The NFL: It’s for sure happening again, and it’s fine. It’s not ideal, a lot of it is really honestly pretty bad and shitty to watch, but it’s happening. There’s no way around the fact that it’s certainly happening. The games count, and that some of it at least is fine; the Browns and Steelers tied, for instance, so…
For all the things that there are to love about the NFL—idiotic and wholly unaccountable leadership, a profoundly malfunctioning moral compass, the new rules that no one even knows how to enforce, the whole Nathan Peterman Thing—the purest pleasure it offers is the chance to be wrong as hell about it. There are some…
College football, the looser and more fun but also worse version of football played by younger and less well-compensated people than those in the NFL, is back baby. Or maybe is already back? Anyway the timing is complicated, because while the good stuff gets going this weekend, college football’s latest attempt to…
You already know the rules of engagement here. If you are out in public, you should not make a show of yourself. You should not run around naked. You should not punch people. You should not watch video on your phone without without headphones. And you should not EVER, under any circumstances, engage in a max volume…
It is a harsh truth, but an undeniable one: If it weren’t for bad ideas, we would not have anything to talk about on the Deadcast. In point of fact, if it were not for bad ideas the Deadcast itself would not even exist. But while our world is currently much worse off for all the bad ideas that currently hold sway in…
As a great American thinker has honked: We’re back. Drew and I have both returned from our time away from the podcast and pretty well recovered from the indignities that the sun inflicted on our ghastly and rapidly deteriorating indoor bodies during that absence. I am not trying to oversell anything, and I absolutely…
There are different degrees of being on vacation. There are the ones that involve unplugging all the way—smash your dumbass phone with a large flat rock, shred your passport, move to the woods for like six days, then come home and I guess shop for a new phone. There are the moderate, heavily hedged vacations in which…
With Drew still loose in the rustic wilds of Maine—we have received credible and deeply disturbing reports of him scampering up scenic mountains and devouring crustacean-centric meals in ways that horrified bystanders—the Deadcast casts its gaze back upon past glory this week. There’s a lot of glory there, of…
When we recorded this Deadcast, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America had yet to premiere. To the extent that we or our extra-lanky returning guest Patrick Redford knew anything about the show, it was through a series of brief promotional videos in which Cohen himself didn’t even appear, although it seemed safe to assume…
When I adopted England as my team for this America-free World Cup, I figured they would fuck me over by bowing out early, maybe underwhelming in the group stages. Instead, they REALLY fucked me over by making a run, getting my hopes up, and then collapsing against Croatia when they had more than a few chances to build…
There is no fan community in American sports that thinks more about how it does what it does than NBA fans. This isn’t necessarily a compliment, but it’s not really up for debate, either. The NBA is the best and most interesting league that we’ve got, and as such is pretty excellent to get excited or upset about in…
It’s not that there aren’t sports happening. Sports are happening, for sure. The latest chapter in the epic Panama/Tunisia rivalry will be written later today in the World Cup, MLB’s regular season is wheezing grandly into the early part of its Boring And Insignificant portion, and NBA weirdos are getting ready to do…
The NBA Draft: When is it? What is it? Will you, personally, be selected in this draft? Look, man: I don’t know this shit and honestly I don’t appreciate being asked. That said, the NBA Draft is 1) happening on Thursday evening, 2) effectively random and reliably entertaining, and 3) unless your wingspan is…
The World Cup: truly a tradition unlike any other, except I guess for the Olympics which it is kind of like in the sense that a bunch of people who only care about a thing every four years suddenly care about it so much. Most of the world, of course, cares about soccer a great deal all the time, but the two people…
Let me take you inside the game for a moment: we record the Deadcast a little while before you actually hear the Deadcast. It is not, despite the seamlessly integrated ads and effortlessly fluid riffage, a live show. When we recorded this one on Wednesday morning, the NBA Finals were not quite as extravagantly over as…
During this week, which is only about half over, some extremely overstated acts of Twitter-based idiocy have already led to the cancellation of ABC’s hit reboot of Roseanne, thanks to the latest extremely racist flare-up of star Roseanne Barr’s longstanding and apparently incurable case of Internet Brain. Some…
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The plan was just to keep on honking away like big idiots about the NBA playoffs for as long as we possibly could, and Drew and I were certainly ready to hold up our end of that bargain. But the stupendous lameness of the NBA playoffs at this moment and the simultaneous pyrotechnic…
The NBA Playoffs should be at something like their apex right now, and in the least entertaining possible sense they may well be. There are four notionally entertaining teams left, and they have combined through four games for maybe three entertaining quarters. The league’s biggest and most brilliant stars are still…
Spend a few days away from the drumbeat of dipshittery and various dreary outrages of Online and something happens to your brain. A bunch of things, actually, but I am thinking of one particular one—the mind, even the most web-damaged mind, returns to something like a normal state. This is not to say that the…
In a universe that is similar to but not quite the same as this one, a new and very strange Deadcast would appear in this space. Drew would probably be more or less the same as usual, but as I had just gotten off an overnight flight on Wednesday morning, it’s a virtual certainty that I would have been a psychedelic…
