This Season Belongs To Sam Darnold

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 Sam Darnold, fighting ICE, conditioner, and more.

Your letters:

Paul:

What are your thoughts about Sam Darnold making the Super Bowl? If you recall, the Vikings lost in the first round last year after a 14-3 regular season record with Darnold at the helm (Yes, I'm trolling you. I'm sure I'm not alone).

You’re probably not, but I deserve the ridicule. I was fully on board with Minnesota letting Darnold walk to Seattle last offseason. As was the head coach … and the front office … and the ownership … and most Vikings fans if they’re all being honest with you. The rationale behind the decision made sense. Minnesota had spent three years carefully executing a plan to build around the fabled rookie QB contract. Darnold had a career year with the 2024 Vikings, but then played like absolute dogshit in the final two games. This franchise has spent so much time trying to win titles with rental QB, only to have their necks broken against the glass ceiling.

So when Darnold fell apart last January, Minnesota had to choose between paying a mint to a guy who had just failed them in very familiar ways, or sticking to their original plan. They stuck to the plan, and proceeded to fall into a bottomless pit. Maybe they’d be in the Super Bowl right now if they’d slapped a franchise tag on Darnold to keep him, or maybe he would have eaten up too much of their cap space for that to be possible. It doesn’t really matter either way, because no “what if” matters in sports. All that matters is reality. And in reality, Minnesota replaced a man at QB with a little boy. It’s a deeply annoying turn of events, but not one I’m gonna bother to deny. Shit-talkers are right to use it to their advantage.

Now that’s enough of making Sam Darnold’s comeback story all about me and my sorry-ass team. Let’s talk about Darnold himself now, because he is awesome. In fact, Sam Darnold is the most exciting QB in the NFL right now, and the numbers back it up. No one hunts for the long ball more often, and no one is better at throwing it. While every other offense in the league has turtled into running the ball and sending multiple tight ends out onto the field, Darnold is still a mad bomber. In fact, at midseason the Seahawks were like FUCK IT WE’RE THROWING IT DOWNFIELD and traded for Rasheed Shaheed so that Darnold could huck it deep even more than he already was. Shaheed ended up being the recipient of Darnold’s first longball in the NFC title game, and on a third-and-manageable, no less. Darnold would go on to throw a lot more cool passes like that on Sunday night, which was great because the AFC title game essentially ended by forfeit halfway through the third quarter.

Maybe Darnold could have been equally effective had he stayed in New York, Carolina, San Francisco, or Minnesota. But it’s more romantic, and also more fun, to believe that he only could have become this Sam Darnold in Seattle. That he had to endure years of dogshit working for organizations that never fully believed in him before finding one that said, This guy’s a fucking weapon; let’s plug him into our loaded roster and kill everyone with him. That’s the narrative our man deserves. So I couldn’t be happier for him, and of course I hope he beats the Patriots by 50.

Noe:

Have you noticed more bars/restaurants becoming Eagles bars? I live in a city without an NFL team and it's getting out of hand. This town has always had one legit Eagles bar (they serve really good pretzels), but lately there are Eagles flags at tons of places. Just yesterday a bartender pointed to their tiny Eagles sign and proclaimed, "Watch out, you're in Eagles country!" This never happened with the Chiefs. Why are so many establishments riding this generic ass good team? Note also that I'm on the West Coast. It's baffling.

Sounds like standard bandwagon shit to me. Plus, Philly sports has an image that Kansas City doesn’t. I’m not praising Philly for this, mind you. But the Philly brand is regrettably strong, so it makes sense that casual fans would suddenly jump aboard a team that makes them feel like they’re part of the Insane Eagles Posse. Sad but true.

Now, since we’re talking Eagles, let’s check in on their search for a new offensive coordinator!

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an organization like these Eagles. They’re the best run team in the league at the tippy top of the org chart, and yet utterly dysfunctional beneath that. Every other year, this team implodes. That’s fucking weird, man. Promising assistants should be willing to crawl over broken glass to work in Philly, and yet even puds like Charlie Weis Jr. (there’s another Charlie Weis?!) are saying, Fuck no, I don’t want any of that. I want every behinds-the-scenes detail I can get about what kind of shop Nick Sirianni is running over there, and I want that tea right now. It’s the Super Bowl bye week, man … the boringest week of January. Gimme something to chew on.

Dustin:

It is Saturday, Jan. 24th and ICE just murdered a man in the streets. What the fuck can we do, honestly? I've never felt this powerless in my life. 

They want you to feel powerless, so don’t give them the satisfaction. Minnesotans aren’t. Take inspiration from your countrymen instead of your leaders. A movement is taking shape on the ground right now. Join it by donating, by calling your reps and letting them have it, and by getting out and protesting. Not only will you feel better for it, but it’ll give you the energy boost you need to keep on fighting. What happened on Saturday has led to a groundswell that is growing increasingly undeniable. I don’t feel downtrodden anymore. I feel ready to blast through a fucking wall.

I’m not telling you to hope. You and I know that hope is worthless. But resolve is not. And look at the resolve Minnesotans are displaying right now. Do those people look powerless to you? Or can you draw a direct line from them to GOP chickenshits backpedaling, to Democrats (finally) demanding Kristi Noem’s head on a pike, and to Trump himself flopping around like a fucking fish as his approval ratings crater?

Everybody at the top level is a fucking coward right now, but these protestors are proving that cowards can be had. One more protestor out in the street, one more voter demanding that Democrats scream FUCK ICE instead of their usual impotent spiel, one more dollar given to places that protect immigrants rather than kidnap them… all of it serves to chip away at an increasingly flimsy Nazi facade.

That’s the kind of momentum that Minnesotans are giving to their fellow citizens. So get on the bandwagon right now if you haven’t already. Because all politicians are, at heart, followers. They gravitate toward what’s popular. And you know what’s getting more popular right now? Abolishing the FUCK out of ICE. That’s where you and I have some agency here, so use it. Use it until we’ve cut the fascism out entirely. Softened tones mean nothing to me. I want total victory, and I’m not alone. Neither are you.

John:

Do you use hair conditioner? I am 55, have a full head of hair, and through my life have had it long and short. I have maybe used conditioner a dozen times, and felt like I'd dunked my head in motor oil. If it were just an item that some people liked and others didn't, I would think much about it. However, it's everywhere! Every hotel, every gym, aisles and aisles in stores... it appears to be more essential than toothpaste. What am I missing with hair conditioner?

Shampoo helps clean your hair, conditioner helps you style it. That’s why I use leave-in conditioner after pretty much every shower I take. If I don’t use any product in my hair, then it starts to get all poofy and goofy. I need that conditioner to help tame my hair so that it looks normal when I go out in public. I doubt that every living American absolutely needs conditioner to make their hair look presentable—reader John might be so follicular-ly blessed that his resting hair will do anything he asks of it—but most of us need conditioner for the same reasons I do. Ever brush your hair but it refuses to stay in place? It’s annoying. Hence, conditioner … plus billions of dollars worth of other hair care products that people buy.

Plus, I love to use gobs of free conditioner when I’m staying at a hotel. Makes me feel like Fabio.

Jonathan:

I would argue that incels are the most pathetic people around. Having sex isn't that hard. You know, as long as you're not a misogynist asshole. What are your thoughts?

I didn’t get laid until I was 20 years old. Having sex was REALLY hard for young Drew, so much so that it felt genuinely impossible that it would ever happen. The fact that everyone around me WAS getting laid only added to my despair. I couldn’t understand how they did it. In fact, it made me angry (but not murderous, I must note) that sex came so easily to others and not to me. The virgin Beavis was my spirit animal. Some nights I thought I would die alone, and it made me cry. Real tears. Real, very pitiful tears.

So I have lived the incel life, to a certain degree. Thank fucking God the manosphere didn’t exist back then to turn me into a monster over it. I still shudder at the idea of what I might have become had I grown up now rather than back in the '80s … the famously peaceful, tolerant 1980s. I’m not telling you all of that to defend incels, but just to illuminate their particular madness as best I can. These are people shut out from physical love, so they turn to hatred as a substitute that will them that they’re right to be pissed, and that women should be more forthcoming. That hatred makes them more repellent to the opposite sex, so they get more lonely and hateful, and the cycle continues thusly.

The only way to break that cycle is with patience and introspection: two things that the digital culture has rendered superficially optional to people, young men especially. So it’s not a shock that our country is now run by a man who possesses no patience and no introspection of any kind. If American culture shifts post-Trump to being a place where those qualities are visibly rewarded (not a guarantee, of course), then our saddest incels might finally learn how to get laid, and to get laid the right way.

HALFTIME!

Charlie:

Bills fan here. Am I crazy? From pundits, bloggers, fans, etc., the overwhelming reaction is surprise and/or saying that firing Sean McDermott is a mistake. Look, he'll always get credit for getting us back to the playoffs, and more often than not he was a good coach than a bad coach. But he couldn't hold a lead for 13 seconds. Daboll was his best OC in his tenure. While injuries almost always factored in, this defensive HC gave up 30+ points in almost every playoff game. While Billy Beane should also get the boot, please tell me I'm justified in being happy McD is gone. 

It wasn’t about McDermott getting fired, but about the process surrounding his ouster. Sean McDermott had clearly hit a wall in Buffalo and wasn’t going to take them any further. I’m not gonna argue with anyone on that point.

But the Bills acted like he was the ONLY problem. They kept Billy Beane on as GM, and then held a deranged press conference in which they publicly threw McDermott (and wideout Keon Coleman) under the bus. So how can any right-thinking Bills fan think, We’re all good now? They can’t. The majority of us watched that Terry Pegula press conference and realized that Buffalo’s problems go deeper than Coach 9/11. So it’s an empty feeling to know that McDermott is gone when you can’t possibly trust the Bills to capably replace him. And they didn't. They just hired the OC who was already sitting around.

That’s where the despair is coming from. It’s well-founded. If I’m Josh Allen, I’m already plotting my escape. I might even fake my own death.

Matthew:

How do you write the number eight? I write it by drawing two circles, one on one top of the other. I've done this as long as I can remember. I know most people write it as a figure 8, using one stroke. My method requires two strokes (one for each circle). Should I switch to the single stroke method?

I use a single stroke, only my handwriting is so poor that the top loops of my eights end up narrow, so it looks like the number six. A few years ago, I made a dedicated effort to improving my penmanship, but I focused exclusively on letters and not on numerals. So my eights still look like sixes, and my sevens look like bass clefs. This is why my wife has to write our checks.

Michael:

Did you know we have five oceans now? Apparently the Southern Ocean has been a thing for a while, and my little nephew made me feel like an asshole.

I did know this! Like you, I was taught in grade school that the earth had four oceans, that Australia was its own continent, and that we had nine planets in the solar system. But then the WOKES came along and changed all of that. Now we’ve lost a planet, Australia is part of the continent Oceania, and I have to pretend that the Southern Ocean is an actual thing. Outrageous.

In all seriousness, if you read a lot of shipwreck books, as I do, you’ll learn that the Southern Ocean isn’t just real, but that it’s the meanest body of water on earth. Dip a single toe into that ocean and a frost shark will emerge from the depths to swallow you whole. True story. You could be the hardy captain of the most heavily fortified battleship in the world, and you’d still say FUCK THAT SHIT if you got orders to brave the Drake Passage. The Southern Ocean doesn’t fuck around, which makes it cool. And it’ll have some great beaches once Antarctica melts. Exciting!

(A quick dad story: My sons get mad at me now if I call grade school “grade school” and not “elementary school.” Apparently the former term is now out of date. Again, I blame the wokes.)

Hudson:

Here’s the situation: one week before my daughter turned three, she wiped out at daycare and knocked out her top front tooth. Gone. Never found. She bounced back immediately and was mostly bummed about getting “red paint” on her favorite shirt. Now we’re debating whether to get her a pediatric partial (a tiny removable tooth) to fill the gap until her adult teeth come in. Without it, that’s three to four years of toothless living, which feels like a long sentence for a kid. She doesn’t care at all right now, but I'm more worried about how that might change as she gets older, both practically and socially. Other kids can be unkind. What would you do?

Don’t bother getting her a flipper. If she’s fine to have a hockey mouth for a while, then that’s all that really matters. Other kids start to lose teeth at that age anyway, and kids will make fun of other kids regardless of what you, the parent, do to mitigate it. Your kid would just lose and/or swallow the fake tooth anyway. It’s a lock.

I have experience in this. My wife has had tooth problems her entire life: dental implants, bridges, the works. She passed those issues onto to some of our kids, and so we’ve had to confront similar choices like the one Hudson faces right now. In nearly every early instance, we’ve opted to leave things as they are. You let your kids lose their baby teeth, and then you start getting work done. Otherwise you’re just wasting money. We’ve had dentists tell us this, and when’s the last time a dentist tried to NOT upsell patients on needless dogshit?

The only exception in our kids’ instance has been braces. They start kids early on braces now, and they never let up. They do braces in two stages now. For Phase I, they straighten the kiddie teeth so that the adult ones grow in correctly. Years later, they commence Phase II to get the adult teeth just right. My older son is in Phase II right now, my younger in Phase I. Both of them are fucking miserable. Both our sons have had their braces in for nearly two years straight. All either of them wants is to get all that shit out of their mouth, so they go to every ortho appointment praying this is the day he’s like, “Okay, I can take them out now.” Every time he tells them they need just a little bit longer, they come back home looking like the dog died.

So don’t do any big tooth shit with your kids until it’s truly necessary. Let them be British for a little bit.

Jason:

So much concern about the NFL schedule going from 16 to 17 and potentially to 18 games, and the toll it takes on the health of the players. But has anyone thought about tying the increase to 18 games with a change to 12-minute quarters?

Not that I’ve heard. Owners would hate the idea, because shorter games would reduce television inventory (unless they crammed more ad breaks into every game, which no). And I bet players would hate the idea too, because 60-minute games are all they’ve ever known. If you’ve ever played football, you know that the games move fast, much faster than if you’re watching on TV. I remember looking up at the scoreboard and being like, Wait, the game is almost over? Well fuck a duck we’re still down two scores! Shorten the games and every player’s circadian football rhythms would be thrown even more out of whack.

Also, I’m not interested in brainstorming solutions to allow for 18 games. That’s Democrat shit. If I’m the NFLPA, I tell the owners to get fucked eternally on the 18-game idea. No need to offer them loopholes to exploit.

Michael:

Out of all your friends, how would you rank yourself on your ability to dive on top of a live grenade? I know you have back problems which might hamper both your speed and diving ability a bit, but I wouldn't doubt your courage. 

How far away is the grenade? Did it roll right at my feet? Do I have to come charging out of a trench to cover it? That matters, because I am no longer charge out of a trench years old. I can slump down onto a grenade with the best of them. But anything more strenuous and I might end up falling short of the grenade and falling on a thumbtack instead. Ow.

Also, you should doubt my courage. If I gotta leap on that grenade to protect my family, I wouldn’t hesitate. But if I’m just doing it to save, like, Shedeur Sanders? Sorry, Sheddy. You go boom now.

Jack:

You mentioned on a recent Distraction episode that you have a pill box. I'm 25 and relatively healthy. But I have several prescriptions and take six or seven pills each morning. I see pillboxes at the pharmacy and always think about how much time it would save me. But the thought of having one makes me feel like I drank out of the wrong grail. Should I bite the bullet and accept my fate as a pillbox guy, or hang onto every last bit of youth I can?

Get the pillbox. No one will mistake you for Joe Biden if you do, plus it’ll make your life considerably easier, especially if you’re traveling. Here’s the pillbox I use. It’s small, discreet, portable, and doesn’t have the giant SMTWTFS lettering on top that makes you feel like you’re on your deathbed. I’m glad I got my pill organizer, and I wish I’d gotten it sooner. You’ll feel similarly.

And don’t let a stupid pillbox define your self-worth. It’s just a pillbox. No one gives a crap … unless you’re taking meds for gonorrhea, in which case any one night stand you take home might have reason to pause.

Adam:

Is over-the-counter cough syrup bullshit? Like most kids, my young daughter gets sick every now and then, and the stuff usually does absolutely nothing to remedy the problem. Sometimes it even exacerbates the cough. I mentioned this at a couple of pediatrician appointments recently and got tacit affirmation that it really doesn't do the job (or at least, the docs humored my idiocy and chose not to set the record straight). What say you?

I wasn’t even aware they sold cough syrup anymore. I grew up with the legendary Grape Dimetapp still on drugstore shelves, ready to be chugged by entry-level alcoholics. Then they banned it! UNAMERICAN! Where’s RFK Jr. on THIS issue, hmm?

Anyway, you probably don’t need cough syrup when your kids get sick anymore, especially when Benadryl is still freely available. But if your kid has COVID, that’s a different story. When I got COVID a few years back, my NP told me to take Claritin, Flonase, and Robitussin all at the same time. It worked. I felt better within hours. So if your kid ever comes down with a pandemic bug, you let that Tussin get in there.

Email of the week!

Paul:

My kid's in 10th Grade and the other day a bunch of her friends were over studying. Three of them have The Hike out, and are going over symbolism and imagery. Turns out, you're required reading. So, how's it feel to know there are some grumpy teens cursing your name the way we cursed Salinger's name?

Fucking AMAZING. Eat my balls, Holden Caulfield!