Pissbaby Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper has only been in charge of his team for six seasons, yet he has shown a real drive and determination to distinguish himself as the most personally annoying of his cohort. Tepper came into the league with unearned goodwill for taking over from racist dingdong Jerry Richardson—goodwill he quickly squandered by firing handpicked coach Matt Rhule less than three seasons into a seven-year deal; pissing off the locker room and fanbase by passing over Rhule's successful interim successor Steve Wilks for Frank Reich and being a smug dick about it; claiming ..read more

I didn’t watch Ripley at first. The black and white was a barrier (I know, but shut up, I was not alone). I have no trouble with black and white photography, so why black and white film? Perhaps because film feels more real to me, meaning it should be more real, meaning color. Either way, I hesitated to watch Ripley. At worst, I thought the black and white would be pretentious, at best ... well, I couldn’t think of that scenario. So I kept putting it off and putting it off as praise was heaped on this latest of a million adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Th ..read more

At the very least, the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University has successfully emphasized the absurdity of Palestine as an exception. In response to students setting up camp on a lawn, the university’s administration and many national figures have reacted so poorly that the matters of one campus in New York City have become an international phenomenon. The students want their school to financially divest from a country carrying out a genocide; the school has chosen to ignore this request and instead direct focus on hypothetical, nebulous threats. Beginning on April 17, Columbia stud ..read more

Hello Billie Eilish, I was excited to see you on the cover of Rolling Stone this week where you appear to be hoisted into the air on a rope in some beigely liminal space. As a Cancer, I am a big fan of your saddest, bleakest songs, and have spent many nights listening to "Everything I Wanted" on loop when I wanted to cry. I found many of the things you said in your Rolling Stone interview, such as asking people to be conscious of their contribution to animal agriculture and referring to masturbation as "jerking it," refreshing. But I admit that I was surprised to read this tidbit ..read more

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