Digesting Norwich City's Newfound Unbridled Optimism

This photo is very much not from the 2025-26 season. I hope you will forgive
me for not having current pictures of a stadium that is an ocean away from me.

A year ago, I was worried about my favorite soccer team. Norwich City have met plenty of turbulence and management errors and hard truths of capitalism over the years, but things never looked as uncertain to this fan of only a dozen years as at the end of the 2024-25 season.

Whatever sporting director Ben Knapper was doing, it wasn't working. Under head coach Johannes Hoff Thorup, the Canaries' defense became one of the most porous in the Championship. A young team battered by injuries never showed signs of coming together. After making the playoffs the year before, Norwich finished in the bottom half of the league table.

With the fan base's polarization over Thorup increasingly shifting to total hostility, Knapper moved on with a couple meaningless games to go. Everything Thorup has said since his dismissal indicates he expected much more rope, giving the appearance that the club's key figures could not even agree on what their immediate goals were. It was hard to see a long-term vision. It was easier than ever to imagine Norwich drifting into perennial mid-table status, ceding their dominance of the East Anglian Derby to Ipswich Town, and having to sell their promising players just to keep the books balanced.

It only took six months for my fears to reach new heights — but only after things initially started to look up. As expected, star winger Borja Sainz left for Porto, but striker Josh Sargent and midfielder Marcelino Núñez, arguably more important players than Sainz, stayed through the summer. Knapper hired a new head coach, Liam Manning, who always downplayed his childhood days as a Carrow Road season ticket holder but brought a respectable résumé. Intriguing signings like defender Harry Darling, midfield destroyer Mirko Topić, winger Papa Amadou Diallo, and young striker Jovon Makama gave reason to believe Knapper was addressing key problems in defense and depth.

Another Blogger Has Ideas on the NBA Regular Season Schedule

You cannot really call me an NBA fan anymore. I tune in for Timberwolves playoff games out of solidarity for my friends and my adopted home, and every couple years, I take up someone's offer of a spare ticket. However, my interest has waned considerably since I obsessed over the Mavericks and talked myself into the likes of Shane Larkin, Nerlens Noel, and Dennis Smith Jr. being the guys who would halt the team's post-championship slide into mediocrity.

I do like the slower pace, imperfection, and vastly superior atmospheres of college basketball more, but I have never been one of those people who think the NBA isn't real basketball. Most of my faded interest is because my favorite athlete of all-time retired and my team just could not stop associating with men accused of harassing and assaulting women. The rest of it is that I just do not want to spend as much time as I did when I was a teenager watching literally every sport. The Mavericks betrayed me — and have spent every moment since making sure I never come back — but the NBA as a whole is more like an old friend I drifted away from but still want to check in on every once in a while.

That also makes me kind of a catty jerk who can't mind his own business. Like everyone who doesn't routinely watch the NBA anymore, I have strong opinions on the NBA. Continuation fouls are way too generous! (They were when I watched, too.) Being able to challenge fouls is stupid on its face, even speaking as someone who generally supports video review in sports! The ninth- and tenth-place teams in each conference have no business playing postseason games! The NBA Cup is silly! Nike has made a mess of the league's uniforms! A league that makes such absurd amounts of money does not need to give floor space, jersey space, and so much of the screen to ads!

This post is not about any of that, though. (For every criticism I list above, I have even more for the sports I do watch closely — on and off, I've been drafting a baseball manifesto for years.) I want to offer my opinion on something most people seemingly agree on, whether they play in or coach in or just follow the league: The regular season needs to be shorter.

How much shorter? Honestly, not much. The 82-game season has lasted for so long because it worked. Getting to watch your team for an extended season, with familiar rhythms, chances to see everyone else in the league, and narratives whose arcs are much longer than the playoffs, is kind of the whole point. For most of the league, a 41-game season ticket package is a great deal for someone who loves attending basketball games.

The problem is that playing basketball is harder. Not only is the player pool dramatically more athletic across the board than even 15 years ago; players are also asked to play more basketball.

The Films I Watched in 2025

Against all odds, 2025 was another year where I watched movies. Once again, I kept track of each one and compiled them into tiers for the satisfaction of my brain; and once again, I have written brief thoughts on each of them for hopefully the gratification of you, dear reader. Like last year, I hit exactly 60 films, which is my annual goal.

Click to enlarge.

You can see how I tiered all 60 of these films in the above table, but I invite you to read further. On we go.

Just Trash

Wag the Dog, dir. Barry Levinson (1997)

The more movies I see that David Mamet wrote, the more convinced I am that Glengarry Glen Ross' scintillating script was an aberration. Wag the Dog is smug and pointless, a film in which every event on the news is framed as a psyop. Mamet reveals himself to be a moron every time he talks about politics, driven by pettiness and reactionary, conspiratorial thinking, so it should not be a surprise that he wrote a film about politics that, beyond some barely funny cracks at jingoism, is more or less nihilist.

A nihilist message is not necessarily a bad thing, but you still have to do something with it. One of my favorite comedies, Burn After Reading, mocks humanity's self-importance in the face of our lives' ultimate insignificance and absurdity. Wag the Dog's message is that The Powers That Be use The Media to lie to you, but its skepticism is so shallow and goofy — again, without being funny — that it becomes useless. When the United States government has illegally interfered with and waged wars on actual countries, hiding behind patriotic slogans and lying to its citizens, that government fabricating a brief military campaign to hide a scandal just does not serve as the prescient farce Mamet believes it to be.

Did Not Enjoy

The Lost Weekend, dir. Billy Wilder (1945)

A film as empathetic toward alcoholics as The Lost Weekend must have been revelatory in 1945. Eighty years later, it comes off more like a noble but imperfect first step. The simplicity of its portrayal of addiction, from the causes to the symptoms to recovery, did not work for me. Though far from a failure, the film just was not my thing.