Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about method acting, fickle stovetops, the Colorado Rockies, and more.
Brendan:
Is it wrong that I'm sad to see Jim Irsay pass away? He obviously was flawed both as an owner and as a person, but I always found him surprisingly human. Is it wrong to prefer his time of going-extinct ownership to the nameless faceless hydra of private equity ownership style for groups like the Commanders?
You’re allowed to be sad when another person dies, even when it’s an NFL owner. There have already been plenty of “Jim Irsay taught me how to be weird” tributes in the wake of his passing, so I’m not gonna reiterate any of them here. But Irsay was indeed a human being, and one who had addiction issues that football fans can actually relate to. He also won Indy a Super Bowl, was the one owner who finally told the press that Dan Snyder had to go, and wasn’t his father. Those are all attributes of a life worth commemorating. Irsay was a good NFL owner (term relative), and a tiny part of me is sad that he won’t be around anymore to tweet out weird shit about Bad Company at 3:20 a.m. on a Tuesday night. You won’t see women ODing at Art Rooney’s house, I’ll tell you that much! Only Jim Irsay was capable of such eccentrics.
But if you’re a Colts fan you also know that, by the end of his tenure, Irsay had become an active impediment to the organization’s success. This team has been in a tailspin ever since Andrew Luck—whose mental toughness Irsay once openly questioned—peaced out on them in the summer of 2019, and Irsay has arguably been the engineer behind that tailspin.
Where to begin? Irsay meddled in personnel decisions, such as demanding that Sam Ehlinger start over Matt Ryan during the 2022 season. That same year, he hired a comically unqualified Jeff Saturday as his interim coach, and then openly toyed with the idea of making Saturday the permanent coach even after the broadcaster showed no ability for the job. Irsay also steadfastly refused to fire GM Chris Ballard, whose last signature accomplishment was drafting Quenton Nelson. Ballard’s most notable move since then was to draft Anthony Richardson, a bust who asked for a play off last season because he was tired. As a result, this team hasn’t won its division since 2014. And we’re not talking about a stacked division here. The fucking Colorado Rockies could win the AFC South. That drought is on Ballard for being a clueless idiot, but also on Irsay for enabling Ballard one moment and forcing a braindead idea on him the next.
So the Colts weren’t going anywhere until Irsay punched his ticket. Now that he has, the mess he’s left behind is substantial. Head coach Shane Steichen has done nothing of import and will probably need to be fired, along with Ballard. The offensive side of the roster, Nelson included, is withering away. Worst of all, the Colts have now had a different starting QB every year for the past seven years, and will likely make it eight this coming season with Daniel Jones. Jones partially fixed his reputation at the end of last season by signing with Minnesota and then never playing a snap. It’s much easier to think highly of Daniel Jones when you never have to watch him play, and the 2025 season will prove that in ugly detail.
But now Irsay is dead, which means the Colts are free of his bizarre whims. GREAT SUCCESS. The only sticky wicket is that he’s bequeathed the team to his three daughters, a situation that rarely ends cleanly. James Boyd of The Athletic speculated that Carly Irsay-Gordon will likely be in charge of the football side of the business, since she has experience working there. But that doesn’t mean she’ll be good at it, or that Irsay’s other two kids won’t start up a fight over daddy’s most valuable asset. So now Colts fans are about to be subject to a ghoulish round of Failson Roulette, to see if they end up with a Mike Brown (very bad), an Amy Strunk (less bad but still bad), a Sheila Ford Hamp (only needed a decade to get the hang of it!), a Clark Hunt (good despite being Clark Hunt), or a clusterfuck ownership situation that only the courts will be able to suss out. There’s every chance that, years from now, these fans will be even SADDER about Irsay’s death than they are now.
Or the team lucks its way into Arch Manning and we all stop giving a shit.
Mike:
What do we owe bad teams? As Defector and other media outlets have noticed, the Colorado Rockies are historically bad. And as someone who used to go to 10 games at Coors a year, I’m all for it. They’ve been garden variety bad before, but that doesn’t concern owner Dick Monfort. The only hope left is if they are embarrassingly bad and he realizes he needs to hire real baseball people. I’m not holding my breath that he’ll make changes, but it’s really the only hope. Say he hires Kim Ng, gives her a blank check, and fucks off to Aspen. Am I allowed to root for them again after rooting for every loss in 2025?
You, along with my editor-in-chief, are partially clinging to the assumption that Dick Monfort can be shamed into action. But I see nothing in that man, nor in any of this country’s billionaire class, to draw the same conclusion myself. More important, I’ve seen how Major League Baseball operates. Was John Fisher shamed into making the A’s good again, or even into giving them a proper home to play in? What about Pirates owner Bob Nutting? Does he care if his team embarrasses its fanbase on a daily basis, forever and ever? Nope. These men have no issue sucking, and MLB has no issue with their negligence.
This is a bone-deep rot that affects the entire sport, and not just one team. Contrary to NFL teams, MLB teams have no salary floor, which means they never have to field a viable roster if they don’t feel like it. Even worse, MLB owners aren’t competitive with one another. The secret sauce to the NFL is that all of its owners hate one another and want nothing more than to lord their own team’s record over the other 31 assholes in the club. Dick Monfort doesn’t have that petty dawg in him, and it shows on the field.
Also, the NFL’s hegemony means that no crappy franchise, not even the Titans, can escape scrutiny from the national press whenever they decide to stop trying. I’m not trying to make some tired “football is better than baseball” argument here. We all get to like whatever sport we please. But for various reasons, there’s no system of effective negative reinforcement for deadbeat baseball franchises. When owners like Monfort abandon any pretense of trying to win games, they face little to no consequences from their fellow owners, or from the front page of ESPN.
In other words, you Rockies fans are fucked. There are no natural or institutional dynamics compelling your team to be anything other than what it is right now, which means you are entitled to bail. Encouraged, actually. You owe those fuckers nothing. Go cheer for the Dodgers instead. You’ve earned the luxury.
Cory:
I saw something online last week: a dude from England asking if Americans actually have to carry out a box of their stuff after getting fired. I've had this happen twice. Curious if you've ever had to lug out the ol' box of stuff after getting shitcanned?
The last time I was laid off at a big firm was in 2001, so apologies if my memory is a bit foggy on the details. I remember this big swinging dick from another department called my office one morning and asked me to come see him. I, being a naïve doof, figured I was getting transferred to another account … maybe even to the London office or something cool. I remember him quickly telling me that I’d been terminated, and that I’d have that day and the next to get my shit together. I also remember my immediate boss, who I didn’t like all that much, avoided seeing me after the deed was done. She never even dropped by to offer her condolences. Dick.
I also remember not having a ton of shit in my office to clear out. It was an entry-level desk job; it’s not like I had blueprints and a t-square that I had to pack up. All I had were like a few office decorations, probably a Vikings Mr. Potato Head or some shit. All of it fit in my messenger bag, and I probably only went to my office the day after just because I could. Also so that I could Limewire some illegal shit onto my company desktop one last time.
I don’t remember being ashamed or embarrassed that I’d been laid off. I wasn’t a very good account exec, so after I got the axe I thought to myself, Yeah, that kinda makes sense. And I didn’t grieve after the fact, because the job sucked. All I could think about while I was cleaning out my desk was what came next. Oh shit, I have to find a new job. Oh shit, I have to tell my girlfriend. Oh shit, I better make sure I have everyone’s contact info. Oh shit, I wonder if I qualify for unemployment. OH SHIT! Maybe now’s the time for me to look for a copywriting job instead of another shit job like this one! Then my now-wife and I went out for beer and pizza. The whole experience was so much smaller, so less dramatic, than I imagined it to be. I thought maybe everyone else would sit in their cubicles and start clapping on my way out the door. In reality, I doubt they even noticed I’d left.
Now quitting Deadspin? THAT lived up to the billing. Four stars. Would quit there again.
JC:
The recent dump of Kennedy assassination info turned out to be fuck-all, and it got me thinking: What's the Drew Take on the Kennedy assassination? What's the Roth take? Would the Defector staff fight over this? Got anyone on staff who's really out there?!
I’m boring. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and pretty much everyone else I know feels similarly. The most out-there JFK opinion I’ve ever heard from a colleague was when former Deadspin EIC Tim Marchman said the CIA knew that Lee Harvey Oswald was a potential danger to the president, but didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t like Kennedy all that much. That’s not exactly tinfoil hat shit; in fact, it fits quite nicely with the theory that Oswald acted alone. One of my favorite books I’ve ever read, Four Days in November by Vincent Bugliosi, laid out the case for it in ironclad detail. And that was an abridged edition of a much longer book; I doubt that Bugliosi spent the 1,000 expunged pages being like “But some say Clay Shaw did it!” Everything about Oswald doing the deed himself made perfect sense to me, and still does.
This is amusing, because the Kennedy conspiracy theory industrial complex dominated my teenage years and early adulthood. The truthering was so widespread, you were almost a freak if you DIDN’T think the Stonecutters had the president killed. So I saw Oliver Stone’s JFK when it first came out and ate up all of it, especially the iconic scene where Donald Sutherland’s Mr. X lays out the whole nefarious plot for Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison. That scene is so well written and so well acted that it felt definitive to high school me. Fucking Operation Mongoose, man. It was Mongoose all along.
Fast forward 30-plus years and Sutherland’s monologue sounds like every other comment on Facebook. JFK gave credibility to truthers in a way that few movies ever had, making it a portent of the choose-your-own-reality universe that you and me now live in. It was a great movie, and kinda still is, because it presented a logline of the JFK assassination story (secret coup!) that was more compelling, on a superficial level, than the real one (weirdo loner shoots the president because he’s of unsound mind).
That dynamic has now flipped. Thanks to the internet, Donald Trump has used a million conspiracy theories to fuel his rise to power. Not only has it made life worse for everyone in this country, but it’s also taken the magic out of pretty much every truthering effort. When JFK was released in 1991, these people were still a niche demographic, which made their ideas both interesting and even mildly endearing. Now I can’t go five seconds without some government official hired fresh from NewsWars being like VACCINES WILL GIVE YOU CANCER OF THE PENIS. In 1991, that would have gotten my attention. In 2025, it’s a fucking nuisance. Reality is better and, if you have a brain in your head, it’s also way more interesting. Even the JFK assassination. Oswald got collared while hiding out in a fucking movie theater! LBJ had to spend the whole ride to Parkland Hospital kissing the floor mat! That’s some wild shit!
HALFTIME!
Dane:
What’s up with so many recipes calling for a frying pan over medium-high heat? I’m a halfway decent cook, and I know about searing steaks, etc., but if I cranked my shit up to medium-high to cook a cod filet, it would be blackened glue before 30 seconds was up. Is my (electric) range possibly a cousin of Chris Thompson's hellfire and brimstone oven?
Every stovetop operates differently, with a great number of them running much hotter than advertised. Your average suburbanite wants restaurant quality cooking appliances, a la Wolf and Viking, because they fancy themselves real cooks who can sear tournedos of beef at 900 degrees flawlessly. In reality, they’re just heating up a sad package of Lean Cuisine for dinner because they got home from work at 7:30 p.m., but they still like the IDEA of being able to magically transform into Thomas Keller using all of their expensive shit. That means that if I set my burner (Thermador) to medium-high on the dial, I’m actually setting it to thermonuclear. Just one tick past medium on the dial counts as high, and then I have to dial it all the way down if I want to cook on low. Meanwhile, someone living in a rental might have to wait 25 minutes just for their 1975 stove to boil water for tea.
So when a recipe tells you to cook something over “medium-high” heat, the author is basically saying they’re not quite sure what the best setting is for your range. It’s probably somewhere between medium and high, but fuck if Bobby Flay really knows the answer. You can’t take his instructions as exact in such instances. You have to interpret them through whatever quirks and farts your own stove has. Same deal with ovens and grills. They all have dead spots, and they can all run hot or cold. This is why I eat chicken six nights a week. Speaking of which…
Brian:
I'm sick of boring-ass baked/grilled chicken. It's easy to make so I do it a lot, but other than some Weber seasoning mix and whatever bottled sauce is collecting dust in the fridge, I got no damn ideas. Every sauce recipe I think sounds interesting is beyond my skill level (think Worst Cooks in America contestant circa Week 5), takes too long to make, or contains some weird ingredient that I'm not about to go searching for.
I’ve had this exact problem ever since my wife had to go on a comically restrictive diet for medical reasons. She can’t eat gluten, histamines, or foods that begin with the letter A. But she CAN eat chicken and rice, so that’s what we’ve been eating night after night after night. She’s as bored with this dinner as the rest of us, so I try my best to vary up the chicken entrée any way I can (I also try to only use dark meat, because it has more flavor). Here’s a partial list of what I have in the arsenal. All of these dishes contain ingredients you can find at most any grocery store:
- Shake & Bake
- Chicken piccata
- Chicken katsu
- Grilled chicken shawarma
- Whole roast chicken
- BBQ chicken drumsticks
- Grilled wings
- Chicken stir fry
- Thai chicken curry (using coconut milk, sugar, lime zest, a whole jar of red curry paste, and a dash of fish sauce)
- Chicken cacciatore
- Chicken soup
- Lemongrass chicken
I’m not gonna bullshit you and say that making any of these dishes is a snap. They all involve handling raw chicken, and they all usually need an hour-plus to make from fridge to plate. But if you’re gonna make chicken come to life night after night, you have to make that extra bit of effort. Also, spices are your friend. Use them frequently and heavily.
Brad:
In all your years having a driver's license, how often would you guess that you have passed a murderer while both of you were driving down the highway? Never? Once? More than a dozen?
In 2023, there were roughly 20,000 deaths by homicide in this country. Let’s pretend that minted out 20,000 new murderers. Let’s keep pretending and multiply that number by my age (48), to account for all murderers to spring up both after I got my license and beforehand. That’s about a million murderers in this country over my lifetime, with half of those cases solved and the offender sent away. The US population currently stands at 340 million, meaning one out of every 680 people I’ve encountered has murdered someone. One of those murderers could be YOU, Defector subscriber. I’d better have the Feds check your keyboard for traces of blood.
I don’t know why I did all that math when I was always going to pull a number out of my ass for this answer anyway. In my heart, I know that I’ve passed more than a dozen murderers on the highway in my time as a motorist. This is because I live in a place where everyone becomes Ted Bundy behind the wheel, so let’s call it an even 200.
Michael:
Is method acting the dumbest thing you've ever heard of? I just read an article stating the new Madden movie is having problems in production because Nicolas Cage and Christian Bale are both method actors and are so in-character that they do it between takes, driving everyone crazy. If I was the director I would be furious if actors were so in character that they started ruining shit.
My favorite story of method actors going overboard was when Jared Leto played Hot Topic Joker and got so lost in his character that he sent his co-stars live rats and dead pigs to fuck with them. Imagine giving Margot Robbie a rat instead of every last piece of your soul. What a fucking jayvee move.
That doesn’t mean that method acting, on the whole, is bad practice. When Robert De Niro was at his peak, he did shifts as a taxi driver to play Travis Bickle and then tried out some light stalking so that he could play Rupert Pupkin. This was method acting with a purpose. De Niro got into character off screen so that he could research the role properly, to understand what it was really like to do the things that his characters did. In that context, method acting isn’t dumb at all.
Where it goes wrong is when actors like Leto assume that they can understand more about a character by talking in a funny voice 24/7. That’s just method acting to method act, which is endemic among young actors who are dying to be taken seriously. They think that dropping 80 pounds and adopting a full-time Irish accent is the key to winning an Oscar. But acting is like any other job in that there are multiple ways to do it properly, which means that you’re allowed your process. But only if it makes sense. Take Jeremy Strong, for instance. Strong commits to roles with such ferocity that he has infamously put off his co-stars while doing it. But look at the resulting work that came from his bullshit. Strong was brilliant on Succession, and arguably deserved to win an Oscar for his work as Roy Cohn on The Apprentice. For Strong, the ends justify the means. That’s good method acting, even of Brian Cox finds it annoying. Lotta ways to skin a cat, just don’t send one to Margot Robbie.
Dean:
Is porn fiction or nonfiction?
Well, is it amateur porn? I count two everyday people actually doing it on camera as nonfiction. But professional porn? That’s all pretend. Turns out Madison Ivy isn’t a nurse in real life. Disappointing, but you and I will get over it.
Email of the week!
Joshua:
I work at a special education school for kids with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities. Back in September 2021, on the very first day kids were back in person, I went out in the hall to talk to a co-worker. As we were standing there I shit myself. No explanation. No warning. Just crude oil bubbling up out of nowhere.
I went to the bathroom, immediately stripped down, and sat on the shitter to finish the job. I assessed the damage. My underwear were out of commission but, thankfully, nothing leaked through to my pants. So I finished up, wrapped my underwear up in several layers of paper towels, then did a walk of shame to the kitchen/home ec room where we keep extra clothes for the kids. We even have a washer and dryer.
Unfortunately, one of our kids was in there eating, with his aide. When I opened the door with my shit-covered underwear parcel in my hands, he started crying and having a meltdown. The aide eventually got him calmed down while I just stood there stammering out a lie about how one of my students had an accident. They bought it. Even better, I found a new, unopened pair of Hanes boxer briefs. I started a load of laundry and then finished the school day a shaken but humbled man. I also had to explain to my wife why I came home from work with my underwear in my pocket.
The best part is we have security cameras in every classroom and hallway, so there’s a digital record somewhere of my gastrointestinal odyssey.
There always is.
