Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it.
Prior to last week, I had never eaten at a Wawa. I knew of Wawa’s food offerings, because Defector Media has a sizable, and vocal, Philadelphia contingent. The most vocal among that contingent was the late Dan McQuade. McQuade was so intensely Philadelphian that I thought of him any time I encountered anything related to that city, and I still do. This goes especially for Wawa, and especially for its sandwiches. I’d pumped gas at a Wawa before, but you and I know that doesn’t make for a full Wawa experience. It’s like saying you’ve been to a city because you had a layover there. No, in order to evaluate Wawa correctly, I had to avail myself of all it had to offer. I have now done just that.
A bit of background here: Motorists in 2026 might think of Wawa mainly as a service station that also happens to sell food. But that’s putting the cart before the hoagie, because Wawa was founded in the early 20th century as a dairy farm, and a dairy farm only. The name “Wawa” itself has a layered meaning. It refers to both the Lenape tribe’s word for the Canada goose (hence a Canada goose in its logo), and to the area of Delaware County that those same geese used as a favored rest stop while migrating. According to this 1989 writeup in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wawa area of Delco still very much exists, although only in somewhat romantic terms:
"Wawa is a state of mind," said Fritz Schroeder, vice president of Wawa Inc. and a lifelong resident. "If you want to be in Wawa, you can be in Wawa."
I wanted to be in Wawa. And just my morbid luck, there was one conveniently situated nearby McQuade’s memorial last week. I needed lunch after the service had ended. I also needed to put air in my tires, because there’s nothing my car loves to do in wintertime than cry wolf about air pressure. All the excuse I needed.
To order food inside this Wawa, I had to use their ordering kiosk. I normally stand against these kiosks on principle, but Wawa’s side function as a gas station made me much more forgiving of the procedure. I was hoping to order The Saquon, a limited-edition hoagie that Wawa introduced in the wake of Eagles RB Saquon Barkley leading his team to a Super Bowl run. But this location wasn’t offering it, perhaps because the Eagles offense, Saquon included, was dogshit for all 2025. I didn’t mourn the lost opportunity, because the Saquon was just a turkey and American cheese combo. That’s such a fucking boring sandwich that only Kevin Patullo would order it. I wanted an Italian sub instead, and this Wawa WAS offering that. They offer it all year long, in fact, and not just as a limited-edition hoagie to celebrate Big Dom’s birthday. Good move by them.
So I braved the lunch-hour crowd inside this Wawa mart and entered my sandwich order into the kiosk. Then I waited. And waited. And then waited a little more. Before entering the mart, I had pumped up all of my tires with the speed and dexterity of a NASCAR pit crew (the station’s air pump was free of charge, I must note). Turns out I could have done that job in between ordering my hoagie and getting it. This irritated me, because I am a naturally impatient person. But also because I really, really wanted an Italian sub. And the Tastykake peanut butter Kandy Kakes I’d bought for dessert.
Finally, the woman in the kitchen called my number and I got my sub. It was a missile of a sandwich, the kind you could split with a friend and still feel full. The ingredients inside my sandwich were fresh. No telltale slime on the lunch meat. No sad, wilted vegetables. No stale-ass bread. I don’t need an Italian sub to blow me away, but I do need it to fulfill the basic requirements of an Italian sub. You’d be surprised how many places fail in this basic task (Subway). And if you can’t even get a basic-ass Italian sub right, how can I trust you to make anything?
Wawa earned my trust. I wish I’d taken a picture of my sub for this review, but A) I ate it in my car, and B) I ate all of it within two minutes. Then I had the Kandy Kakes. Then the low-pressure light on my dashboard finally switched off. Sorry I have no visual evidence of any of this, but you must trust me when I say that in every aspect, Wawa delivered for me.
Was this the greatest sandwich I’ve ever eaten? No, but I didn’t expect that. In fact, when I told the rest of the Defector staff I wanted to review Wawa, our own staff writer and newbie Philadelphia resident Kelsey McKinney took up the Philly torch on Dan McQuade’s behalf and was quickly like OUR CITY’S SANDWICHES ARE MORE THAN JUST WAWA. Maybe so, but Wawa sandwiches are the only ones I hear about from the Philly internet every 10 goddamn minutes. If that wasn’t the best Philly, non-cheesesteak sub I could eat on my trip, it still felt like the most Philly, non-cheesesteak sub I could venture.
More important, I now consider Wawa to be prime road-stop food. If I’m about to go on a long migration, but I know there’s a money-in-the-bank dining option to break up the ride, then I’m a happy man. That means I’m even happier now that I have a place besides Popeyes and Shake Shack to include in the rotation. I waited a little while longer than I would have liked for my Wawa sub. In fact, you could argue that I waited 49 years for it. I now deem that wait to have been well worth it. Three and a half stars.
The Games
No more games. The season is over. A cruel winter now envelops us all in its cold, dead grip. The idea of living one second longer now repulses me. Now let’s talk about some random crap:
-Every hard-up team this offseason will go hunting around for the next Sam Darnold, in the form of one of these oh-so-alluring potential QB acquisitions: Kyler Murray, Mac Jones, Tua Tagovailoa, an un-retired Derek Carr, Kirk Cousins, and … fuck it, I’m too uninspired by these names to continue listing them. There isn’t another Sam Darnold out there. No one with anything approaching his arm strength, his build, or his Flacco-like power to remain an emotionless cipher at all times. Guys like that usually don’t slip through the cracks, even when they play for the Titans.
If rehabbing a busted draft pick were that easy, it would happen more often. But the vast majority of failed top-10 pick QBs—my team’s included—are unsalvageable. They either don’t have the arm, the processing ability, or the durability to recover from their initial failures. That’s why guys like Darnold, Kurt Warner, and Mark Rypien only come around once every 20 years or so. The idea that there’s some magic, untapped well overflowing with them is the kind of shit that only a desperate NFL front office would believe.
In other news, I’ve decided that I want my team to sign Malik Willis, even if he wants $30 million AAV.
-Related, please treat all of the reporting in the runup to free agency the way you would anything posted to social media on April Fool’s Day. “The Niners want to keep Mac Jones” means We’re not trading him for anything less than a late first. This is the time of year when every team wants to goad every other team into making a shitty deal. Only the Arizona Cardinals are stupid enough to buy into any of it. Besides, the last two champs have proven that the draft is basically the only thing that matters. Wait for all of the fake news around THAT event before you get emotionally attached to any of it.
Super Bowl: 1-0
Overall: 6-7. I meant to do that.
Offseason Song That Makes Me Wanna Run Through A Goddamn Brick Wall
“Primal Sinister,” by Closure In Moscow! Sent in by Ryan:
These Aussie rockers released new music for the first time in about a decade, and the video they dropped for the second single off the new LP looks like one of those animations you get after scoring a strike at a bowling alley, if the animation had also been dosed with acid. The whole video revolves around the lead singer getting buried alive as a mummy before some eldritch monster from The Backrooms chases him (and the rest of the band) through trippy ancient Egyptian landscapes, before ultimately getting jumped by a 50-ft tall pharaoh. The music is groovy as hell too. They’re basically what The Mars Volta could’ve been if they hailed from Melbourne instead of El Paso.
I was too put off by The Mars Volta initially to know if what Ryan is saying is true or not. But it SOUNDS true, so I’m gonna roll with it. This video is cool as balls.
Fire This Asshole!
Is there anything more exciting than a coach losing his job? All year long, we’ll keep track of which coaches will almost certainly get fired at year’s end or sooner. And now, your final 2025 chopping block:
Brian Callahan—FIRED!
Brian Daboll—FIRED!
Jonathan Gannon—FIRED!
Pete Carroll—FIRED!
Kevin Stefanski—FIRED!
Raheem Morris—FIRED!
John Harbaugh—FIRED!
Sean McDermott—FIRED!
Mike McDaniel—FIRED!
Mike Tomlin—QUIT!
I can already see Pete Carroll making the move to TV after he disgraced himself with the Raiders. I bet his TV personality would be a lot like Mooch’s. This is not a compliment.
Jim Harbaugh’s Lifehack Of The Week!
“When I’m watching the Olympics, I sync up with the athletes on my TV screen. If they’re in a downhill crouch, I go into a downhill crouch. If they’re playing hockey, I skate around the family room by running, full speed, into the walls and bouncing off of them. And if I’m watching the Quad God, I too will jump and spin. I spin so hard, I can feel my G-forces pulling in nearby objects: candles, pieces of fruit, our kitten Greg. The second you abandon the athlete mindset, you die. And I will never die. I will live past man, past the Earth, and past the Sun. I will win existence in ways that mortal men cannot even begin to comprehend. And then, only then, will I sit down to enjoy a probiotic smoothie.”
Great Moments In Poop History
Reader Ryan sends in this story I call RYAN POOPED IN CLASS TODAY:
I’ve been a member of Pearl Jam’s Ten Club since the late ‘90s. The prime benefit is seniority-based, members only tickets, and in 2013, this yielded me tickets in the pit area directly in front of the stage on the outfield grass of Wrigley Field. I’m not a Cubs fan, but standing on the field at Wrigley was pretty magical, right up until the stomach cramps started to settle in. There were port-a-potties lining the walls in foul territory, but after baking in the heat all day, I dreaded how foul that territory would be. I kept telling myself it would pass, but when my girlfriend said that she was going to try and get to one of the bathrooms on the field-level concourse before the show started, I said I needed to go too and started following her out.
Then things took a weird turn. I have a condition that makes me susceptible to fainting. There’s no absolute trigger, but in this case it was probably the heat, which I was later told was over 110F on the field. About halfway back to the concourse, I started feeling light-headed. I veered over toward a security fence to get out of the flow of foot traffic and went down to my knees to try and fight it off, all while a security guard just kept yelling at me, “Dude, you can’t lay down there.” I laid down there. When I came to, I could see my girlfriend’s legs on the other side of the fence. She had been in front of me when all of this happened and had to double back when she realized I had disappeared and saw a commotion of people behind her. She convinced the security guard that I wasn’t drunk or high and he radioed the first aid team and helped me to the seating area.
When the first aid team got there, I explained my history to them, and they said they had an air-conditioned room they could take me to get checked out and get cooled down. I agreed, and stood up to walk off with them, but that’s when they informed me that for liability purposes they had take me off on a stretcher. I weakly protested to try and retain some dignity, but knew I needed a break from the heat, so they loaded me onto one of those folding stretcher-chair devices and carried me off the field in front of 40,000+ fans (and at least a dozen co-workers who I knew were there that night).
The first aid room was the Cubs’ Players’ Wives’ Lounge (that feels like way too many possessive apostrophes). They carried me in, transferred me to a hospital bed, and made sure my vitals checked out. As I was lying there, the cramping that kicked all of this off suddenly roared back to life. The staff directed me to the bathroom in the back of the lounge, and I barely got seated before blowing out a hot stream of pure liquid diarrhea. This gave me another cold sweat, but also a fleeting hope that my problems had been purged and I could finally get back out to the show, a hope soon dashed as the diarrhea repeated about every 10-15 minutes for the next hour or so.
Somewhere in there, I heard the roar of the crowd and the opening notes of “Release,” and I began to resign myself to the fact that that I was in no condition to get back on the field. I wasn’t in any condition to get home at that point either, even though it was only a mile away. While the intervals between poops were lengthening, an intense line of thunderstorms was bearing down on Chicago. The show wound up being suspended for 2½ hours after only six songs due to the storms. The first aid room eventually filled up with blind drunks and people who were obviously feigning sickness because they wanted an excuse to get into the air conditioning. As soon as the rain and lightning moved off, we made a break for home. Pearl Jam got an exception to go past the usual curfew and played a set that went until 2 am. I could hear the faint wafts of the show on the wind as we got back to my apartment, and it’s my hope that some faint wafts of my stench still haunt the Cubs’ Players’ Wives’ Lounge to this day.
Brick Johnson’s Executive Proposal Of The Offseason
“Dad? Daddddddddddddddddddd… Dad. Wake up, Dad. Listen, we have to trade for Mac Jones. I’m dead serious. Come downstairs and watch how badly I just fucked Daylen up in Madden with MJ as my quarterback. You’re gonna lose your shit.”
Cheap Beer Of The Offseason
Cerveza Barrilito! From Chazz!
My proximity to the U.S./Mexico border frequently yields Albertson's finds such as the lager you see before you. At $8.99 per 12-pack and 3.3% ABV, it's sufficient enough to get the job done, especially for someone who is staring an NFL offseason directly in the face. If you're looking for quality, please look elsewhere. If you're in the 14-17 age bracket and looking to take the first step into becoming a 21st century Barney Gumble, this will probably do the trick. Go Vikings.
I love good entry-level beer. My first binging beer came from a Coors Light party ball. I threw up a LOT.
Offfseason Movie Of The Week For Raiders Fans
Mixed by Erry, which I watched with my wife over the weekend. I figured that, since this movie was Italian, it would offset the Netflix element involved. I was incorrect. This is an extremely Netflix movie. It’s shot well enough, the exteriors are good tourist porn, and I enjoyed all of the main characters making violent hand gestures at one another as they spoke Italian. But that’s pretty much the extent of its charms.
This is a story about a 20th-century DJ named Erry, who’s so good at making mixtapes that he ends up being the biggest cassette seller in the entire country. The problem here is that A) we never really get to hear any of his mixes, and B) Erry never makes the artistic leap into remixing, or full-on production. This movie could have told the story of how DJing evolved over time into its own art form. Instead, we’re essentially left with a jukebox musical that has a few sitcom moments in it. I like Netflix originals more than some of my friends do. Because of Lupin, I also trust Netflix’s foreign language content more than I trust its English-language content. Emilia Perez should have disabused me of that notion, but alas. At least Mixed by Erry is better than that piece of shit ever was. Two stars.
Gratuitous Simpsons Quote
“What's your name?”
“I'm Bart Simpson. I saved you from jail."
“Er, I...”
“I reunited you with your estranged father.”
“Er, uh, I don't know...”
“I saved your career, man! Remember your comeback special?”
“Yeah well, what have you done for me lately?”
“I got you that Danish!”
“And I'll never forget it.”
Enjoy the offseason, everyone. See you back here for the draft in April.
