Pat McAfee Is Intolerable

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 washing tacos in the dishwasher, Indiana, pizza cutting, Isaiah Likely, and more.

Your letters:

Todd:

Stephen A. Smith HAS to have some kind of shelf life, right? People aren't going to keep employing him like this forever, are they? Tell me there's hope.

There isn’t. Trust me. I’ve met the guy. Stephen A. cherishes his soapbox, even when he has absolutely nothing valuable to add to the conversation. He’s enormously popular, especially with black audiences. And he also still draws in millions of people, like Todd up above, who’ll pay attention to what he says just to gripe about it. He’s the perfect creature for the Look At Me economy that we currently live in. He’s also a deranged workaholic who just added a politics show on Sirius to his already packed broadcasting schedule. His bosses adore him for his abhorrence of load management. They love being able to use Stephen A. to fill 12 different on-air jobs. In turn, he loves his bosses to death. If Skydance bought ESPN tomorrow, Stephen A. would be first in line to kiss David Ellison’s ass. The only way you’re getting him off the air is if he strokes out while yelling about the Knicks, which is entirely possible.

But lemme defend Stephen A. here for a moment. First off all, his omnipresence is clearly a symptom of a larger disease, namely over-consolidation. Secondly, there’s a much worse person who’s always on ESPN:

Stephen A. is at least amusing when he’s being annoying. He’s also only tangentially involved in ESPN’s football coverage (because he knows dick about football). Pat McAfee, on the other hand, is like a best man toast that never ends. AND he’s all over the four-letter’s college football programming. I used to get Lee Corso on my College GameDay, now I gotta deal with Axe Body Spray here bro-ing up that pregame show with canned antics that make Terry Bradshaw look like Mel Brooks. Pat McAfee is the real enemy here. Wanna know why all of your favorite athletes keep snapping their Achilles, Indiana? It’s because of this man. We must find a way to destroy him.

Dave:

RE: That no-TD call in Ravens game. I don't necessarily think it was the wrong call, partly because of the framework I use for those plays: if it would have been an incompletion on the field of play, it's an incompletion in the end zone. If that same action had taken place short of the goal line, I guarantee no one for Baltimore would have been demanding a fumble call.

I have to provide some background here for anyone who missed the end of Steelers-Ravens on Sunday afternoon. Late in the fourth quarter, the Ravens were down 27–22 and at Pittsburgh’s 18. Lamar Jackson hit TE Isaiah Likely in the end zone, and the refs initially ruled it a touchdown. But Likely had only gotten two feet down (I know how weird that sounds) before the ball slipped out of his hands. According to the rulebook, you still have the make the vaunted “football move” after both feet are down to complete the process of the catch. Usually, this means either turning around, or taking a step. Even if you’re in the end zone, you still gotta make this move. Likely didn’t, so the refs wiped the touchdown off the board.

I don’t even know what a catch is anymore! is a tired complaint, so I’ll spare you. We’re all used to the modern catch rules, and we all have an instinctive feel for what’s a definite catch and what isn’t. So I wasn’t mad when the Ravens had that score taken away. They still could have converted on the subsequent third down. They still could have gone for it on fourth down after that, instead of kicking a field goal. They still could have run an urgent two-minute drill on their final possession instead of walking around like they were at a fucking cocktail party. Or Likely could have just, you know, held onto the fucking ball.

He didn’t, and I don’t feel sorry for any team that leaves its fate in the hands of the officials. The Ravens are a fucking mess right now, which leaves them far more vulnerable when a call goes against them. I feel no pity for them. Bad officiating is an act of God. Blaming any loss you suffer on a shit call is like saying you lost because it rained. And we all keep a mental list of which fanbases are the quickest to scream THE REFS COST US THAT GAME in a crowded theater. You better believe that Ravens fans, who have two titles this century and yet still adore playing the victim, are on my list.

I won’t indulge them. Instead, I’ll say: Fuck you for losing that game, Baltimore. You could have spared us from more Aaron Rodgers bullshit, and from Pittsburgh cementing its annual destiny of going 10-7 and getting crushed in the Wild Card round. Instead, you ate a butt. If I were a Ravens fan, I’d be annoyed about that call, too. Every borderline call is a crime when it goes against you. But I am not a Ravens fan. I’m far cooler than that, and I’d like to watch decent football in January. Neither John Harbaugh nor Mike Tomlin shares that interest. Both of them should be working inside a television studio next fall.

Nicholas:

What the fuck did Indianapolis (sports division) do to piss off the sports gods? Two great stories, murdered by Achilles injuries? INVESTIGATE?

Yeah but you have the undisputed No. 1 team in college football, which is one of the most bizarre developments of my lifetime. How the fuck did Curt Cignetti turn IU into a goddamn powerhouse? Who’s that program’s top booster, Saudi Arabia? It’s very funny to me, a Notre Dame hater, that Cignetti can lure NFL-caliber quarterbacks to his shithole Indiana burg while the Irish have failed to do likewise for 40 years running. When the only first-round pick you’ve cranked out at QB this century is Brady Quinn, you don’t get to complain about being left out of the playoff for some other asshole team.

Actually, to really lean into this digression, let’s interrupt my answer to Nicholas with a quick ND question.

A definitely not jilted Notre Dame fan:

Are we going to end up with a secondary college football postseason tournament that’s played on campus? I feel like TV ratings would be good since it would be decent teams. And if it’s on campus, teams would reap more revenue for the schools over neutral site bowl games. 

I have no idea. What I do know that the bowl games will become more endangered, if not outright extinct, as the playoff field expands. And it will. The CFB’s TV contract with ESPN expires after this season. The two parties have an extended contract already in place with one another for the 2026 season and beyond, but they haven’t decided on how large the bracket will be for next season, or any season past it. You’re getting at least 14 teams in 2026, which means that you’re getting at least 16 teams, because a 14-team bracket is shitty and annoying (and harder to create an office pool with). Eventually, 16 will become 24, and then 24 will become 32. But right now, we’re in a weird transitory phase where the playoff is larger, but not large enough to render bowl games fully obsolete.

When this transition is complete, likely toward the end of this decade, the bowl games will probably disappear. Schools like ND will still complain about everything, the same way college basketball bubble teams whine whenever they don’t get a pity 11-seed in the NCAA tourney. But regardless, the CFB will have fully supplanted the bowl system by then. As someone who always enjoyed the Thrifty Car Rental Bowl Week jingle, I’ll miss watching 15 minutes of a shitty bowl game on a random December Tuesday. But our TV overlords will probably fill that void with some other form of meaningless postseason exhibition, such as our reader’s proposed football NIT. Those network execs care about these secondary games about as much as you and I will.

Now… back to Nicholas! Refresher:

Nicholas:

What the fuck did Indianapolis (sports division) do to piss off the sports gods? Two great stories, murdered by Achilles injuries? INVESTIGATE?

It’s the karmic price that Indiana must pay for giving us Pat McAfee’s career. And for giving us Mike Pence, who denied President Trump his rightful victory in the 2020 election. Also, online doctors are now warning us that the uptick in high profile Achilles injuries in pro sports could be due to the COVID vaccine, which I too have long suspected.

In all seriousness Nicholas, you got hosed by shit luck. But the Colts just got an excuse to bail on giving Daniel Jones a nine-figure contract extension, so your luck cuts both ways.

Adam:

Is the band Geese a joke? And is the joke on me? Or am I just missing something?

Adam’s question reminded me that Pitchfork released its best-of lists for 2025 just last week. Every year, I check these lists to see if I’ve heard of any of the artists listed, and you better believe I’d never heard of Geese until I saw their name pop up multiple times while I was scrolling. I didn’t check out Geese’s songs after that, because Pitchfork has never liked rock bands that actually rock. But Adam’s question compels me to finally do so. Hang on while I jack up the YouTube…

(listens, comes back)

OK yeah, this is a classic Pitchfork-approved rock band, terrible lead vocals and all. This is the kinda song they play during a sad montage on Shrinking. I kept expecting a Mumford to show up halfway through the video.

Otis:

Pizza: wedges or squares?

Wedges. You know that’s the right answer. Anyone who answers squares probably lives in Indiana. I want every slice to have a crust grip on one end, and I want to be able to fold that slice. Square-cut pizza fails both of these tests. You know why they cut a pizza into squares? So that they can get a bigger slice count for kiddie birthday parties and shit. Us grownups know that wedge slices are the only way to go.

Also, ever go to a fancy pizza place that makes like Italy and doesn’t slice your pizza for you? I swear they exist. I swear I’ve gotten a whole, uncut, 12-inch pie delivered to my place setting. They just give you a steak knife and it’s your problem after that. Motherfucker, this isn’t Italy. You’re not getting a Michelin star just for giving me extra busywork. Cut my goddamn pizza before you serve it to me. And in wedges! Not in squares, or in circles, or in cute little snowmen. I don’t have time to fuck around. I want my pizza.

Jake:

What the hell am I supposed to do with my arms when I'm sleeping? 

I fold them over my chest, like I’m an embalmed cadaver at an open viewing. I can’t sleep with my arms at my side, because it feels weird. Sometimes my wife will sleep with her arms resting above her head, which makes her look like she’s going down the big dip on a roller coaster. It’s very charming, but not a trick that I can pull off. So I do the dead guy thing.

HALFTIME!

Brian:

I walked into my 15-year-old’s room and was hit by a wave adolescent boy funk that blew back my hair. The smell emanated from his hamper, particularly his pajamas. How often should you and your children wash their PJs?

They should rotate between a couple of pairs and then wash both pairs at least once a week. That sound reasonable?

I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer. Because I lost my sense of smell in an accident years ago, I have never personally encountered my own sons’ heady teenage funk. I have to rely on my wife to be the nose there, and HOO SHIT does she have a lot to say about how stanky those boys are. In fact, she charges me with pickup from soccer practice so that she can avoid the BO in the car on the ride back. I’m strangely jealous of her. I’d kinda like to know just how ripe those two fuckers are. If they smelled as bad I did back then, their feet alone could kill.

Also, our sons do their own laundry. One is punctual about doing it. The other one tends to drag ass. My wife, and her nose, can usually tell.

Sam:

As we head to the end of the year, I'm getting myself psyched up for my annual physical. I'm thinking about broaching the idea of going on a GLP-1 with my doc, not just because of weight gain, but some medical issues that have cropped up BECAUSE of that weight gain. I know you last updated folks on your GLP-1 journey in January and figured we're about one year later. Is it still a 4-star review? Are you an Adonis now? Is having a drug you need to take forever burdensome, mentally or physically?

Here’s a fun fact for you. I’ve been on Wegovy for well over a year now, and I haven’t lost a single pound. I’ve lost body fat and replaced it with muscle (the NP’s office ran tests to prove it; I’m not trying to give you the stock bro lie here), and my love handles protrude less than they did before. But in other ways, I’ve sort of defeated the medication. I still have a wicked case of sweet tooth, which Christmas time only serves to exacerbate. And I still indulge my gummy munchies with a light midnight snack. Usually sweets.

So Wegovy hasn’t cured me of overeating entirely. I’m due to cut sugar out of my life, and I know that I have the ability to do so because, in this decade alone, I quit biting my nails cold turkey. I also, just a couple months ago, finally defeated a compulsive urination habit that had plagued me for my entire life. AND I haven’t had a drink in seven years (congrats, me!). That makes sugar the final boss when it comes to my worst vices. I have to defeat it before I die, and I will. Maybe.

I told you a year ago that I prized my Wegovy scrip more for what it does for me mentally than physically. It ended my obsession with food, which in many ways was the real problem. My cholesterol remains low, and I look the part of a fit, fully healthy man. So maybe I can get away with making myself a batch of cookies from time to time. Or, more likely, I’ll just go on the next gen of GLP-1 agonists when they come out soon, and that’ll make quitting sweets a breeze. Everyone is gonna be on this shit, and they’ll likely be irresponsible with it in the exact opposite way that I am.

As for the prospect of taking a drug forever, I got over that fear ages ago. I’m already on more than a couple of drugs for life, so one more doesn’t mean shit to me. It won’t mean shit to you when you get old, either.

(My wife is still spooked by it, but also thinks you can OD on ibuprofen if you take too much of it.)

Brian:

It would be stupidly easy to impersonate a coach, right? Slap some team gear on any middle-aged dude and boom, instant coaching staff. If you had official team attire and a working key card, how deep could you infiltrate an NFL organization before getting busted? You’ve played and covered football for years. How far do you think you could talk your way through a facility before someone called you out?

Five minutes. I’d have an easier time walking into an OR pretending to be a heart surgeon than I would passing myself off as an NFL coach. Playbooks were incomprehensible to me as a college football player, and they’re no less impenetrable to me now. I can talk generalities as a football critic. But ask me to break down tape like I’m J.T. O’Sullivan and you’d know I was a fraud within seconds.

My wife still thinks I should coach youth football after I retire from blogging, but god that sounds like a lot of work. I’d rather just tell other coaches they’re stupid than be a stupid coach myself.

John:

I think the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza saga has all been staged by Olivia and Ryan themselves. I think they're shady enough to have thought every step of this through as a long con that they can cash in on; a real life House of Cards saga that they started implementing years ago. They are smart and disgusting, and able to pull it off for a public that never really questions anything like this because it's too juicy.

I promise you that you’re vastly overestimating the shrewdness of both of these people. Olivia Nuzzi and her ex-fiancée are both miserable and insane, and they’re behaving exactly like insane, miserable people would. The long con for each of them was always the traditional Beltway insider scam: insinuate yourself with powerful scum in order to gain a profit. This RFK Jr. scandal is merely part of that. We’re talking about people who will make one sordid move after another until there are no moves left to make, and then keep trying to scam their way to the top anyway. It’s the only move they know.

So if Olivia Nuzzi—who just got let go be Vanity Fair, and whose book just got trashed in the papers and ignored in bookstores—REALLY conspired with Lizza to stage a messy public breakup, I don’t think you could consider either of them a mastermind for conceiving of it.

Adam:

What's your favorite Christmas song/album? If you have one.

I got four.

-Elvis’s Christmas album

-Phil Spector’s Christmas album

-Frank Sinatra’s Chirstmas album

-The Nutcracker

My folks used load those CDs their six-disc changer (remember those?) in the family room, and play them on a loop all during Christmas week. So I love all of those albums unreservedly, even if Phil Spector killed a lady.

Monte:

Barring reading (which is not writing), is there any means of practice for writers beyond the sheer act of creation? There are no etudes or scales for writers, and I'm not sure the trick of copying an existing piece until your own imagination takes over makes sense.

All of my writing practice occurs inside my head. I go out into the world and take in new sights and experiences. Somewhere along the way, I get an idea. Then I bat the idea around in my mind like it’s a ball of yarn. Is this idea a vein I can tap? ... i.e. does it naturally spawn more thoughts along the same lines? Take this post, for instance. When I made my family a homemade steak sauce, I knew that I wanted to write about it. But how?, I asked myself. Should I just post a recipe? Oh wait, I could probably tie it into my love of homemaking, since the concept of “male homemaker” still outrages the Fox News contingent. Oh shit, now I have to think about why I love homemaking, which means I can rope my parents and my kids into the throughline. Suddenly, I have not just a thought, but a story. An unwritten draft sitting in my melon, waiting to be documented.

That’s not “practice” in the academic sense that Monte here is looking for, but that’s all I got. Writing the process of organizing your thoughts. That requires you to take in stimulus that spawns those thoughts (not just reading books, but listening to music, visiting a new city, or even trying a new food), to note those thoughts down in a notebook, and then to ponder those thoughts. That mental work is practice for when you finally put pen to paper.

So, to sharpen your writing voice, do more shit that makes you think. Like watching the Ravens tie their own dick in a knot at the end of a game!

Andy:

If you took an unwrapped Taco Bell soft taco and put it in the upper level of a loaded dishwasher and then ran it, do you think the dishes would be clean when all is said and done? If so, how many unwrapped Taco Bell soft tacos do you think you would need to place in a dishwasher before doing so guaranteed you'd find evidence of your taco crimes afterward?

This reminds me of my wife and me bickering, on a monthly basis, over whether or not we have to rinse the dishes before loading them into the dishwasher. I say no, because I am lazy and because I found a link that told me that I didn’t have to. She disagrees, which means she wins the argument.

The real key is to rinse off shit like cheese and tomato sauce; anything that might crust over when the dishwasher is operating at peak heat. Otherwise, I’ve usually gotten away with leaving dirty dishes, you know, dirty. That means that our dishwasher could probably run a cycle with a soft taco and still do its job.

I wouldn’t go past the one, though. More than that and I’d break the fucking thing.

Email of the week!

John:

I picked up my eight-year old son from basketball practice the other day. When I get there, one of his friends (we'll call him Adam), says to me, "Your son pooped." Being a father who is still triggered by kids pooping when they're not supposed to, I immediately look at him and ask, "Did you like poop your pants?" He's giggling and says, "No." So I ask him, "Okay, well what is Adam talking about?"

I look over to Adam, who is also giggling. He says, "No, he pooped in the toilet.” I look back at my son, now he's giggling more, and I say, “Well good. That is where poop goes, after all." My son is now barely containing himself, and he spits out, "...and then Adam extended it!" This takes a second for me to process. I then ask them both. "Let me get this straight, you pooped in the toilet...didn't flush it...and then Adam pooped on top of your poop and made like a big mega combined poop? Is that right?" At which point they both literally fall over laughing.

As a parent, I know this is behavior that I should not encourage, so I say to them, "Let's not do that anymore. But deep in my cockles, I know they're right, and that a two-person mega-poop is a funny thing, right?

The funniest thing.