Here was the situation when the Atlanta Falcons were on on the clock to make the eighth overall pick in last night's NFL draft: After going 7-10 in three consecutive seasons while shuffling through a sparse deck of subpar quarterbacks, the team had decided to bite the bullet and sign franchise-lite quarterback Kirk Cousins to a $100 million deal in the offseason. Rome Odunze, an elite member of one of the highest-rated wide receiver classes to ever enter the draft, was available for the taking. Here was the situation after the Atlanta Falcons decided to draft quarterback Michael Penix Jr. with ..read more

Well they say you can't win them all and that's true. They say the NFL Draft is more art than science—and nowhere is that more true than in the NFL Draft. Last night with the 17th pick the Jacksonville Jaguars selected: Trade With Vikings. That's not who a lot of analysts had on their boards. And if I'm being honest, and I am, I am one of the aforementioned analysts who didn't have it on their boards.  Trade With Vikings is certainly an intriguing player but not who I had on my board to fill the needs of the Jaguars' roster. In my mock draft I had the Jaguars going with a different pick ..read more

Joel Embiid was lucky not to be ejected Thursday night from Game 3 of Philadelphia's playoff series against the Knicks. In the first quarter, after failing to successfully flop against a bulldozing OG Anunoby, Embiid grabbed at the knees and ankles of Mitchell Robinson and yanked the New York center to the floor as he was jumping to dunk the ball. It was a dirty and unnecessary play, but the loose and frequently re-defined and -emphasized standard for an automatic ejection is "excessive" contact, which by tradition tends to mean different things depending upon whether the act in question is co ..read more

One somewhat nebulous criterion I like to use in evaluating teams in the playoffs is: How painful does it look to have to play these guys? When I watch the Knicks do hand-to-hand combat and vacuum up every single rebound, I feel their opponents' bruising through the screen. LeBron James briefly turning into a crying-face emoji after Michael Porter Jr. hits a huge three? That guy's experiencing more acute psychic agony than you ever will. Not all strong teams induce pain (Boston, Cleveland) and not all sadistic teams are great (Orlando, Lakers), though I will always feel more optimistic about t ..read more

The frustrated fan will sometimes lament that their team "has no identity." This is up there with "they play with no heart" and "[coach] has lost the locker room," expressions that confuse symptoms of losing with the cause. Most often what the fan means is that the team does have an identity, and the identity is "being bad." Still, however dubious the concept, it was fair to wonder at the beginning of the PWHL season, before Ottawa had won or lost any games, what exactly the team was supposed to be. You could look over to Toronto, its roster nearly all Canadian and its stars mainstays of that ..read more

The one thing you absolutely do not want to do, as a podcast that covers both sports and things that are not sports, is find yourself in what we in the biz call "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables Scenario." The freedom to talk about whatever you choose is inherently also the freedom to do some severely wrongheaded and embarrassing shit. This actually has been a truly infuriating week in America, even by the high standard set in recent years, and I went into this week's episode with a lot of trouble on my mind, even by the high standard I have personally set for having ..read more

I know about the shutouts and the statistical outliers, but consider the recent games where the White Sox haven't been shut out. There was their final game against the Phillies, where they got out to a 2-0 lead in the first inning off an Eloy Jiménez home run, but immediately lost that lead after Nick Nastrini (from my friend, at the bar: "He has great eyebrows") gave up three runs in the bottom of the first, bringing them to a 3-18 record. Then they got shut out by the Twins to open the next series, but as we're not talking about the shutouts, let's just say that their record blossomed to 3-1 ..read more

For the third time in three seasons, Everton has escaped relegation in dramatic fashion. In 2022, they erased a 2–0 first-half deficit against Crystal Palace to win the game 3–2 as Dominic Calvert-Lewin's bullet header in the 85th minute clinched survival with one game left to play and brought the home fans onto the field. After the final whistle, the fans returned to the field and stayed for hours. In 2023, it came down to the last day of the season, and it was Abdoulaye Doucoure's belter that saw Everton through to a nervy 1–0 win against Bournemouth. And yesterday, playing a fixture that th ..read more

The Chicago Bears held a press conference at Soldier Field Wednesday to launch a campaign for a new football stadium, built as the centerpiece of an ambitious and breathtakingly expensive lakefront development project. Is this proposal another dreaded public-private partnership? You're goddamn right it is, and a whopper of one: The McCaskey family intends to ask the state of Illinois for at least $2.4 billion in public financing, or approximately half of what they say it will cost to build a new domed stadium, to improve surrounding infrastructure, spruce up the surrounding neighborhood, and c ..read more

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, through here. Here is something that I’ve long known but never had the courage to admit: The worst sports fans I know are also the happiest. You know the kind of fan I’m talking about. They are biologically devoid of shame. They flaunt every win like it’s a new tattoo. They blame every loss on the refs and/or the secret society that runs the world. They call into sports tal ..read more