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r. jabson street pasig 12 Black-Led Coming-Of-Age Movies That Need To Be SeenHave you heard the one about the Colorado School of Mines mechanical engineer who’s going to play football at mighty Alabama? Standby. It’s a good one. “I mean, it didn’t feel real at first,” Blake Doud is telling me of his commitment to play for the Crimson Tide. “It kind of still doesn’t feel real.” Oh, it’s real alright. Really wild. Really cool. See, Doud last week became the first Mines player to enter the NCAA transfer portal in the portal era — and the first Oredigger to make the leap to a Power 4 program. Even that part is wild; it was Mines coaches, specifically punting guru Scott Groner, who encouraged him to go. “Blake would be the first to admit he didn’t want to leave Mines,” Groner tells me. It’s true. He didn’t. Mines football players don’t leave Mines football. They love Mines football. “Coming to school here was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Doud says. But that’s the thing about Mines. You opt into long study hours and brutal exam weeks to jump start your life — whether that’s building rockets or bridges as an engineer... or chasing an NFL dream with your lead foot. “At the end of the day it’s our duty to send these guys off and better their lives,” Groner says. “If he can play in front of those SEC crowds and get three meals a day and work with an SEC strength program, I truly felt that could be the edge that would allow him an NFL opportunity.” Friggin’ Alabama was never a thought in Doud’s mind. Shoot, punting wasn’t much of one, either. Mines was the only program to recruit Doud as a punter instead of a wide receiver, where he excelled at Legend High in Parker. So he chose Mines to punt balls and “hopefully build some stuff, because I’ve always liked building stuff,” he says. “It’s not easy here (at Mines),” says Doud, who will dual-enroll at Mines and Alabama next semester to complete his engineering degree. “But this place has truly shaped who I am.” Doud redshirted his first year at the Division II powerhouse. He didn’t appear in a single game in his second season. He exploded in 2023 and 2024, winning RMAC Special Teams Player of the Year and first-team All-American honors. He led Division II last season at 46.1 yards per punt. “I saw it straight away,” says Groner, a former All-American punter, who spent eight years working with the Kansas City Chiefs and now works part-time with the Broncos equipment team. “I saw his 6-foot-5 frame. Being 6-foot-5 as a punter is kind of a cheat code — long levers, powering through the football, good hang time. Then his coach-ability took over.” It’s rare a single punt turns heads in college ball. But in Week 1 this season Doud launched an 80-yard boomer that went viral with over 2 million views on social media. A couple Power 4 assistants even asked me if he would consider transferring to play Division I ball for a year. Doubt it, I said. Mines football players don’t leave Mines. They love Mines. “Blake kind of came out of nowhere a little bit. He was this scrawny 6-foot-5 kid,” Groner says. “But he’s extremely coachable, which most Mines kids are. Everything I’d say, he would’t question it. He’d try it, then come back at me if something didn’t feel right. Those are the best kinds of kids to work with. And I can tell he’s really invested and driven and wants to be great. That makes it fun as a coach.” Then came the transfer portal. “I know the portal is frowned upon in college football,” Groner says. “But this is different. This is potentially life-changing.” Groner’s first call went to Dustin Colquitt, a close friend from their time with the Chiefs, who works with specialists at the University of Tennessee. The Vols didn’t need a punter. The University of Texas-El Paso was Doud’s first scholarship offer in the portal. Then the University of Missouri. Once Missouri offered, Alabama special teams analyst Jay Nunez called Doud with a scholarship offer. Roll Tide. He’s moving to Tuscaloosa in early January. “Alabama, they were always No. 1 when I was growing up,” he says. “Always in big games.” “Building stuff” is still on the table. But career plans have changed. Doud studies Los Angeles Rams punter Ethan Evans, who played at Wingate University, another Division II program. A man named Lloyd Madden was the last Mines player to play in a regular-season NFL game, the school said. That was in the 1940s. I asked Groner, who knows NFL punters: Is Blake one? “He is,” Groner says. “He has the body and he’s only getting stronger. If he doesn’t have the NFL leg now, he will. The hard work is there. The desire is there. And he’s a gamer. He is.” Before he left the Mines campus, the Orediggers had one request for their All-American punter. “When you’re playing on Monday Night Football,” Groner says, “you have to say, ‘Blake Doud, Colorado School of Mines.’” Roll Mines.

Alpha Modus and Insight Acquisition Corp Close Business Combination and Alpha Modus will Begin Trading Under “AMOD” TickerEL SEGUNDO, Calif. (AP) — Despite dealing with his share of injuries and learning a new offense, Justin Herbert is on one of the NFL's longest streaks without throwing an interception. Herbert enters the Los Angeles Chargers' game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday having thrown 335 passes without a pick. That's the fifth-longest run in league history. Aaron Rodgers holds the record of 402 for Green Bay in 2018. “It’s one of those things where you go play quarterback and you’re not worried about it. If I throw an interception, it is what it is,” Herbert said. “I’m doing everything I can to take care of the ball and make sure that I’m not putting the team in harm’s way. At the end of the day, you got to be aggressive downfield and you got to take your shots.” Herbert suffered a sprained left ankle and bruised left leg in last Sunday's 19-17 loss at Kansas City . He practiced Thursday after sitting out Wednesday. Herbert — whose last interception came midway through the first quarter on Sept. 15 at Carolina — has also joined Tom Brady as the only players who have not thrown an interception in 11 straight games with a minimum of 15 attempts in each. Brady accomplished the feat with New England in 2010. “It's pretty amazing. I said to him the other day, ‘Thank you for not having us overcome some interceptions.’ It's huge and has kept us in a lot of games,” offensive coordinator Greg Roman said. “You have a smart quarterback that is trying to win the game. He's not trying to win stats and understands the importance of taking care of the football.” Herbert will face a Tampa Bay defense that has only six interceptions, tied for sixth fewest in the league. “He does a great job taking care of the football and understanding the offense," Tampa Bay coach Todd Bowles said. “If it’s not there, he can use his legs; if it’s there, he’s got a cannon of an arm. He can zip it in. He trusts his receivers — they do a good job of mixing it up.” The Chargers (8-5) have dropped two of their past three, but hold the second wild card spot in the AFC. The Bucs (7-6) have won three straight since their Week 11 bye, which gave them a chance to regroup following a stretch in which they lost five of six. All of the victories, which have carried them back to the top of the NFC South, have come against last-place teams (Giants, Panthers, Raiders). Tampa Bay’s Baker Mayfield has already matched a career high with 28 touchdown passes, but he hasn’t done as good a job of protecting the ball as he did a year ago. He’s thrown more interceptions through 13 games (13) than he did in 17 games (10) a year ago. He threw for 295 yards and three TDs during last week’s 28-13 win over Las Vegas , yet also turned the ball over three times to help the Raiders keep it close until the fourth quarter. “We have to understand, especially when we’re in the red zone and we’re in the scoring territory, we can’t turn it over. That’s No. 1,” Bowles said. “You don’t like the turnovers, period. Every now and then they can happen, but we have to do a better job taking care of the football as an offensive staff, period,” Bowles added. “Between the coaches and the players, we need to do a better job of focusing on exactly what we want to get done, how we need to get it done, and make sure we execute it every play. It’s not just on Baker, it’s on everybody.” Los Angeles leads the league in scoring defense, allowing 15.9 points per game. It is also fifth in sacks (39) and three-and-out percentage (24.3%) and seventh in third-down defense. “They’re really gap sound,” Mayfield said. “They don’t get bad eyes down there. Everybody does their part in whatever the play's called. Nobody tries to do too much and then like I said earlier, they fly to the ball. They don’t let you get explosives. Obviously, in the red zone, they’re closing windows pretty quick.” The Bucs are 7-1 in December and January regular-season games dating to last season and 19-5 in those games going back to 2020. The Chargers are the only opponent with a winning record that Tampa Bay will face over the final seven weeks of the season. Tampa Bay's running backs catching the ball out of the backfield. The Bucs are second in the league in receptions by running backs (85), first in receiving yards (726) and tied for the league lead with six touchdowns. Rachaad White is fourth among backs in yards after the catch with 420. He has 41 catches, and Bucky Irving has 36. “They're similar in the sense they can do the same things but different in style. They're both really shifty,” Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter said. “The goal of offense is to get the ball to people in space with angles on blockers. They do a good of that.” AP Sports Writer Fred Goodall in Tampa, Florida, contributed to this report. AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

One night last month, near the end of the Chicago International Film Festival, a particularly long line of moviegoers snaked down Southport Avenue by the Music Box Theatre. The hot ticket? This fall’s hottest ticket, in fact, all over the international festival circuit? Well, it’s a 215-minute drama about a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to America in 1947 after surviving the Holocaust. The film’s title, “The Brutalist,” references several things, firstly a post-World War II design imperative made of stern concrete, steel, and a collision of poetry and functionality. Director and co-writer Brady Corbet, who wrote “The Brutalist” with his filmmaker wife, Mona Fastvold, explores brutalism in other forms as well, including love, envy, capitalist economics and how the promise of America eludes someone like the visionary architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody. Corbet, now 36 and a good bet for Oscar nominations this coming January, says his unfashionable sprawl of a picture, being distributed by A24, is also about the “strange relationship between artist and patron, and art and commerce.” It co-stars Felicity Jones as the visionary architect’s wife, Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe after the war with their niece for an agonizingly long time. Guy Pearce portrays the imperious Philadelphia blueblood who hires Tóth, a near-invisible figure in his adopted country, to design a monumental public building known as the Institute in rural Pennsylvania. The project becomes an obsession, then a breaking point and then something else. Corbet’s project, which took the better part of a decade to come together after falling apart more than once, felt like that, too. Spanning five decades and filmed in Hungary and Italy, “The Brutalist” looks like a well-spent $50 million project. In actuality, it was made for a mere $10 million, with Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley shooting on film, largely in the VistaVision process. The filmmaker said at the Chicago festival screening: “Who woulda thunk that for screening after screening over the last couple of months, people stood in line around the block to get into a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a mid-century designer?” He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with Fastvold and their daughter. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A: Yeah, that’s right. In relation to my earlier features, “The Childhood of a Leader” had a $3 million budget. The budget for “Vox Lux” was right around $10 million, same as “The Brutalist,” although the actual production budget for “Vox Lux” was about $4.5 million. Which is to say: All the money on top of that was going to all the wrong places. For a lot of reasons, when my wife and I finished the screenplay for “The Brutalist,” we ruled out scouting locations in Philadelphia or anywhere in the northeastern United States. We needed to (film) somewhere with a lot less red tape. My wife’s previous film, “The World to Come,” she made in Romania; we shot “Childhood of a Leader” in Hungary. For “The Brutalist” we initially landed on Poland, but this was early on in COVID and Poland shut its borders the week our crew was arriving for pre-production. When we finally got things up and running again with a different iteration of the cast (the original ensemble was to star Joel Edgerton, Marion Cotillard and Mark Rylance), after nine months, the movie fell apart again because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We couldn’t get any of the banks to cash-flow the tax credit (for location shooting in Poland). It’s completely stable now, but at that time the banks were nervous about whether the war would be contained to Ukraine or not. And then we finally got it up and running in Budapest, Hungary. A: Every filmmaker I know suffers from some form of post-traumatic stress (laughs). It sounds funny but it’s true. At every level. On the level of independent cinema, you’re just so damn poor. You’re not making any money, and yet from nose to tail, at minimum, a movie always takes a couple of years. With bigger projects, you might have a little more personal security but a lot less creative security with so many more cooks in the kitchen. Either route you choose, it can be an arduous and painful one. Whether you’re making a movie for a million dollars, or $10 million, or $100 million, it’s still “millions of dollars.” And if you’re concerned about the lives and livelihoods of the people working with you, it’s especially stressful. People are constantly calling you: “Is it happening? Are we starting? Should I take this other job or not?” And you have 250 people who need that answer from you. Every iteration of the project, I always thought we were really about to start in a week, two weeks. It’s just very challenging interpersonally. It’s an imposition for everyone in your life. And then there’s the imposition of screening a movie that’s three-and-a-half-hours long for film festivals, where it’s difficult to find that kind of real estate on the schedule. So essentially, making a movie means constantly apologizing. A: I was making short films when I was 11, 12 years old. The first thing I ever made more properly, I guess, was a short film I made when I was 18, “Protect You + Me,” shot by (cinematographer) Darius Khondji. It was supposed to be part of a triptych of films, and I went to Paris for the two films that followed it. And then all the financing fell through. But that first one screened at the London film festival, and won a prize at Sundance, and I was making music videos and other stuff by then. A: Probably 25. We work a lot for other people, too. I think we’ve done six together for our own projects. Sometimes I’ll start something at night and my wife will finish in the morning. Sometimes we work very closely together, talking and typing together. It’s always different. Right now I’m writing a lot on the road, and my wife is editing her film, which is a musical we wrote, “Ann Lee,” about the founder of the Shakers. I’m working on my next movie now, which spans a lot of time, like “The Brutalist,” with a lot of locations. And I need to make sure we can do it for not a lot of money, because it’s just not possible to have a lot of money and total autonomy. For me making a movie is like cooking. If everyone starts coming in and throwing a dash of this or that in the pot, it won’t work out. A continuity of vision is what I look for when I read a novel. Same with watching a film. A lot of stuff out there today, appropriately referred to as “content,” has more in common with a pair of Nikes than it does with narrative cinema. A: Well, even with our terrific producing team, I mean, everyone was up for a three-hour movie but we were sort of pushing it with three-and-a-half (laughs). I figured, worst-case scenario, it opens on a streamer. Not what I had in mind, but people watch stuff that’s eight, 12 hours long all the time. They get a cold, they watch four seasons of “Succession.” (A24 is releasing the film in theaters, gradually.) It was important for all of us to try to capture an entire century’s worth of thinking about design with “The Brutalist.” For me, making something means expressing a feeling I have about our history. I’ve described my films as poetic films about politics, that go to places politics alone cannot reach. It’s one thing to say something like “history repeats itself.” It’s another thing to make people that, and feel it. I really want viewers to engage with the past, and the trauma of that history can be uncomfortable, or dusty, or dry. But if you can make it something vital, and tangible, the way great professors can do for their students, that’s my definition of success.Imo Grasshoppers defeated COAS Babes 43-41 in a record-setting game at the ongoing Ardova Handball Premier League on Monday in Lagos. It is the first time both the winning and losing teams will record over 40 goals in a game. It was obvious that both teams were focused on winning the game but it was Grasshoppers who edged forward in the closing stages to win the game. There was little to separate the two sides but the former multiple national league champions had to rely on experience to defeat the energetic COAS Babes. Defensive plays made little difference in this game as both teams went all out for the win, in the process, setting a league record. Fans were on the edge of their seats urging both sides to go for more goals, which they responded to multiple times in the game. Both sets of players, who were visibly tired after the game, got applause from appreciative fans. Related News Ardova HPL: Teams arrive in Lagos for second phase Tuesday Ardova HPL: High-flying Tojemarine beat United to remain top Ardova League: Champions United, Babes win opening games In other game in the female category, Seasiders Babes defeated Plateau Peacocks 28-25. In the men’s category, De Defenders defeated Correction Boys 26-25 in a close game, Sunshine Kings and Benue Buffaloes game ended in a tie (23-23), while Safety Shooters beat Adamawa Warriors 44-28. On Tuesday (today), Benue Buffaloes lock horns with Correction Boys, Sunshine Kings takes on Defenders, Rima Strikers battle Adamawa Warriors, Niger United meet Lagos Seasiders, while Safety Shooters takes on Tojemarine Academy.

THE Consumer Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ) has bemoaned the failure by the government to allocate funds in the recently announced 2025 National Budget towards improving the public transportation system in the country. In a statement, CCZ chief executive officer Rose Mpofu said the government should have considered suspending duty on public service buses. “Public transport remains a big challenge and consumers are always being taken advantage of, especially women because they are usually harassed by disrespectful touts. Also children and people with disabilities are always being taken advantage of,” she said. She said commuter omnibus operators disregard the fair pricing system, always finding ways of circumventing it through hiking fares when it rains, or in the evening when commuters are desperate to get home. Mpofu said the government should have considered allocating some funds towards resuscitating Zupco to enable it to grow its fleet and provide an affordable and efficient service. She said a reliable public transport system would assist in decongesting the roads as most people will use it instead of the private commuter omnibuses, commonly known as “kombis”, and pirate taxis, known as “mushikashika”. Jobs would also be created and the dignity that consumers get from using public transport would also be created. “Resuscitation of the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) is also very important and we are happy that it was given a huge chunk to try and upscale its operations,” Mpofu said. She welcomed the suspension of duty on inputs for producing motor vehicles saying this will promote value addition and create employment which will benefit consumers as more income is earned. On the issue of withholding tax on betting, Mpofu said it is a positive move as it would result in more people paying taxes and increased revenue generation for the government to fund social programmes. She also hailed the government for increasing the minimum tax threshold, but suggested that it should have been informed by the family basket of six. — New Ziana