Comment on SJ Tuohy leaves executive director role at UCF’s NIL collective

SJ Tuohy is stepping down as executive director of The Kingdom NIL, UCF’s collective geared toward supporting athletes through their name, image and likeness. Tuohy, 31, has been in the role since March 2023, when he took the job after serving as director of football operations and later chief of staff for coach Gus Malzahn. He’s leaving for a new role as deputy director of athletics at Oral Roberts University. Simon Pflum will become the collective’s new executive director. He’s worked as the assistant director of operations and special assistant for UCF’s football team and as a football operations assistant at Arkansas. “I am extremely excited to continue to support UCF’s hard-working student-athletes,” Pflum said in a statement.

The worst part, the very worst part, of this crazy sports writing job —worse even than a 17-hour trip to Edmonton — is accompanying decent people as the elevator goes temporarily down on their good careers. “Not fun,’’ Tony Sparano said to me once near the end of his Miami Dolphins coaching run in 2011. “A lonely town all of a sudden,’’ Larry Coker said before his firing by the University of Miami in 2006. The names and teams change.

Not long ago, the Day of the Dead festival was a mystery to most Americans, and even some Mexicans, too. People who did know about it tended to think it was the “Mexican Halloween,” which is not true. But in recent decades, this annual observance has spread from its origins mostly in southern Mexico to the rest of the country, and into parts of the United States as well. At first glance, the celebration’s emphasis on skeletons and graves might seem ghoulish.

By Christi Carras, Los Angeles Times (TNS) LOS ANGELES — Good news for theaters still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and other industry disruptions: A new UCLA study has found that teenagers’ favorite thing to do is going to the movies. The latest installment of the university’s “Teens and Screens” report — which surveyed 1,500 young people across the U.

By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times (TNS) I imagine that when you imagine a TV critic, you picture some hard-boiled, crusty, even heartless type. But I have always been a sensitive, delicate, please-leave-the-light-on sort of fellow. So Halloween is a holiday I greet with mixed emotions. I am fine with its brighter expressions — candy, pumpkins, cute costumes on little children, “It’s Halloween” by the Shaggs, all that.

Amy Maxmen | (TNS) KFF Health News Bird flu cases have more than doubled in the country within a few weeks, but researchers can’t determine why the spike is happening because surveillance for human infections has been patchy for seven months. Just this week, California reported its 15th infection in dairy workers and Washington state reported seven probable cases in poultry workers. Hundreds of emails from state and local health departments, obtained in records requests from KFF Health News, help reveal why.