour traffic, it struck me that it had been a hot minute since I heard an actual human being. Between that morning’s TV news, touch tone phone messages, the radio music, and the GPS basically every human voice I’d heard that day up to that point was pre-recorded. What do you think the percent of language heard by an average American nowadays is live (including in person)? Like maybe 30%?
Hmm … not sure. I better ask Siri.
SIRI: “Okay, here’s what I found on Google searching for what percent language you heard was live…”
YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT, SIRI. I WILL SHOOT YOU AND LEAVE YOU DEAD IN A DITCH.
SIRI: “Sorry, I didn’t quite get that.”
GAHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Eli:
Has there ever been an ambidextrous quarterback? Someone who could throw the football with their left and and also their right hand? Surely this would unlock some huge advantage and wild offensive schemes right? Or would this not matter at all?
There’s one playing college football right now. His name is Mikey Gow, and he’s a freshman QB at Missouri Baptist. I’m not bullish on Gow’s NFL prospects, given that he plays ball at what appears to be the Evangelical collegiate equivalent of Bishop Sycamore, but even if our man works his way up the transfer portal and becomes a legit prospect, NFL teams will force him to pick a dominant arm. It’s easier to hone your mechanics that way, and you can always use the other arm if you wanna perform a bit of ad-lib magic, as Patrick Mahomes has done with his left arm on more than one occasion. There’s no inherent advantage in having a switch hitter at QB. You’ll end up confusing the rest of your offense more than you will the other team. I’ll wait for Gow to prove me wrong before I back off this take.
Now, ambidextrous punters? THAT is a potential nuclear weapon you could wield.
Manuel:
Is Justin Herbert one of the most overrated QBs ever, or the MOST overrated? He’s tall, blonde, and handsome, and can throw the ball far enough to make Uncle Rico jealous. Yet he can’t win shit, and chokes more than the Falcons and Maple Leafs combined. Somehow, the whole NFL writers guild makes every excuse for him. Am I missing something?
I think the shine is finally off our little hero. You don’t open the season getting rinsed by Arizona and Vegas and get to keep your reputation. Herbert is entering his seventh NFL season. His best season in the league came in Year 2, when he threw for over 5,000 yards and 38 TDs. He has been miles away from those numbers in recent years, and still has zero playoff wins to show for it. And yet there are plenty of suckers out there, knowledgeable ones, who think that he can still turn the corner. Why?
All football people, casual or pro, have a tendency toward confirmation bias when studying tape. You see a player make a handful of killer plays and you assume that, with some fine tuning, they can do that kind of shit on EVERY play, in every game, all season long. Then they do it again three games later and you think to yourself, “You see! That’s how good this guy can be!” Herbert is probably the best modern example of a QB who triggers that kind of flawed thinking. He can throw the ball into pinprick windows, he can scoot, and he can throw for big yardage. But he can only bring all of those qualities together a handful of times. On other plays, he looks like a complete fucking goober. And now that he’s been in the league for this long, well into his second contract, the numbers say that this is the QB he’ll always be. Hoping he’ll suddenly blossom into a Hall of Famer who wins multiple Super Bowls is like assuming Donald Trump can still pivot to being a real-deal president.
I know that the league has the occasional late bloomer at quarterback, with Sam Darnold being the most prominent example. But Darnold is an outlier, and so is Matthew Stafford. You’re always better off assuming that guys like Herbert can never make a similar jump, because the odds say that they probably won’t. Especially after you get crushed by the Raiders and Cardinals, man. I can never take you seriously again when that happens.
In wholly unrelated news, Kyler Murray is back starting for the Vikings this week! I SENSE BIG THINGS IN STORE FOR OUR OFFENSE!
Ron:
A few years ago we went to a blowout between Syracuse and Clemson at the Carrier Dome. Interesting fact that I wish we knew before we went to the game: although Carrier is one of the largest manufacturers of industrial HVAC systems in the country, there is no fucking air conditioning in the Carrier Dome. It was a thousand degrees in the Dome and it and stunk like Truly and piss. Never going back.
This serves as a personal reminder that I have never met a person who’s been to the city of Syracuse and had nice things to say about it. So it stands to reason that the Carrier Dome would suck mondo ass, even if I have a strange affection for flawed domed stadiums. All the new domes are just boring malls. I much prefer the freak indoor stadium like the Carrier Dome, the Alamodome (it’s shaped like a plus sign! So weird!), and Tropicana Field, which is a true piece of shit. I never want to VISIT any of these stadiums. I just like having something ugly to point at on the TV.
Email of the week!
Noah:
I wanted to write in regarding Gellman’s question last week on unique names driving success in sports. There’s a clear answer that I haven’t seen pop up in the comments yet: Jalen, from Jalen Rose. There are no real records of anyone named Jalen before he was born in ‘73, when his mother combined his dad’s name James with his Uncle’s name Leonard.
There are actually no material records of any Jalen I can find before 1992, when Michigan reached the NCAA finals with him as a core part of the Fab Five. From there, the name spikes in popularity, peaking at the 106th most popular male baby name in 2000 when he led the pacers in scoring ahead of their Finals appearance.
As of this year, there were 19 active Jalens (or variations) in the NBA, including the finals MVP Brunson. There are 40+ Jalens (or variations) in the NFL, including (most notably) Jalen Hurts, Jaylen Waddle, Jalen Carter, and Jalen Ramsey. It’s gotta be Jalen.
Pretty sure Eric Woodyard of ESPN beat you to the goods on this one, but I forgive you. For now.