Category: News

When Drew Brees announced his retirement after the 2020 NFL season, he immediately inked a deal with NBC to join the network’s Sunday Night Football coverage, with NBC hoping he would eventually move into the lead analyst role alongside Mike Tirico.

However, Brees did not make for a particularly good in-game analyst, struggling to provide the same level of insight into the game as a Tony Romo or Cris Collinsworth, while also not being a particularly engaging personality. That’s a rough combination for the broadcast booth, and the result was Collinsworth staying in his position as the lead game analyst as Tirico takes over for Al Michaels, with Brees remaining somewhat in limbo.

Some clarity on Brees’ situation arrived on Sunday afternoon, when Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reported Brees was leaving NBC in what was described as a “mutual” split, noting NBC wasn’t particularly thrilled with his performance and Brees was not wanting to just do studio coverage. Marchand reports Brees could be in the mix to join Fox’s coverage, as they need an analyst after Troy Aikman’s departure, but with Tom Brady on his way into the lead booth whenever he retires on a record deal, it would at-best be a spot job before being bumped down a notch — and that’s if Fox sees him as a better option than Greg Olsen, who has proven himself as a better analyst to this point than Brees. However, it’s not a surprise to hear Brees wants to find a new analyst job, as what’d be the point of getting that TV hair if he just left after a year.

From a network point of view, Brees’ struggles in making the transition from star QB to the booth and quick ouster from NBC might cause them to pump the brakes at least a bit on blindly assuming that’s a move every top quarterback can make, and will at least make Fox a bit sweaty about the Brady deal which they are clearly banking on being a slam dunk.

America’s rightwing has not been well for a while now. They peddle voter fraud lies, they start fights with Disney, they continue to tolerate Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then there’s Roger Stone. The longtime Republican fixer and Twitter bannee, who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, has been going around telling Trump supporters that there’s a “satanic portal” above the White House.

Last month, Stone appeared on the MAGA-friendly show Elijah Streams, where he said that a friend showed him pictures of some kind of hole that formed as soon as Joe Biden took office. The portal allows “those who are evil” to escape into our world and make it worse. He added, “only by closing it will we be successful in saving this nation under God.” He said he wasn’t kidding. “This is not some practical joke. This isn’t some conspiracy theory. I’m absolutely convinced that this is demonic.”

Stone repeated the claim during a rally in South Carolina on Friday. “Yes, ladies and gentleman, there is a satanic portal above the White House, you can see it day and night,” Stone told the crowd. “It exists, it is real, and it must be closed, and it will be closed by prayer.”

Does Stone actually believe in this “satanic portal”? Hard to say. But the important thing is that MAGA folks do.

(Via Raw Story)

Few games require the level of skill needed to win a match in Valorant. While there are cool abilities and unique characters that even the playing field a bit, a match in Valorant often comes down to who has the best game sense and the quickest reflexes. Thanks to that, the best players in the world are able to use the game’s various abilities to make some really incredible plays that even stuns other pros.

On Sunday, we saw one of those pros in action when YaBoiLewis, a player for Fokus Clan, pulled off what can only be described as a double jump double kill with the character Raze. In Round 18 of a 9-8 map, Fokus was looking to tie up the match with a crucial victory over their opponent, G2. They already had an advantage when G2 player, Meddo, went down. That’s when Lewis went to work and finished off the remaining four players on G2’s squad. He starts off by winning a 1v1 against AvovA and from that point on it’s just a highlight reel.

This dude double jumped into a 2v1, came out on top, and then managed to tag off the final player on G2’s squad to secure the victory. He made it look so simple, but listen to the broadcast’s reaction and you know that he just pulled off a pretty legendary highlight. While he never had a shot at the Ace, because he wasn’t the one to take down Meddo, he’ll be satisfied with the play of the game and a map tying victory.

Unfortunately for him and Fokus Clan though, that round wasn’t enough to propel them to victory. G2 would compose themselves to earn the first win of a best of three series.

Selena Gomez is not unfamiliar with the Saturday Night Live stage. Back in 2016, the singer made her debut on the show where she served as the musical guest and performed “Hands To Myself,” “Same Old Love,” and “Good For You.” Six years later, the multi-talented act found herself back on the SNL, but this time, with different responsibilities. Gomez took over the latest SNL episode — which featured Post Malone as the musical guest — as the show’s host, and she wasted no time entertaining her audience. It began with her opening monologue where she gave her best Miley Cyrus impersonation.

The opening monologue began with Gomez explaining that her role as host for the show was “a big moment for me” as she grew up watching SNL every week with her mother. Gome also revealed that she asked one of her “oldest friends” Miley Cyrus, who’s hosted SNL several times, for hosting advice prior to the show. She then went into a full impersonation of the Plastic Hearts singer telling her to just be herself and “have fun.”

Elsewhere in the SNL episode, Post Malone performed “Cooped Up” and “Love/Hate Letter To Alcohol.” The first performance was done with Roddy Ricch on stage while the second was of a track that’s set to feature Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes.

You can watch Gomez’s full opening monologue in the video above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

When James Harden first arrived with the Sixers, he came promising “scary minutes” whenever he and Joel Embiid shared the court together, and the early returns were promising, as they piled up wins and paraded to the free throw line together.

Brief regular season success, as we all should know by now, isn’t an indicator of greatness, but in the world of pundits, hot takes are necessary and plenty got carried away in the moment. Among the common refrains among those bullish on the Harden-Embiid pairing was that they could be the modern day Shaq and Kobe, a title that has been passed down over and over again whenever a star guard and star big man share the floor together, despite there having not been a single duo that’s been able to reach those heights since.

Shaq himself was asked about the comparisons and made clear that Harden and Embiid were “not close” to he and Kobe, and would have to do an awful lot for a sustained period to even get in that conversation. With the Sixers exiting once again in the second round this week, Shaq decided to remind everyone of those midseason takes and issue a decree that there will never be another duo like he and Kobe, and that comp needs to be retired.

The best response to Shaq’s post was from ESPN’s Kendrick Perkins, who offered an earnest apology to the big fella for getting caught up in the moment, and blaming Harden for it all — while showing that he’s clearly been spending too much time around Stephen A. Smith with a “that damn Harden.”

Shaq is right that we should just retire the Shaq-Kobe comparison, for a variety of reasons. For one, Shaq and Kobe are fairly comfortably two top-20 players all-time, which most all of these duos that get that comp are not. On top of that, the game has changed considerably and it’s hard to dominate the game as a guard-big combo in the same way as Shaq and Kobe did, and as such a great guard-big combo is likely to look pretty different than those two. Finally, Shaq and Kobe spent nearly a decade together and authored one of the most dominant three-peats the league has seen, so making the comp before a duo has won at least two titles is just begging to look silly eventually. On this one we should listen to the Diesel and find something else to compare the next budding guard-big duo to.

Selena Gomez is now one third of one of TV’s most beloved current trios, so when she hosted SNL, it was bound to feature one of her Only Murders in the Building co-stars. Sure enough, during a pre-taped sketch, the actress, non-retired singer, and internet non-user was joined by Steve Martin in a fake documentary about whoopee cushions.

Gomez plays host to a documentary series called American Inventors, which devotes three minutes to one Archie Gizmo (Martin), a prolific inventor of prank do-dads. In the ‘60s, he’s a struggling inventor looking for his big break. “I knew it would be funny to have your boss sit down and [have] a noise come from his butt,” Martin’s Gizmo says, “but I just couldn’t figure out what noise.”

Gizmo then finds his muse: an accident-prone woman named Dina, played by Aidy Bryant. “Her energy was magnetic; her eyes were endless,” he say, “and every time she sat down, gas.” He quickly surmised that “the funniest noise that could come out of a butt was a fart.”

But whoopee cushions are only the start. Dina’s clumsy antics inspired Gizmo to also invent googly-eyed slinky glasses, the hand buzzer, and more. “Dina was the prize,” Gizmo says, “and the greatest gag she ever goofed was marrying a guy like me.”

You can watch the sketch in the video above.

In just a few weeks, Post Malone will release his long-awaited fourth album Twelve Carat Toothache, his first full-length effort since 2019’s Hollywood’s Bleeding. With the release date for Twelve Carat Toothache, which is June 3, rapidly approaching, Posty is understandably in full promotion mode for the album’s arrival. An example of that comes through his recent performance on the Selena Gomz-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live. It’s here that Posty performed “Cooped Up,” his newly-released record with Roddy Ricch, and “Love/Hate Letter To Alcohol,” a song that features Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold.

Post Malone kicked off the night by performing “Cooped Up” alongside Roddy Ricch. The new song makes for the duo’s second collaboration following “Wow. (Remix)” back in 2019. Posty rocked a leather jack and leather pants to perform the song on the Studio 8H stage backed by orange and blue lighting before welcoming Roddy to join him. He returned later on the night to debut “Love/Hate Letter To Alcohol” in its entirety, a record he previously teased during an Instagram livestream. For that performance, he was surrounded by a choir dressed in black and white as Posty himself took center stage for an emotional set.

You can watch Posty’s SNL performances in the videos above.

Twelve Carat Toothache is out 6/3 via Republic Records. You can stream it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Two years after it was first announced, the Lovers & Friends Festival finally opened its doors to fans on Saturday in Las Vegas. The nostalgia-themed ’90s hip-hop and R&B-focused showcase was first announced at the beginning of 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic pushed it back until this weekend. The Lovers & Friends Festival is curated by Live Nation, Snoop Dogg, and Bobby Dee, and it flaunted a two-day lineup that include Lauryn Hill, Usher, Ludacris, Lil Jon, TLC, Ciara, Nelly, Ashanti Ja Rule, Ne-Yo, and more. While day one was supposed to be a fun one, it concluded on a scary note as a mass stampede erupted following reports of gunshots at the festival grounds.

According to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, who spoke with TMZ, reports of gunfire were made at 10 pm local time and it sparked a massive stampede as fans rushed to leave the venue and flock for safety. “At this time, there is no evidence of a shooting and the initial report has been deemed unfounded,” the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said after their investigation. They also noted that three people were transported to a local hospital with minor injuries. The festival resumed a short time with Usher and more delivering nighttime performances to conclude day one.

The stampede was not the only complaint from fans at Lovers & Friends. Many took to Twitter to complain about the showcase’s inability to provide adequate resources for those who attended the show in the sweltering desert heat as temperatures approached 100 degrees. Fans voiced their frustration about a lack of shade and a poor supply of water among other things at the festival.

You can view some tweets and videos from fans below.

There’s another Star Wars show about to hit Disney+: Obi-Wan Kenobi, which brings Ewan McGregor back to his most high-profile role. To ring it in, Kyle Mooney returned to one of his more high-profile roles: as the real, hip version of Mandalorian break-out character Grogu, better known as Baby Yoda.

This time, Mooney’s Yoda had, as co-host Michael Che pointed out, “a new vibe.” Indeed, as Yoda pointed out, he’s now more “spiritual.” He went on one of those ayahuasca retreats, “but with a bunch of pills and weed.” Rather than a traditional guide, his “boy Tom Holland got on the aux cable.”

He also talked about finding a new crew, namely Jared Leto, Santana featuring Rob Thomas, Bob the Builder and Tila Tequila. When Che said that sounded like a good team, Yoda replied, “Yeah, it’s a cult.”

Baby Yoda’s so calm now that he loves everyone, even his haters. Among them is Baby Groot, with whom he’s had a beef. “But I’m older now,” he said, “and I just want to say, Baby Groot, I know we had our issues. But I mean this from the bottom of my heart: I really, really don’t like you.”

You can watch Mooney do Baby Yoda again in the video above. Obi-Wan Kenobi debuts on Disney+ on May 27.

Things are, to put it lightly, not so great right now! Safe and legal abortion is on the verge of being eliminated. There’s a baby formula shortage. Gas prices have skyrocketed. Cryptocurrency has crashed. And oh yeah, there’s still a pandemic. On this week’s Weekend Update portion of SNL, co-host Colin Jost pieced everything together to remind us that we might be living in one of the most entertaining yet grimmest blockbusters of recent years.

“Is it me or does every story this week sound like the opening voiceover in a Mad Max movie?” Jost asked the crowd. “The year is 2022. A virus rages across the planet. Digital money has collapsed. Infants have nothing to eat. Women are forced to breed. Men are ready to die for gasoline. And we suffer under the leadership of the one known only as Joe.” (The latter prompted a Photoshopped image of Joe Biden with an Immortan Joe face doo-hickey.)

Jost then zeroed in on digital currency: “The entire crypto market has lost over a trillion dollars. But don’t worry. You can make that money back fast as long as you’ve been hoarding baby formula.”

Michael Che, meanwhile, tackled some good news. “The January 6th committee has subpoenaed five sitting Republican congressman after they refused to testify voluntarily,” he said. “Said the Republican congressmen, ‘You can’t force us to do anything, we’re not pregnant.’”

Che also took on one of the largest companies in the world. “Amazon announced that it will play employees who have to travel to get an abortion up to $4,000 in expenses every year,” he said. “The only catch is you’ve got to do it during your eight-minute lunch break.”

The two also covered such topics as Kevin Spacey’s comeback film, Ukraine winning Eurovision, and last week’s Wordle mishap. You can watch the segment in the videos above and below.