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 malls, flopping, hero instincts, and more.
Before I get started today, let's go ahead and open up the submissions for Why Your Team Sucks 2026. Does your NFL team suck? Well then, email us here and tell us why. A quick refresher of the guidelines for you. One: put your team's name and "WYTS" in the subject line. Two: Your team only, please. If you're some asshole Steelers fan sending in a missive about how pathetic the Browns are, right into the dustbin it goes. Got all that? Good. Then let's get down to business.
Your letters:
Paul:
Given that Fox's World Cup ratings are only up 150 percent whereas Telemundo's are up 289 percent, will the TV powers that be realize fans aren't fine with the idiocy of people like Alexi Lalas and Pat McAfee? Can we get sober-minded yet fun analysis like on NBC's EPL coverage?
Ha! No. You will never be free of the shitheads. Pat McAfee is reportedly on the verge of re-upping with ESPN to the tune of $60 million a year. Now, McAfee produces his own show, so that $60 million figure includes whatever overhead he incurs in making it, including paying his own crew and keeping A.J. Hawk's lithium supply fully stocked. But that's still $60 million for a guy with a 10-cent brain, and it still means that you and I will still see screengrabs of McAfee doing the "Uber Driver Sucked Me Off??" face all over the four-letter's homepage for the rest of the decade. He'll also stick around College GameDay, too. That was a great show once upon a time. Now it's largely a showcase for Pattycakes to tear his shirt off and scream "PLEASE ADORE ME!" at a bunch of pre-hungover college kids. I'd rather watch my dog die.
Just as you and I will never be rid of McAfee, so too will we never be rid of the hot take industrial complex. Hot takes existed well before McAfee was old enough to wear a jock strap, and they'll keep on existing after he accidentally drinks a glass of bleach and croaks on the spot. It doesn't matter that there's no longer any such thing as a hot take. It doesn't matter that your neighbor will hop on social media to say boring shit like, "Hot take: Frosted Flakes aren't that good." It doesn't matter that Americans have so thoroughly exhausted their ability to voice outrageous opinions that nothing outrages them anymore, not even having a braindead Nazi pig serving as president. The shouting will continue until the universe has fully contracted back down to a blip.
I'd like to think that the prospective decline of the MAGA movement might serve to pop the hot take bubble. And the AI bubble. And the crypto bubble. And the … well look, the whole fucking thing is one big bubble, innit? I'd like to think all of the bad shit will go away, but that's not how America works. Utopias aren't real, and this country will always be a mess. A loud one, where loud people can always find an audience. In this country, loud assholes will always look out for one another. Why do you think I still have a job?
Matt:
What is the worst advice you received that you actually tried?
Buying a cast-iron pan and seasoning it. Shit, man, I could compile a thousand awful pieces of cooking advice from the Bon Appetits of the world. But the whole cast-iron experience remains singularly annoying in my memory. I bought the pan, I covered it oil, I wiped it clean after cooking, before putting more oil into it … all that tiresome shit. It made me feel chefly, but it never made the food I cooked markedly better than when I was using just a regular-ass pan that was 40 pounds lighter. Even when I punted on the seasoning process and started washing the cast-iron pan with soap and water, it still wasn't worth the effort. And I can already hear cast-iron acolytes yelling at me about this. They always do. But fuck them.
This isn't as relevant to Matt's question but: Do college kids still use nose grease to kill off excessive beer foam? I spent four years binge drinking from kegs in college and never got tired of that stupid beerhack. I thought it was genius, and I kinda still do. It probably resulted in me ingesting an inordinate amount of space mutant bacteria, but still: Loogit all that foam dissolve! My nose did that!
Leo:
How do you deal with the flopping? As a sports fan who doesn't care a ton about soccer but follows it a little, I tried watching the last half of Argentina-Cabo Verde and I just couldn't deal with all of the players faking injuries every two minutes. I was embarrassed for them.
Stop being such a Republican, Leo. Diving is part of soccer and always has been. It's just gamesmanship, same as the flopping that's in plenty of other sports, especially basketball. If you're not working the refs, you're not winning. One reason I liked this USMNT team, at least until last night, was that our players knew how to dive like pros, and were willing to do so. They weren't bound by some bullshit imaginary mandate to be more American than other teams by staying on their feet all match long. They were willing to dive, even if that resulted in some guy wearing a Punisher logo calling them soft for it.
I used to be like Leo up there. I was a proud soccer hater, and I always pointed to diving as my chief gripe. DURRR THEY DON'T FLOP IN THE NFL DURRR, all that bullshit. Never mind that savvy NFL players, especially QBs, will gladly ham it up if they can get a free 15-yard flag out of it. In my mind, soccer players were worse divers. Too overly dramatic. Too wimpy. Therefore, their sport was inferior.
But then I grew up and to accept that diving is just part of the game. Once I did that, I was able to focus on all of the things that make soccer rule. If I had held onto my old prejudices, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate that Argentina–Cape Verde match for what it was: one of the coolest games I've ever seen. Look at this Sidny Lopes Cabral goal, man. Fucking look at it! If you think I'm gonna let some random dive elsewhere in the proceedings ruin that goal for me, then you're the stupid one. Some divers are annoying (Italy, Trae Young), but that's just the cost of doing business. Sports needs its villains, anyway.
In fact, I've come so far around on diving that I'm dying to learn more about the art of it. I want a full Diving Confidential investigation across every major sport. I want players to tell me their favorite flopping techniques, or to tell me about specific dives they learned by talking to other players or from watching them on tape. And I wanna know which coaches drill their players in foul-baiting, because I know damn well some of them do. Duke basketball didn't become Duke basketball by accident, you know. I asked my son if his soccer coaches did any flopping drills in practice, and he looked at me like I was a deranged old man. Well I'm not the crazy one, kiddo. You are! There's a whole flopping/diving subculture in the sports world, and I want in on it.
One last thing before I move on: Diving in soccer is a blessing in disguise because, unlike in the NFL, I never freak out when a player crumples to the turf. Except that one Canadian guy. He was actually hurt real bad. Sucks to be him.
Adam:
"Country Roads" is a great song, but it's a terrible team song for USA Soccer. It's a song for losers, all orange slices and "good game" vibes. That was USA soccer in 1994, not with this team in 2026. What would you suggest for a new team song?
Nothing. I'm down to keep "Country Roads" as the unofficial anthem of the USMNT. You don't want me picking a replacement for it, because I'll just pick one of my favorite rock tunes, and I'm not seeing a bunch of 20-somethings getting all hyped up to sing "Only" by Anthrax after every win.
So "Country Roads" stays. Like Adam said, it's a great song. And, despite last night's ass-kicking, it sure as shit isn't a song for losers. We have plenty of tracks that openly qualify for that distinction: "Bad Day," "Fight Song," and what have you. But "Country Roads" isn't one of them.
Also, the current USMNT players voted to adopt it. Ever since they did, the fans have taken to singing along with it, and so has manager Mauricio Pochettino. Look at this footage from after the Bosnia and Herzegovina win. Does that feel like a sad, losery pastiche to you? Shit no, it doesn't. It feels like the exact right song for the moment. Like it's in a plaaaaaaace… where it beLOOOOOOOONGS. I'm getting zero 1994 vibes from that clip. Got plenty of them from the Belgium tape, but John Denver played no role in that.
Zach:
Like most yanks, I've been enjoying the World Cup enough to want to get more into soccer/actual football. How should I go about choosing a league/team to support? Because most leagues don't have NFL imposed parity, you kind of have to choose one of the five or so teams who can actually win, or else your season seems like a forgone conclusion. Any suggestion, or do I just have to choose some loser like Fulham until they get relegated?
You don't have to do anything. Just watch more of the pros and see if any one team or player speaks to you. There's no need to force an adoption. I tried to make Liverpool my EPL team at one point, I think because I liked their red jerseys. What can I say, I just can't get enough of Standard Chartered investment products! Anyway, that choice never stuck, because it was essentially arbitrary. Meanwhile, my son became a fairly avid Tottenham fan, so now I root for them whenever they're on. I'm not ride-or-die, because A) I'm too old to form an indelible bond with a new sports team, and B) Spurs never win anything. I already root for one team that continually gets the penthouse door slammed in its face. I don't need a second one.
The larger point here is that you don't need a team of your own to watch a sport. I have no real NBA team to speak of, but I watch the NBA playoffs without fail every year. I usually end up with a temporary favorite—I was rooting for the Knicks to win it all this time around, and was rewarded for it—and that does the job well enough.
You also don't need to pick a team that has a chance of winning it all one day. That's especially true in soccer, where the best players are spread across multiple professional leagues, and where various international competitions are so thoroughly integrated into the schedule. You and I are conditioned to put all sorts of American restrictions on our fandom. You gotta have one team, and that team has to win the one, all-important title. The diffuse, egalitarian setup of international soccer invites you to think about your fan habits in an entirely different way. You can graze at the buffet, sampling flavors from here and there, and still go home satisfied. It's freeing like that.
Don't bother with MLS though. It's still a waste of time.
HALFTIME!
Daniel:
How are you at responding quickly to an unexpected moment of peril? I ask because we had an incident this 4th where a Roman candle–type firework fell over and pointed directly at the porch where everyone was standing. Fortunately no one was hurt. But of the five adults out there, only one really acted, running heroically towards the downed firework to pick it up and chuck it away from everyone. Three of us basically just froze, and the other hightailed it inside and shut the door behind her. Do you think there's a way to get better at reacting quickly to such things (short of going to military boot camp)?
I'm a hit-and-miss first responder, like pretty much everyone else. The most clutch "man of action" moment I ever had, off the top of my head, was when our daughter choked on a pretzel in the back of our car. She was a preschooler back then, and I heard her struggling to breathe while we were driving to visit Mount Vernon. So I immediately pulled over, got out of the car, threw open the door, and reached into her throat to pull the offending pretzel piece out. Many times, it is actually NOT the right course of action to use your hand to dislodge an object caught in someone else's throat, because there's a danger that you'll only push it further down the windpipe. But fuck that. I got the pretzel out and saved my daughter's life. That makes me a hero on par with the 9/11 first responders.
But my instincts don't always work that way, and yours don't, either. Bravery is just another word for survival. I'm sure those survival instincts can be honed through training, education, and just general life experience. But for most people, they're never gonna be that consistent. Sometimes I think selfishly in a moment of crisis, and act accordingly. Sometimes I think first of other things/people. And sometimes, I act contrary to my first thoughts. I'm much more likely to memory-bank the times I came through for someone else in the clutch (see the above pretzel story), because it makes me feel better about myself. That's a human instinct, too. Everybody wants to be the hero, which is why I gleefully ignore the time my son tumbled down the stairs when he was a baby because I was busy checking my email.
Ron:
Just finished five days car-camping (i.e. tent, Coleman stove, frozen leftovers, and lots of bottled wine) in Hells Canyon. Got me to thinking, could modern Americans manage the Missouri River? The Oregon Trail? I don't mean whether Americans, using modern tools, could do this. I mean, could current Americans—using only the tools, animals, wagons, and navigational aids available 150 years ago—make it? Travel several thousand miles without a damn clue about what awaited them at the end?
Nope. We're soft as shit. Especially the Americans who accuse other Americans of being soft. Those guys would be dead of cholera within six hours of leaving the wagon depot.
Sam:
I'm still riding high from the Knicks' historic run to a championship. Because the drought was so long, I feel like I'm good at least for a while before I can start really whining too much about this team. Is there a time limit on when fans should just be happy for what we got from an all-time fun team, or are we within our fan rights to be miserable bastards come the new year? Do Knicks fans get a Jim Dolan waiver to be complaining about their team already?
Bill Simmons got this same question back when he was writing for Page 2 at ESPN. He said that every fanbase should give their team a five-year grace period after winning a title, which sounded fair to me. Did he himself honor that rule after his Boston teams went on a title binge in the late aughts? Of course not. I wouldn't be forgiving, either, because this shit ain't rational. If I'm a complete psycho about every game my team plays leading up to a title, I've already conditioned myself to be a complete psycho after the fact. So you'd better believe that if my favorite team ever reaches the mountaintop (ha!), I'll still be calling for heads the second things go sideways afterward.
Same goes for you Knicks fans out there. Maybe you promised the team you'll be nicer to them as they bask in their post-title afterglow. But the second the ball is tipped off again, and you watch those fuckers blow a home game to the Hornets in the middle of November or whatever, you'll be back to calling into WFAN to tell everyone that Karl-Anthony Towns is still a bum. That's the magic of sports, baby.
Pete:
My daughter is much like my wife in that she is deliberate and cautious. She just needs to know all the details before she commits. I am not that way. But on Tuesday, she jumped off the high dive at the pool. She's never talked about doing it, or that she was scared. She just said she wanted to do something new. She's eight. I was amazed. What did your kids do that just showed you know awesome they are????
Aww, this is a nice question. The beauty of parenting is in the surprises, isn't it? Those surprises aren't so pleasant at first. "Holy shit, how did this baby fill up a diaper so quickly?!" But as they grow and develop, your kids take on qualities you never would have imagined them having.
I'll give you a personal example. When our oldest son was around 10 or so, he got a Rubik's Cube as a gift. I have never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube. If I get one side all the same color, I feel like Tenzing Norgay reaching the summit of Everest. This is because I lack the patience, and probably the aptitude, to think about the steps involved in getting all of the sides perfectly aligned. My son was an entirely different story. He studied the cube, filling up a notebook with combination sequences and committing those sequences to memory. Eventually, he could solve the thing in a matter of minutes. I have no idea where he got that from, and neither does my wife. Maybe he got the genius knocked into him when I let him fall down the stairs that one time. But I'll never really know the answer, and that's what makes raising kids such a fascinating endeavor.
It won't surprise you to learn that, in the years since, our son has scored hundreds of points higher on the SAT than either my wife or I ever did. Again, that's probably because of the stair thing.
John:
I had to meet a friend recently at the local upscale (not luxury) mall in a very affluent area. I had some time to kill so I wandered around to see what stores are even in malls these days. The one thing I noticed is an abundance of Athleisure stores. I actually lost count and the grandpa in me decided to skim through the mall directory once I got home. There are seven of them! Here they are: Alo, Athleta, Beyond Yoga, Fabletics, FP Movement (a Free People offshoot), Lululemon and Vuori. There's also a Nike store, a North Face store, and large Nordstrom and Macy's stores with athletic wear for men and women. If you ignore non-apparel stores (e.g., Williams Sonoma, LEGO, Tiffany, etc.) they make up more than 10 percent of all the standalone stores in the mall. That seems unsustainable, right? Unless I'm severely underestimating the demand from soccer moms and desperate housewives.
Fun fact: Anytime I see the phrase "Desperate Housewives," I think about how hot Nicollette Sheridan is. But enough about me and my inner Trump. John here asked about the athleisure revolution, and my job is to answer him. The deal here is that athleisure vendors have, at least for the time being, snatched away all of the upscale client market share from more traditional clothiers you and I used to see in the mall. Where there used to be a Zara or a Levi's, there’s a Vuori instead. Not only do our more affluent citizens prefer the fit of these clothes (this is me; I wear Vuori shit on the regular), but they like flaunting their Lululemon garb at the yoga studio as a status symbol.
Is it sustainable? No, because all fashion is cyclical, and because the average mall store is always living on borrowed time. We're not far from all of those Fabletics storefronts converting to thrifting outlets. And shit, malls themselves are becoming obsolete, if they aren't already. I don't even hit the mall for my Christmas shopping anymore. I only go there to see a movie or to get something at the food court.
[hits the food court]
OK, when is the acai bowl fad gonna end, goddammit? I wanted a BURGER.
Dan:
A longtime friend of mine has been happily married with kids to the same woman for almost ten years. Her father, who I've only met a few times at get-togethers but seemed like a decent enough guy, became a widower a few years ago. Last year he began dating, and is now engaged to, my friend's sister. There's a 20-year age gap between them, but considering the younger person in the relationship is already 38 herself that doesn't seem like a big issue. The far greater issue is that my friend's father-in-law is about to also become his brother-in-law! If they have kids, his little nephew or niece would also be his brother-in-law or sister-in-law. I know that he's thought about these things because he's told me so. Both he and his wife are putting on a brave face about all this, trying to be supportive of their loved ones the best they can, but reading between the lines I think it's fucking them up. Should it be?
Not enough to keep them from getting it on. It's perfectly fine. No genes are getting mutated in this relationship, and pornography teaches us that it's OK to feel horny.
Email of the week!
Adrian:
I was listening to you and Roth talk on The Distraction about embarrassing drunken escapades and I got all excited thinking, "I can contribute to this discussion!" Like the time I mistook my girlfriend's closet for a bathroom, or when I puked on three of my friends simultaneously at the bar, or when I woke up behind a police station. Then Roth started talking about potentially life-threatening drunken experiences and I thought, "I have lots of stories to contribute here too!" Then it hit home and I remembered that I was a serious alcoholic. Anyway, I'm 24 years sober and grateful to be alive. To anyone struggling with quitting alcohol: You can do it, and it's completely worth it.
Hear hear, amigo. I'll drink a club soda to that.
