Comment on Russell leads Pepperdine to 66-56 victory

Around the AFC Hit hard: There is no defense for how Houston linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair laid out sliding Jacksonville QB Trevor Lawrence last week. It’s why he was immediately ejected. And it’s why, on top of previous transgressions that included punching a helmeted Cincinnati player, he was suspended three games. After the suspension, Al-Shaair took to social media to declare in all-caps, “If you want me to be your villain, I’ll be your villain!” along with a middle finger emoji and pictures of the Joker and his My Cause, My Cleats support of Palestine.

In mid-November, just as the mountain towns were waking up from shoulder-season hibernation and preparing for the ski season, my husband and I popped into Minturn and stumbled upon the cutest (and likely smallest) whisky tasting room in Colorado. No hyperbole: The Wee Dram on Minturn’s Main Street is a cozy, 135-square-foot, 12-seat drinking den where husband and wife Spence and Stefanie Neubauer pour tipples of single malt whisky and serve cocktails like Old Fashioneds and peated Manhattans. The Wee Dram tasting room is a cozy, 135-square-foot, 12-seat drinking den.

Mead’s “Effort Modification Coach” has his fingerprints all over the state championship on Saturday. As the Mavericks seek their first football title in 75 years, Colorado coaching legend Gary Klatt will be on the sidelines inside Canvas Stadium as an assistant for his son, Mavericks head coach Jason Klatt. The 79-year-old patriarch of one of Colorado’s most well-known football families — Jason’s younger brother Joel is a former CU Buffs quarterback and current FOX Sports college football analyst — has been here before.

Last December, Keegan Kelly was taking his final exams as a high school student in Auckland, New Zealand, just a short 7,300 miles away from the history books into which he’s now etching his name. After graduating from Rosmini College — many Kiwi high schools are called colleges and run adjacent to the calendar year — he traded a warm summer at the beach for a freezing cold pitch in Colorado and a head start on his college soccer career. This December, Kelly became the first University of Denver men’s soccer player to score goals in back-to-back NCAA Tournament games, something he couldn’t have foreseen during exam time.

CLEVELAND — Defenses don’t stump Nikola Jokic, but questions occasionally do. If his mind is a supercomputer — as it has been likened to by so many bewildered NBA players, reporters and TV personalities — then a mathematical equation that he deems indecipherable may cause a “syntax error” message to appear. In a defeated locker room Thursday night, in a city with horizontal snow outside and a wind chill near zero, the brain-teaser was this: How can the Nuggets make up the gap when an opponent is shooting a way higher volume of 3-pointers than them? “I really don’t know,” Jokic said after a long pause, and then he laughed.

Why hasn’t the bird flu pandemic started? ScienceSingle bird flu mutation could let it latch easily to human cells, study finds The Washington PostA single gene mutation could enable H5N1 to spread between people, study finds Livescience.comBird Flu Is Becoming a Bigger Threat TIME