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 music, Caleb Williams, dishwasher mishaps, best foods to throw up, and more.
Your letters:
Adrian:
It might be cliché to compare what’s going on right now with ICE to Nazi Germany. However, I find myself wondering if this is similar to how things played out back then in Germany. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see how the situation in Minnesota is being treated (media using weak language and not stating plain facts, obfuscating or cowardly politicians). When things were veering towards catastrophe 90 years ago, do you think it was similar? Were people turning a blind eye and not properly covering the atrocities until it was too late?
The great Erik Larson (Devil in the White City) wrote an entire book about this. It’s not Larson’s most exciting work, but In The Garden Of Beasts chronicles life inside pre-war Germany as it gradually, and then suddenly, turned into the defining fascist regime of modern history. It’s not an exact correlation to what’s happening in America right now, because the United States is so much larger, with a much more sprawling system of government and a media landscape that, even after consolidation, is far more diffuse.
But we already know that many Americans in 2026 are, at the urging of the Trump regime, turning a blind eye to the atrocities being inflicted upon their own countrymen. There are also many more citizens, myself included, who are trying to carry on with their lives here while hoping that things don’t get so bad that they have to flee. And that part resembles the story that Larson tells in his book. People either think that the worst can’t happen, that it won’t happen, or that they can survive the worst if it does happen. That’s a tacit form of complacency that allows evil to spread, and that’s where Americans need to wake the fuck up. Because we’re already in the Too Late stage of things, and there’s ample precedent for what happens next.
All of it has made me wonder … who wants to be a hero? You and I know how spiritually weak the Trump regime is. You know that the veil could maybe be pierced if someone with real juice—and I don’t mean someone merely famous, like Ryan Coogler at the Globes the other night—loudly and profanely started calling for these motherfuckers to all be treated like the remorseless criminals they are. To LEAD. For all intents and purposes, no one has. Think about it. Have you seen ONE well done attack ad from Democratic interests throughout this ongoing horror? Have you seen any major leader of industry—Tim Cook or whoever—tell Trump to go fuck himself? Have you seen any DNC leader call for the abolition of ICE and the prosecution of everyone in this administration? Fuck man, I’d even settle for Matthew Stafford calling these fuckers out after a playoff win. All I ask for is one big voice eager to galvanize the rest. Instead, there’s been NOTHING.
That’s what makes me so pessimistic. Because this is a situation that’s begging for someone to step up and be a hero. You don’t have to be fucking Iron Man to stand up to these chumps. You just need a big honking platform and a modicum of basic human courage. That’s it. The first widely influential American to use that megaphone will be a goddamn savior. We'll build statues of this person, and of our own accord! We’ll name schools and airports after them, and then create a new national holiday in their honor. All they have to do is seize the mic, and already they’ll be more vital to the future of America than piece of shit Chuck Schumer ever was or will be.
So who’s gonna do it? Anyone out there wanna be an icon? Then speak up now, because soon none of us will be able to speak at all.
Louis:
What's the best food to vomit?
Chicken soup. It’s not a JOY to vomit chicken soup, but it’s about as mild a food to bring back up as you can ask for. It’s mild, and it won’t add to the acid load already in your barf. You know what really sucks? Throwing up your meds. I did that a few weeks ago and then I was like well wait, does this mean I should take my meds all over again? Now I have a migraine to go with my Siberian Death Flu. Not fair.
Jay:
Why does the NFL still insist on having timed OT periods during the playoffs? Is this only to ensure the TV partners get ad time if the OT goes more than 15 minutes?
That and also the players need the rest. They don’t get a lot of rest if a game goes to double OT (only two minutes), but you do need that clock up there to keep the rhythm of everything consistent. Really, there should be a full halftime break between the end of regulation and the start of the first overtime period, because players are dead on their feet. But the NFL doesn’t care about its players’ health, and they don’t want any game to impinge on Fox’s 8:00 p.m. time slot for Ronald Miller Is The Jackal Now. So this is what we get.
Nick:
After the 2025 NFL season, what is your opinion of the Ty Dunne article about Caleb Williams and Bears GM Ryan Poles? Many Bears fans feel it was an ableist, homophobic, anonymously-sourced hit piece that gleefully attempted to derail the tenure of a new head coach before it got started. It implied that Williams is a nearly illiterate, uncoachable, possibly queer diva who was doomed to fail, and that his GM was a toxic narcissist that made the future of the team hopeless. Do you think there is validity to that opinion? Do you think Dunne’s motivation for writing the article should be called into question? Do you think Williams’ and the Bears’ success in 2025, driven largely by a young core of Ryan Poles draft picks and acquisitions, means any of it was incorrect?
Let me provide background for anyone unfamiliar with everything Nick is referring to. Ty Dunne is the independent NFL blogger who broke the story about now fired(!) Bills coach Sean McDermott being a big fan of the 9/11 hijackers. Dunne also discovered that then-Green Bay head coach Mike McCarthy was skipping out on meetings to get massages, and he first exposed the ugly inner workings of Mike Zimmer’s tenure in Minnesota. Dunne is a very particular sort of access merchant. He’ll gas up players and/or coaches who talk to him at length, but then use those same dudes as sources whenever he writes a big investigative piece. That process pays off for our man, because he almost always gets great copy out of those people when he needs it.
So when Dunne busted out a big, three-part investigation into Caleb Williams’s brutal start with the Bears, I considered his reporting to be credible. Pretty much every NFL writer I follow—Tanier, McCown, Coller, etc.—did the same. That’s why I cited Dunne when lamenting Williams’s failures at the beginning of this season. I’ve now done far too much explaining already, so lemme just cite the parts of that article that pissed readers off. The first was this use of the word “sashay”…
The typically calm coach lost it… Unfazed, Williams sashayed away. Right back to the huddle.
… followed by this Nolan Nawrocki-esque passage:
Williams walks down fashion runways, attends Louis Vuitton shows and poses in a slew of different outfits for an Esquire photoshoot. He paints his nails. He was voted GQ’s most stylish athlete. Quarterbacks need a life outside of X’s and O’s. Quarterbacks don’t need to eat avocado ice cream, wear recovery pajamas and obsess over the sport to a Tom Brady extreme. Win games, and nobody will care. All eccentricities will be celebrated. Lose games, and one Bears coach who got to know Williams closely believes this fashionista side could become, “a point of contention and distraction.”
You get the idea. Dunne’s sources, many of them former Matt Eberflus staffers, consistently derided Williams as a diva. And since the NFL remains culturally stuck in 1949, you get all of the tired insinuations that go along with the diva label. I’m not gonna defend Dunne for putting this dorky shit in his piece. He could have left the above blockquotes on the cutting room floor and still brought the goods. Typical case of Substack-itis.
Now let’s parse this passage from him, which also made people angry:
Multiple Bears sources tell Go Long they’ve seen evidence that Williams has dyslexia. They also believe that the GM, who has access to everything, was well aware of this condition before the Bears made the quarterback their first overall pick… A learning disability does not have to be a deal-breaker, of course. Many highly successful pros are open about the condition. Packers pass rusher Rashan Gary owns it as his “My Cause My Cleats” initiative. Frank Gore rushed for 16,000 yards, the third-most in NFL history. Savants such as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Magic Johnson revolutionized their respective fields with dyslexia. Yet rather than do what a normal NFL team would with such a gigantic decision — meticulously chart a plan — the Bears, coaches and scouts tell Go Long, either suppressed this information or overlooked it. At worst, it’s a cover up. At best, gross negligence.
First of all, Dunne should have corroborated that Williams had a learning disability before putting this out there. Otherwise, he’s just covering for sources looking to blame Williams’s initial failures on anyone, and anything, but themselves. And while Dunne uses the bulk of this paragraph to dump on the Bears’ front office for failing to help Williams treat the condition if he really did have it, that also has a whiff of cynicism to it. If Williams really does have dyslexia, what would a "treatment" plan from that team’s boob-ish front office even look like? And do we even really know if that potential affliction would make it more difficult to play quarterback? Because, based on this season's results, it doesn’t seem like it.
So to sum up: I still like most of the shit in the Go Long Williams piece, but not all of it. That’s kinda par for the course with Dunne, but I’m glad he’s around to get copy that pretty much no other insider is willing to publish. He’s a zealous football evangelist who likes the Green Bay Packers WAYYYY too much, but he’s willing to do the kind of tawdry, gossipy NFL reporting that doesn't exist anywhere else anymore. I appreciate that, even if sometimes this stuff blows up in his face and comes off as embarrassing.
Because I can believe that Williams was an absolute turd his first year in Chicago while also believing that he’s clearly coming into his own as a professional. I can also believe that Ryan Poles, secretly the main target of Dunne’s investigation, is a cheap suit who badly fucked up his first coaching hire but still managed to draft vital pieces for the roster. Even Mike Brown managed to draft Joe Burrow, know what I mean?
If Poles didn’t vet Williams properly, that may not end up mattering in the slightest. Caleb Williams is now one of the most exciting players in the NFL, if not THE most exciting player. He’s still got a shitload of work to do, especially as it relates to accuracy. But he’s clearly willing to do it, and watching him doesn’t feel anywhere near as depressing as it did back when Dunne hit the PUBLISH button on his Substack back in September. I wanted Caleb Williams to be good, and I wrote as much. He’s getting there now, which is cool. My team will suffer greatly for it, but that’s my problem and not yours.
HALFTIME!
Patrick:
My wife is due in April with our third child. The first two, both girls, were over ten pounds at birth. The third is measuring at a similar rate of the first two. I'm 6'9", 320+ lbs, and my wife is maybe 5'6". At what point do I start to really feel guilty for what I'm putting my wife through?
Isn’t she already giving you shit for the other two? Half the fun of parenting is blaming your spouse’s genes for shit. Like if our boys eat through $200 worth of groceries in a single day? Oh you better believe my wife is saying to me, “They got that from you.” And yes, I got blamed for the labor pains, too. You’re not a new dad until your wife screams “You did this to me!” 500 times in the delivery room. Hell my parents would blame each other for my shortcomings while I was standing right there. “He gets those farts from you.”
Now, do I actually feel guilty that our children inherited some of my cumbersome dimensions, or some of my most annoying qualities? No. How the fuck was I gonna prevent any of that from happening, by asking Timothee Chalamet to sire our children for me? Of course not. Any shade my wife throws at me about this kinda shit, or vice versa, is strictly for teasing’s sake. Therefore you, Patrick, shouldn’t feel bad about being 6-foot-9. You didn’t ask to be that tall, and your wife knew you were that big when she met you. Go ahead and tell her you’re sorry that she had to deliver a trio of cave giants, but it ain’t something you should actually lose sleep over. You are who you are, same as your kids.
Dusty:
You're a Yahtzee whore, how do you feel about board game variants? I ask because we tried the "Triple Yahtzee!" variant the other day, which the internet said was the best one.
No, I hate all that shit. Save for Monopoly Junior, I am a board game purist. If you dare ask me to play Super Scrabble instead of the original, that’s your ass. So I play regular Yahtzee, and regular Yahtzee only. No triple Yahtzee. No Yahtzee: Scrubs Edition. I play it alone, on my phone (a knockoff version called Yazy because the brand name app, like Scrabble’s, sucks major ass), dozens of times a day. If I get a Yahtzee roll, I do the bro nod, like that’s right baby. If I’m on a run toward the end of a game but still need a Yahtzee, I think to myself, “Two more shots at the Yahtz.” That’s about as much information about my Yahtzee habit as anyone who is not me could possibly require. Let’s move on.
Donna:
As someone who is mostly a sports idiot, how is it that I have heard so little about the referee experience? What I usually hear is how the refs fucked up this, or fucked up that. Like they’re supposed to simultaneously be everywhere and see everything in real time, while also getting paid a fraction of what the players are. Has there ever been a documentary about the game from their perspective?
No, because the NFL would forbid it. The goal is to minimize the presence of officials, especially outside of any game context. You show up to the stadium, you announce penalties as dryly as you can manage, you do a pool report after the game, and then you vanish. It’s a thankless task by design, because a lot of things could go sideways if any league decided to make its officials into personalities (see: the now-retired Joey Crawford in the NBA).
This is all for the best. But if Netflix ever got the greenlight to make a Referee docuseries—a real doc, not some glorified PR dogshit—it would be incredible. Hell, I’d kill just to get a former ref drunk at a bar to hear all the dirt they’ve got. Fans only notice refs when they fuck up, but it’s an insanely hard job that also lets you see and hear all of the dirty business happening on the field and on the sidelines. Imagine asking an off-the-clock Bill Vinovich what he thinks of the Harbaugh brothers. These people are walking around with solid gold in their memory banks.
Greg:
There are certain songs that instantly take me back to a specific place and time. Now that we have every song basically at our disposal and I've built playlists of those songs, is that ruining the effect? Like now, instead of listening to Green Day or Smashing Pumpkins and thinking of a simpler time running around with my friends in high school, it also kinda reminds me of the PowerPoint deck I built last week.
I have a tip for you on that end, which is to stop listening to those artists via playlist. Go back to listening to full albums instead. I haven’t lost my emotional tether to music since the advent of streaming, but I have found that I can really make the time machine hum if I ditch the shuffle mode and listen to the music the same way I did when it came out.
For example, I ignored my usual workout playlist the other day and just listened to Soundgarden’s Superunknown all the way through instead. I hadn’t done that in decades, and the effect was near instantaneous. Going by the original tracklist took me back to owning the physical cassette, to listening to every song on that album in order—picking up transitions between songs that I hadn’t heard in a very long time—and even listening to minor songs on the album that I deemed worthy of the usual "every track must be a banger!" playlist. Listening to a full album again is like rereading a great book, or watching one of your favorite movies all over again. The magic is in giving yourself to the work entirely. That was a solid workout I had yesterday. I’m gonna do that shit every day now, with a different album each time.
And you don’t need to listen exclusive to old shit to get the same rush. Another example: 2025 was the year I belatedly discovered Slayer, especially its masterpiece album, Reign in Blood. I threw every song from that album onto my workout playlist, but hearing the tracks separately didn’t have anywhere near the impact of listening to all of them over the course of 27 punishing minutes. So now, if I wanna hear Reign in Blood, I listen to all of it. It takes me back to … well, it takes me back to my basement a year ago. But dull memories are still memories, and they still have an odd rush to them. So that’s my tip. Now go with Satan.
Tomark:
Regarding this tweet, which coaches are ping pong table coaches and which ones are no ping pong table coaches? Which teams desperately need a ping pong table to be added or removed from the clubhouse?
Tomark, the fact that you would even think about ping pong at this time of the season tells me that you’re not serious about winning football games. I will now remove YOU from the clubhouse.
Dennis:
Would an NFL game be better or worse if all players had headsets in their helmets and could be spoken to by coordinators throughout the play?
I threw out a “ban the helmet radio” take a week ago, as an aside to some other take I was screeching to the readership. So let me use this space to expound on it a little. I know that the helmet radio makes communication between the playcaller and QB easier in a loud stadium, but it also gives every NFL coach license to overcoach, and there’s nothing these people love more than to micromanage the living hell out of their players. The goal of coaching, of teaching in general, is to imbue your student with the ability to coach/teach themselves. You to go college and now you’re doing most of your work outside of a classroom. You go to grad school for a PhD and now you may not even have to step inside a classroom at all (NOTE: I do not have a graduate degree of any kind; I do not know how grad schools work). You know what you want to study, and you know how to study it. Off you go.
The NFL should work along similar lines. At a certain point, you should just let players figure shit out for themselves, rather than trying to direct them on every snap like you’re David Fincher. Think about the best QBs of this century: Brady, Peyton, Rodgers. All of those players grew into de facto coordinators on the field (Rodgers too much so, but that’s already been well-covered). They could coach themselves. They didn’t need some OC playing helicopter parent just to complete a third down pass. But the advent of the helmet radio is too much control for modern coaches to resist. I’d like to see what would happen if the NFL severed that cord. It’s loud and you’re not sure what to call out there? Figure it out, kiddo. Be your own QB.
Email of the week!
Chris:
Back in ‘95 I was a junior in high school and my father had recently passed away. Not long after, my aunt took my mom up to Toronto to see Phantom of the Opera to help get her mind off things. So I did what any normal grieving teen would do: I told everyone I knew to come over for a rager. I must have had 30 people in our little 1200-sq ft house, and we lived in a pretty dense neighborhood. To this day, I’m amazed that no one called the cops.
I quickly learned that the idea of hosting such an affair and actually having said affair are two VERY different things. I spent the bulk of the evening telling everyone not to smoke in the house, to keep it down, not to break shit, make sure you puke in the toilet, etc. Eventually, when those who weren’t staying had left and those who did were comatose, I began the daunting task of cleaning up (mom was coming home early the next day, so time was of the essence). I realized I desperately needed to run the dishwasher. In my callow youth, this seemingly simple task was a foreign concept. I didn’t have any dishwasher detergent, but I did have liquid Dawn - problem solved, right?? So I poured a healthy glug into the reservoir and went on with the rest of my duties.
I returned to the kitchen an hour later and was utterly horrified to see the entire kitchen covered in soap foam. I’m not talking about a couple inches. It was up to my fucking waist, and it was spilling out into the dining room like The Blob. I spent the next several hours trying to scoop it up with bath towels, buckets, and whatever else I could think of: throw the foam off the porch, rinse, and repeat. The moral of the story is, don’t put liquid dish soap in your dishwasher. Ever.
Miraculously, I got away with it.
You thought that story was gonna be about poop, didn’t you? FISHED IN!
