Injuries to Jalen Williams and Cason Wallace have already rocked Oklahoma City’s season. Anthony Edwards’ unexpected knee surgery has derailed the fun Minnesota Timberwolves spectacle, maybe for a couple months.

Some of you NBA fans have been messaging me about this topic, worried over whether this is the league’s new status quo. I’d say, with the caveat that there’s always some randomness to who gets hurt and to what degree…probably?

Earlier this week, NBA analyst and Pacers watcher Caitlin Cooper wrote:

It's a week into the season and the NBA is averaging the most possessions per game, shortest average possession length, highest average pickup distance, and most possessions with at least three offensive players crashing in the tracking era. Playing very hard for 82 games!

It’s the intensity. That’s ironic because a cliché complaint about the NBA regular season is the lack of intensity. “Load management” became a byword to the casual sports fan for how the NBA had gotten far too casual. But actually, the main reason we see less of our favorites is that everyone outside of Sacramento is playing so much harder. Load management is mostly an attempt at mitigating the costs of intensity. This isn’t just a basketball problem, but an issue across sports. As actors get better at competing within a game, it changes the game in ways we don’t always love. It’s inevitable and an example of how “progress” doesn’t always progress in the direction of a product we prefer.

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There’s that line from Rick and Morty people like, often invoked in situations just a bit different than the one I’m about to describe:

Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer.

The quote captures some of my feelings towards media members now getting floridly outraged at Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid for the practice squad addition of a kicker who was accused of sexual misconduct at massage parlors between the years 2012-2016. Reid would mean very little to these people had he not employed players convicted of worse. Instead, “Big Red” brought in men who committed violent crimes, sometimes towards women, and won Super Bowls while drawing praise from the types who seek engagement by complaining today. When he lifts the trophy, this chattering class wants to bask in the glory, touting both coach and team. You were cheering then without regard to the criminals on roster. Now you want to boo?

If you praise the result, you’ve little standing to bitch about the process. Andy Reid is the NFL’s top paid coach at age 68. Had Reid signed players with cleaner records, he’d probably be watching these games on TV like the rest of us. This is just how Reid does things and we’re only talking about him because it worked. This is obvious, realists get it, so then why is there such a backlash right now over the practice squad addition of former Ravens elite kicker Justin Tucker? There’s a lot going on here.

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ESPN star Pat McAfee is pretty obsessive about the idea he might be killed on the set of College Gameday or somewhere else. I say that descriptively rather than pejoratively. It’s an odd, dark aspect of his output that’s arguably as much related to the time we live in as it is to his own narcissistic idiosyncrasies.

I see it as an underrated subplot of a man whose sudden power at ESPN generates a lot of commentary. I was vaguely aware of his worry, but before looking into it, didn’t realize just how often he’s expressed concern about being struck down like this. When McAfee lashes out at an anodyne University of Utah video making fun of him, as he did last weekend, it’s natural to call the GameDay host “soft.” When he invokes the murder of another public figure on a Utah campus in response, he is indeed acting unreasonably.

At the same time, it’s hard to dismiss McAfee’s job, silly as it is, as completely safe. It reminds me of that famous Catch-22 line, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Pat McAfee acts paranoid, more so than any ESPN celebrity, as I’ll detail below. It’s also difficult, in 2026, to reject his paranoia as purely irrational. He’s not an overtly political public figure, but he does have something of a political valence. The world has sharper corners than it did in the decades when Lee Corso had this gig. Here are McAfee’s expressed fears, both reasonable and unreasonable, along with why ESPN can’t simply shrug them off.

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We’ve got a fantastic House of Glass for you with Front Office Sports ace . We begin with the WNBA Finals scheduling fiasco, get heavy into NFL media and emerge with a questioning of Jay-Z as Super Bowl act.

Thank you to live stream joiners , , , and to all of you about to listen to the recorded product. We really appreciate people spreading word of my and Ryan’s exploits.

Topics! Include!

• The WNBA Finals scheduling fiasco.

• Why the Hawks owe the WNBA nothing.

• J.J. Watt, Troy Aikman, and NFL booth musical chairs.

• Does David Ellison care about sports?

• Baseball’s surprising small-market appeal.

• Why going viral doesn’t sell subscriptions.

• Has Mahomes declined—or has defense improved?

• Could Caleb Williams become the NFL’s best QB?

• Tom Brady versus the refs.

• Jay-Z picks himself for the Super Bowl.

One of many niche topics I’m into is whether a city’s subjective civic reputation actually matches reality. Boston, for instance, is the archetypal Racist City that a comedian leans on for jokes about a racist city. I’m not going to weigh in on that topic, but I’m citing it to say we can’t actually take a racism geiger counter to all the towns and determine if Boston has significantly more of this issue than, say, Philadelphia. Or Phoenix. Or wherever. I just know Boston is the city that primarily wears that reputation and we’re never getting an official update like, “Racism dropped 20 percent in Boston this year, according to the Racism Geiger Counter.”

I also “know”, through our shared oral tradition, that Boston is a tough sports media city, possibly the toughest. But is it? It maybe was at one time, but, as Mike Felger of Boston’s Felger and Mazz radio show keeps indicating, this might be more legacy reputation than reality. There are multiple recent examples of this famously hard bitten sports media culture being as soft if not softer than coverage you’d receive in my Bay Area. Jayson Tatum vs. Jaylen Brown is the latest in a line of stories that town’s official media downplayed.

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To my mind, the Patrick Mahomes situation over these past few years is like the inverse of Norm Macdonald’s Saturday Night Live monologue joke about being asked to host the program after getting fired from it:

Then it occurred to me, I haven’t gotten funnier, the show has gotten really bad!

Mahomes, now age 31, hasn’t declined, at least in my opinion. NFL defense just rapidly improved since the 2018 MVP season when he threw 50 touchdowns. Mahomes has fewer weapons now and his team has injuries at tackle. That’s been the main focus when this topic gets brought up but I’d argue the underrated limiting issue is more the environment around the league than what’s wrong with the 5-1 Kansas City Chiefs. You can see what’s happening on one single play, influenced by the freakish sort of player who’s getting drafted into the NFL every season.

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Garry Shandling had a vision for his 1990s HBO cult classic The Larry Sanders Show. It rhymes with NBA life, perhaps our most “Hollywood” sports culture.

‘The Larry Sanders Show’ is about people who love each other but show business gets in the way. All stories are about something blocking love

The dynamics are stacked against a lot of NBA teammates remaining friends. This is a league where the business reliably gets in the way. If your co-star is doing better, he’s getting more touches, which means you’re getting fewer. His success is now a threat to your acclaim and money. In baseball, teammates generally like each other better because success isn’t zero sum. In basketball, someone has to sacrifice, leading to resentments. Winning an NBA championship often necessitates transcending these natural tensions, but the post-title “Disease of More” will bring them right back, even worse.

The warming Cold War between current Celtics star Jayson Tatum and oft-disgruntled former Celtics star (now current 76ers star) Jaylen Brown is a high profile example of this issue. The two were billed as basketball brothers, a bond Tatum still touts. Clearly, there was a divorce, and only one of the guys wants to admit it. Even if I prefer Jayson Tatum as a personality, his pretense reflects an obnoxious aspect of the fading Player Empowerment Era: These guys will dictate, but almost never own, action. And Jaylen Brown, who represents other annoying aspects of the Player Empowerment Era, is calling his former teammate on this sleight of hand.

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So I’m trying to make fetch happen with my Sports Media A vs. Sports Media B frame. There’s the formal Sports Media A discourse, where official media offers socially acceptable opinions. Then there’s the Sports Media B discourse, where everyone else engages in an alternative conversation on social media.

Sports Media A is where I go to read about how Chargers offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel’s job is in jeopardy. He’s mucked up Herbert’s footwork and will pay for his sins. Sports Media B is where I go to read jokes about how the offense has really fallen apart because the quarterback is distracted by Beer’s molten hotness.

I believe the new look Minnesota Timberwolves, who crushed the new look Miami Heat in last night’s opener, fit this frame pretty easily. It’s just hard to say exactly what Minnesota’s Sports Media B appeal is. Or maybe it’s easy to say, just less so for myself, and other WHITE writers who live at least part time in Sports Media A. But, take it away Anthony Edwards.

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Since I wrote about the Jalen Hurts blood clot situation that has the Philadelphia Eagles under scrutiny, the public received two competing signals from the NFL and its players’ union. Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL's Chief Medical Officer, came out with what sounded like a defense of the Eagles, based on an investigation into the matter. Soon after, the NFLPA released a statement saying they were not made aware that any such investigation was being conducted and actually were told it wouldn’t be.

The immediate early week trend was to declare the Philadelphia Eagles something akin to murderers, and while they may well have acted wrongly, some caution on murky medical matters is probably prudent. All that said, there’s an elephant in the room regarding player safety here, one that’s less fashionable in NFL media to broach. As an anti-NFL globalist, it is my duty to observe that, while playing football is inherently unsafe, flying these 53-man rosters around the world to engage in this violent sport adds risk factors to an already overburdened circumstance. Though it’s theoretically possible that nobody acted wrongly in the specific Jalen Hurts matter, the situation is also illustrative as to why the big NFL global push, which has yet to generate tangible revenue by the way, presents under-discussed player problems. Just look at the timeline in this case, based on recent reporting. It’s something the NFL really doesn’t want media to talk about, perhaps more so than the situation itself.

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From ABC World News Tonight, told to us by a network news anchor:

Jalen Hurts, the Philadelphia Eagles star quarterback, is out for the rest of the season after doctors discovered a blood clot in his leg and clots in both his lungs.

Well that’s unfortunate and concerning, but if you’re new to this story, you might wonder why an NFL injury report is on the nightly news. The timeline on this situation is a mess and has the NFL world calling for mass firings. I’d argue that we plausibly know less than what is being reacted to, but what little we know looks really bad for the Eagles.

The starting pistol for widespread outrage is this post from ascending NFL reporter Tom Pelissero:

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I’ve done a lot of Justin Herbert analysis while avoiding the most interesting aspect of his spectacular decline. Maybe I’m still an institutional actor at heart. One of the many reasons mainstream sports journalism lost out to other forms of fan discourse is that the former shrank its topic list, out of fear of certain taboos. I’m not necessarily defending the era of columnists calling trained professional athletes “frauds” and “bums,” but I am observing there’s a market for that. Now, if I want to see that sort of appraisal, or even just a smarter channeling of such a sentiment, I go to YouTube or Twitter/X.

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Let me tell you, there was a time when, if a highly touted quarterback got engaged to a hot pop star, skipped two weeks of voluntary team workouts to visit her European tour, and started the season 0-and-6 while playing horrifically…this would be a major subject of official media speculation. Instead, it’s a huge topic for the informal discourse, while remaining a “hear no evil, see no evil” subject for the mainstream. Madison Beer’s potential influence on her fiancé is a clear illustration of how there’s a Sports Media A and Sports Media B.

Sports Media A is where I go to read about how Chargers offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel’s job is in jeopardy. He’s mucked up Herbert’s footwork and will pay for his sins. Sports Media B is where I go to read jokes about how the offense has really fallen apart because the quarterback is distracted by Beer’s molten hotness.

It’s hard to gauge the extent to which the Beer influence is taken seriously versus just harnessed as fantastic joke fodder. Every time Justin Herbert throws an interception someone releases a “how bad is Justin Herbert?” meme with a video clip of Madison Beer looking hypnotically attractive. Before his game against the Seahawks two weeks ago, a fan heckled Herbert with, “You’re just as bad as your girl!” There are certainly worse insults to be subjected to, I guess.

So this is a huge Sports Media B topic that, theoretically, all of us in Sports Media A know to scoff at. In the pre blog days, sports writers were more likely to connect performance to theoretical personal traits and circumstances. Then the blogs arrived and Fire Joe Morgan had a lot of fun mocking writers for their unproven theories about grit, heart and hustle. Critics were trained on the idea that “professionals” were engaged in a form of sophistry when invoking the personal to assess the tangible. To be clear, there was a lot of that absurdity going around in sports culture. I’m reminded of the scout’s line from Moneyball, “Ugly girlfriend means no confidence.” That’s obviously a stupid, near-superstitious way to analyze an athlete’s potential.

So there was a corrective to the old ways as once young bloggers aged into becoming the mainstream. Culturally, it became taboo in media to connect someone’s personal life to their performance shortcomings. That is, unless they were in and out of rehab like Johnny Manziel. On balance, it’s hard to argue that this was a bad reform.

Of course, this culture shift had little impact on the conversations media members would have in private. I remember being shocked when I was in the Staples Center media room and a big time sports writer flatly explained to me why Paul George was slumping: “He’s just drowning in pussy right now.” I was taken aback because I’d never spoken to this guy and had, for years, only absorbed his clean cut commentary from afar. But here he was, giving me this uncensored theory on how a new NBA star was struggling because he’d never had access to so many women as a decent player at Fresno State. Was this true? Who knows. The point is that Sports Media A moonlights in private as Sports Media B.

Many ex-NFL players are on YouTube, happily engaging in Sports Media B. For example, former NFL greats Shannon Sharpe and Chad Ochocinco actually broached the subject of whether Herbert’s been derailed by the Beer relationship. Ochocinco was critical of Herbert for skipping team workouts and said he didn’t “understand” that lack of diligence. Then Chad looked at a photo of Beer and interrupted himself with:

Oh shit!

He altered his position somewhat with:

I get it.

Henceforth, my nickname for Madison Beer (that nobody else uses) is “Yoko OhShit.”

One reason the Beer Theory can be easily rebutted is that Justin Herbert is hardly the first QB to have a hot significant other. As an overtly horny Brent Musberger once told America during the 2013 Alabama-Notre Dame national championship:

You quarterbacks, you get all the good-looking women.

And:

If you’re a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with Pop.

Musberger was ogling Katherine Webb, girlfriend of Bama QB AJ McCarron. Her cameo in the stands was an instant viral sensation as LeBron James and other athletes followed her on social media. It occurred to me back then that Musberger, by making an unPC observation about a benefit, had ironically turned that benefit into a problem for McCarron. Yes, big time college quarterbacks get to date beautiful women, but now this woman was suddenly famous and had the eyes of higher status athletes than him. That’s uncomfortable, even if those two were solidly in love (Note: McCarron and Webb got married and remain married).

I doubt the ensuing awkwardness had any impact on McCarron’s unremarkable NFL career, but the point is this: While it’s probably silly to believe that a quarterback’s focus might be derailed by the incandescent attractiveness of his S.O, it’s less silly to wonder if a high profile relationship complicates his existence. When Tony Romo dated Jessica Simpson, it was a source of criticism. Romo rejects the idea that this romance impacted his play, but concedes it altered how he dealt with the media. There’s just more to manage when the eyes of the world are on your love life. That said, Josh Allen married a high profile Hollywood actress and he’s doing just fine.

I do believe that an unequal romance has adversely impacted the Chargers, but it’s not necessarily the one Sports Media B likes to joke about. Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh has been ridiculously enamored with his 6′6″ beauty. When Herbert skipped voluntary team work, Harbaugh was asked about his response:

He told me he wasn't going to be here for those two weeks and my first reaction was, ‘Do you need a ride to the airport?’

Far be it for me to question an all-time HC, but I wonder about what example this sort of talk sets for a team. It reads as coddling of a quarterback who has yet to make good on his potential. And, to use the relationship jargon, Harbaugh comes off like a simp in this scenario. So much of his handling of Herbert frames the situation as the team must not fail him versus the other way around. You can contrast that approach with Bears head coach Ben Johnson’s blunt handling of Caleb Williams that happened to correlate with Williams’ massive turnaround.

It’s unfashionable in Sports Media A to wonder whether a coach indulging his quarterback like this might lead to lowered standards and worse results. It’s more fashionable to put the blame on the offensive system, the offensive line and other more football-based qualities. And maybe so, but Justin Herbert currently ranks as 33rd in QBR right now in a league with 32 teams. Such a disastrous outcome likely results from multiple factors. Madison Beer could be one of them, but I’d hazard the bigger reason might be a coach who lets his QB canoodle with her on the practice field.