The popular Philadelphia sportswriter Dan McQuade has died at 43 years old, the website Defector said Wednesday. McQuade was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer in 2024.
McQuade’s career in sports journalism spanned two decades, including stops at Philadelphia Magazine and Deadspin. McQuade left Deadspin in 2019 and went on to co-found Defector, where he was a writer and editor until his death.
It’s hard to describe what it’s like to be a Philadelphian. Luckily, we had McQuade.
As the Eagles started winning Super Bowls—a major priority in McQuade’s too-short life—interest grew in exactly what these hoagie-mouthed individuals were up to. No one had a better pulse on that than he did.
I knew the byline before I knew the man. How could you not? If you’ve ever owned a Kelly green item of clothing, you knew that Dan invented the Rocky Run, broke the Bill Cosby story wide open, and was simply the only person you could trust to write about T-shirts on the Wildwood boardwalk; that’s a tiny sampling of McQuade’s hits, which defined both the blog era and Philly journalism.
The tributes poured in when the news of McQuade’s death broke late Wednesday night, with reporters hailing him as a “Philadelphia institution,” a writer who “captured Philadelphia’s quirks better than anyone,” and the man who “articulated what makes Philadelphia *Philadelphia* better than anyone I know.”
Those quirks he was capturing were Philadelphia’s though, which meant that the McQuade I knew was down to earth. I was beyond intimidated when we became coworkers in 2017, but the only sense I ever got from him was that he was glad to have someone else he could riff with about whether or not Carson Wentz was a fraud.
McQuade loved football and track and his young family; the Penn and Holy Ghost Prep alum is survived by his wife Jan and son Simon.
