The Year In Sports Media Beef

We arrived at the studio hungry. A promise had been made: the last Deadcast of calendar year 2018 would be a review of The Year in Sports Media Beef, and our chef de cuisine and tour guide would be Laura Wagner, the site’s our in-house beefmaster. Lord knows this stupid and diminishing year provided plenty of protein. And so Marchman and Laura and I brought our bibs and rolled up our sleeves and tucked into a robust spread—a year’s worth of beef, seared off and sizzling, stretching as far as the eye could see.

Of course we got full. At some point, even just sampling the year’s beeves became a race against time. Yes, we discussed Sports Illustrated’s amazingly goofy Drew Brees Is Not An Underdog story and Shams Charania’s weird Derrick Rose fluff job for The Athletic and the exploitative skeeviness of both SB Nation and FanSided, but by that point we were taking small bites and chewing thoroughly. There is only so much beef that a body can safely metabolize, and while we quickly rocketed past that limit, there are other constraints—time, tolerance, how interesting any of it might seem to normal people—in play. But we came hungry and left sated, and fellow beef aficionados should be able to do the same.

But, as any emotionally volatile Canadian academic could tell you, an all-beef diet is not healthy. And so we also discussed the manifest squickiness of buttheaded online mogul Bryan Goldberg in his non-mogul guise, just as a sort of pick-me-up. And then, as a palate-cleanser/digestif, we leapt into the Funbag. There we discovered... well, more horror, but different and fresh horror, including some truly disturbing and sick online television-watching behavior and the question of whether Donald Trump has ever been nude in front of another person. Eat up.

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