The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, I'm Stefan Fatsis, and this is Slate's sports podcast. Hang up and listen for the week of December 4th, 2017.

On this week's show, Howard Bryant of ESPN and Jeremy Stahl of Slate will be here to discuss the rift among national football league players over the league's plan to donate money to social justice causes and potentially silence the player protest movement.

Tom Haberstro, a Bleacher Report, will join us to examine the latest craze in the National Basketball Association.

Everybody's going vegan.

Finally, the New York Giants on Sunday became the last NFL team to start a black quarterback. I'll deliver an extended afterball about the first black quarterback signed by the team in 1967 and then talk with Lewis Moore, a professor at Grand Valley State University, who studies African American and sports history.

Josh Levine is the editorial director of Slate Magazine. He's off this week. Through the magic of pre-recording, you will, however, hear him talk about basketball veganism. And I will now take advantage of my alone time to report that at a Scrabble tournament to New York over the weekend, I scored 614 points in one game.

Yes, that was a personal best hand clap.

My bingoes weren't flashy, bugger, trustier, climate, and yodalers, plus Zaire for 68 points.

Zaire is defined as a former monetary unit of Zaire.

A bunch of other high scores, including a play that, among other things, turned Bijou, B-I-J-O-U into B-I-J-O-U-X for 40 points.

I'll hang up and listen to your congratulations.

After a round of negotiations with a group of players, the NFL last week agreed to donate

$89 million over seven years to various minority or social causes.

That seemed like a positive outcome to a year of protests

that were begun by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. That is, until details

emerged. Capernick's former teammate, Eric Reid, and a couple of other players announced that

they had split from the group that was negotiating with NFL management. Slate's Jeremy Stahl reported

that Reed was asked as part of that deal if he would stop kneeling during the National Anthem,

and then Reed told Stahl in an interview that to pay for the new campaign, the NFL would

shift money that was already pledged to other charitable efforts.

Jeremy Stahl is here now.

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