MON SIX

BOSTON (AP) — Right-hander Kutter Crawford, who missed all of last season with knee and wrist injuries, avoided arbitration with the Boston Red Sox when he agreed Tuesday to a $2.75 million, one-year contract.

Crawford, 29, gets the same salary he had last year.

He went 9-16 with a 4.36 ERA in 2024, when he led the majors with 16 losses and 34 home runs allowed. He started last season on the injured list with a sore knee and had surgery in July on his right wrist.

In his career, Crawford has an 18-31 record with a 4.56 ERA.

Four Boston players remain eligible for arbitration: right-handers Tanner Houck and Johan Oviedo, first baseman Triston Casas and second baseman Romy González. Players and teams are set to exchange proposed salaries on Thursday.

AP MLB:https://apnews.com/hub/MLB

Believe it or not, there was a time when being a Nick Saban disciple did not seem like a ticket to greatness. Particularly in the first part of his Alabama tenure, when schools were desperate to mimic Saban's methods, some of the more prominent names on his coaching tree like Derek Dooley, Jim McElwain and Will Muschamp could not reproduce his secret sauce when they got their chance to run SEC programs.

But with Saban now comfortably on the ESPN desk, where it seems like he spends most of his time either railing on the state of the sport or helping rehab the image of his fired buddies, his influence over college football is inescapable.

While Saban left the stage before the professionalized era of college football could chip away at his mystique, he has found a way to still dominate the sport through proxies who have adapted his lessons to a model that Saban himself wanted little to do with.

"I think everybody learned a lot from Nick," said Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, who was Alabama's wide receivers coach for Saban's first four seasons in Tuscaloosa. "If you were serious about your career and wanted to be a head coach one day, you took great notes or great mental notes. I felt like after one year with Coach Saban, I had learned more about how to run a program than I maybe did the previous 27 as an assistant coach."

Now, as we reach the semifinals of theCollege Football Playoff, you can see Saban's influence on multiple generations of coaches who have reached the top of the sport.

There's Cignetti, 64, who has clearly borrowed Saban's intensity, attention to detail and unwillingness to accept complacency from anyone in his organization.

There's Dan Lanning, 39, who learned at Alabama that you need to recruit the best players to build the best teams and has imported that philosophy to Oregon.

There's Mario Cristobal, 55, who has built Miami in the image of Alabama teams that dominated on both lines of scrimmage.

Then there's Pete Golding, 41, who almost sounds like he's doing a Saban imitation — both in cadence and curse words — whenever he steps in front of a microphone as Ole Miss' new head coach.

And though they're all different in terms of their X-and-O expertise and what they borrowed stylistically from Saban, the one thing they all share is an inside view of how to build the kind of multi-layered, staffed-up organization that covered every base and made Alabama a consistent winning machine no matter which coaches or players came in and out in a given year.

"The time there opened my eyes to what college football had grown into, what it had become and the resources necessary," said Cristobal, who spent four seasons as an assistant under Saban.

They're not alone. Seemingly every top-level program, but particularly those that encountered peak Saban either as a competitor or a cousin, has tried to copy Alabama with an army of analysts, personnel gurus and assistants to assistants on top of the cutting-edge facilities and bloated recruiting budgets.

It hasn't always worked out, of course. Plenty of former Saban assistants have arrived at head coaching jobs with big hype and left a trail of expensive buyouts in their wake.

But when you look at the entire breadth of the sport, Saban's coaching tree is now undeniable, stretching from Kirby Smart at Georgia to Steve Sarkisian at Texas to Lane Kiffin at LSU to Brent Key at Georgia Tech along with up-and-comers like newly hired Cal coach Tosh Lupoi and Charles Huff at Memphis.

It's enough Saban-connected success across the landscape to raise the question of why Alabama — which is 20-8 without a playoff win since Saban retired — doesn't have a Saban acolyte in charge now.

But that's a story for another day. Alabama is old news at this point, and Saban's DNA is all over the four teams playing for a chance at this national championship.

It doesn't even necessarily matter how long his former assistants were there or how they arrived.

Lanning and Golding represent the dozens of up-and-comers who passed through the Saban system, hoping to learn his famous "process" from the inside.

Golding was a defensive coordinator at UTSA who caught Saban's eye at a chalk talk and subsequently spent five years at Alabama, helping the Crimson Tide win the 2020 national title. If you watch and listen to him closely, you can see echoes of Saban's verbal tics with a lot of "aights" and hand motions as he makes his points.

"I think most people who went through and were fortunate enough to be around Coach Saban understand, No. 1, the lifeblood of the program is recruiting," Golding said. "And then you've got to have sound schemes on both sides. You want to keep stability within those schemes for the development of players. And there's a toughness component, a competitive character component to hold these guys accountable and hold them to a high standard. And I think that's pretty consistent with whoever is playing right now."

Lanning's time at Alabama changed the trajectory of his career. Though he was only with Saban for one year, he left a job as a full-time, on-field coach at Sam Houston State in 2014 to work at Alabama as a graduate assistant, which many would consider a backward career step. But not only did it help launch Lanning into an assistant coaching role at Memphis, getting into Saban's world helped him land at Georgia for four years under Smart.

"I was going to take a pay cut to go be there," Lanning said. "When anybody asked me why, I said, 'I'm going to get my doctorate in football.' And that's what I felt like working for Coach Saban. Things I thought I knew, I realized I didn't know anything."

Cristobal represents the scores of coaches who went to Alabama to, in many ways, rehabilitate their career. Like Sarkisian, Kiffin and current Maryland coach Mike Locksley, Cristobal landed at Alabama as offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator after six years at Florida International where he had some success but ultimately fell victim to significant funding and administrative challenges. After four years, Cristobal left to be Willie Taggart's co-offensive coordinator at Oregon, took over as head coach the following season when Taggart left for Florida State and was successful enough over four years to come back to his alma mater.

"If I could just put my finger on one thing that I valued the most in terms of learning, was reconfirming what I learned under Coach [Jimmy] Johnson and Coach [Dennis] Erickson, the guys I had a chance to play for here, is under no circumstances can you allow human nature and complacency to take over yourself and the people in your program," Cristobal said. "That's at all costs and it's a daily fight. When you wake up, that has to be opponent No. 1 that you have to attack with intent, with urgency and I would say that would be the most important thing."

But perhaps the most Saban-like disciple is the one whose tenure at Alabama barely registers a memory.

By the time he got to Alabama in 2007, Cignetti had been a longtime quarterbacks coach rising through the ranks from Rice and Temple to Pittsburgh and NC State. Unable to put his career on a path to becoming an FBS head coach, Cignetti in 2011 famously took the job at D-II program IUP — Indiana University of Pennsylvania — making $125,000, about half of his salary at Alabama.

Since 2019 when James Madison hired him, Cignetti has posted a Saban-like 77-11 record as a head coach and has Indiana on the verge of arguably the most surprising championship in college sports given the program's history as a perennial loser.

For many years, it was an interesting hypothetical about what would happen if you imported Saban into a random program and not a monster like Alabama or a place like LSU that had untapped potential.

Cignetti has essentially ended that debate.

"There's a lot of disciples out there doing well," he said. "And that's why he's the greatest of all time."

Saban's role in the sport these days is interesting because while he has a huge megaphone, he has chosen to use it largely as a signal flare against the Wild West of the transfer portal and NIL while engaging in dubious conflicts of interest around certain coaching moves like advising Kiffin before he took the LSU job.

The reality, though, is that Saban chose to become a TV personality because his own dominance in the sport was waning. With the dramatic shift in recruiting and player compensation, he could no longer horde talent on the premise that being an Alabama player would unlock future NFL riches.

He was also 72 years old.

While Alabama may struggle to ever get back to that level of success, this year's CFP has made it clear his influence across the sport will be felt for decades to come.

One of the bigger stories to come out of thiscollege footballpostseason has been theSoutheastern Conference'sperformance, and whether the SEC has lost its seat on the throne as the sport's top conference.

After beginning with five teams inthe College Football Playoff,the SEC has one team remaining:No. 6 Mississippi,which faces No. 10 Miamiin the CFP Fiesta Bowl semifinalon Thursday, Jan. 8. Texas A&M and Oklahoma were upset in CFP first-round games by Miami andAlabama, who was then thumped 38-3 byIndianain the Rose Bowl. That just covers the surface of the SEC's struggles this postseason.

It's a performance stat line ESPN's Paul Finebaum couldn't defend during Tuesday's edition of "First Take."

"I've been on that hill Stephen A, and I'm getting destroyed. There's no way to defend the SEC. It's been terrible," Finebaum said.

"There's no way to defend the SEC. It's been terrible." 😳@finebaumon if the SEC's days of dominance are over in college football 👀pic.twitter.com/xy0rFiphS6

— First Take (@FirstTake)January 6, 2026

REQUIRED READING:Big Ten dunks on SEC in college football coaching carousel. That's the cold truth

Excluding CFP games and CFP bowl games, the SEC went 1-5 in bowls this season, with the most notable win beingTexas' win over Michigan in the Citrus Bowlthanks to a career day from Arch Manning. Of those five losses, two of them cameagainst the Big Ten:Illinois over No. 23 Tennessee in the Music City Bowl and Iowa over No. 12 Vanderbilt.

The SEC sustained a loss in the Rose Bowl to the Big Tenwith Alabama's 35-point blowout loss to Indiana.In an SEC-vs.-SEC matchup in the Sugar Bowl, Trinidad Chambliss ledOle Missto upset No. 3Georgiawith a dominant fourth-quarter performance.

Though he did mention Ole Miss is still in the CFP and has a chance at giving the SEC its first national championship since Georgia went back-to-back in the 2022-23, Finebaum didn't stop there.

"I'm sure somebody at the SEC offices is whispering Ole Miss can win it all. That would solve some of the wounds, but this has been a long year for the SEC," Finebaum continued. "... It's a rough year for the SEC. Ole Miss is it regardless of the Lane Kiffin story.

"... If Ole Miss loses Thursday night and I'm sitting here having to defend this league to you Stephen A, saying 'Oh no big deal that it's three straight years without an SEC team in the national championship game,' there is no defense."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Paul Finebaum unable to defend SEC football with bowl season performance

Amy Sussman/BBMA2020/Getty

Post Maloneisn't feeling like a rock star after his latest mishap was caught on camera.

The "Rockstar" singer and rapper injured himself during his own Twitch livestream last week when he attempted to do a backflip off his swivel desk chair.

And while he wiped out spectacularly (natch), it must be noted that he never dropped his lit cigarette during the otherwise cringe moment.

"Here it comes, y'all," the "Sunflower" artist (real name: Austin Post) said while getting up from his chair. "This is just an attempt!"

Invideo captured by TMZ and posted on TikTok, the Grammy-nominated performer moves the rolling chair into position and steps onto it with both feet before trying to backflip off of it. However, he never actually rotates his body and just falls to the floor in a heap with a loud groan. He immediately gets back up and gives the camera a thumbs-up.

"Ugh, it was all right," Malone says before adding with a laugh, "I actually hurt my wrist because my f‑‑‑ing chair rotated, f‑‑‑! Ow!"

The 30-year-old artist, who is set to headline Stagecoach later this year, was live on the streaming platform to play the video game event Post Malone's Murder Circus Encore inHunt: Showdown 1896(available now through Feb. 9). Throughout the stream, he played the game, drank Bud Light, and smoked cigarettes.

Matthew Pearce/Icon Sportswire via Getty

This is hardly the first time the "Congratulations" artist has had a public spill. Last July, during his Big Ass Stadium Tour, he took a tumble when he kneeled down on the stage to clink his red Solo cup against a fan's cup in the audience.

Video of the momentposted on TikTok showed Malone raising his cup and leaning over, as the edge of the stage fell away during the Arizona show.

The footage was captioned, "I am SO sorry Austin. I love you! Such an amazing show." And it featured the words, "I didn't mean to almost break your back."

In September 2022, Malone had another spill at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis during a stop on hisTwelve Carattour.

While Malone managed to get up and finish an abbreviated version of the concert then, his manager later revealed that the singer hadbruised his ribs. He was hospitalized and given pain medication after falling through what he described as "a big-ass hole" on his set.

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with ourEW Dispatch newsletter.

"I just want to apologize to everyone in St. Louis, and I want to say thank you guys so much for coming to the show," Malone said ina videoposted afterward. "And next time I'm around this way, we're gonna do a two-hour show for you so we can make up for the couple missed songs that we missed."

Malone ended up having tocancel a concertscheduled for Boston as a result.

Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly

As legend has it,Taylor Swifthas a new top single.

"The Fate of Ophelia" has surpassed "Anti-Hero" to become the singer's longest-running No. 1 single, surging back to the summit of the Billboard Hot 100 for a ninth nonconsecutive week and eclipsing the eight-week reign of the "Midnights" hit.

According to Billboard magazine,"The Fate of Ophelia"logged 18.3 million official U.S. streams, up 9% week over week.

That rebound is more notable given the song's recent slide amid the holiday season."The Life of a Showgirl"single briefly fell out of the Top 10 altogether, dipping to No. 28. The rapid climb back to No. 1 reflects renewed fan momentum, which also propelled"Opalite"from No. 54 to No. 8.

"Elizabeth Taylor"made the Hot 100, as well.

On the album side of the charts, "Showgirl" logged a 12th week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. While it remains six weeks shy of surpassing Swift's personal benchmark set by "The Tortured Poets Department," her broader catalog shows no signs of fading.

More:Unlocking the Easter eggs in Taylor Swift's music video 'The Fate of Ophelia'

Swift's top five songs at No. 1,per Billboard, include:

• "The Fate of Ophelia," nine weeks

• "Anti-Hero," eight weeks

• "Blank Space," seven weeks

• "Cruel Summer," four weeks

• "Shake It Off," four weeks

Don't miss anyTaylor Swiftnews; sign up for thefree, weekly newsletter This Swift Beat.

Follow Taylor Swift reporter Bryan West onInstagram,TikTokandX as @BryanWestTV.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean:Taylor Swift's 'Fate of Ophelia' dethrones this song as her top single

Five years ago, as lawmakers met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, thousands of Americansviolently stormed the Capitolin an effort to stop the proceedings.

For some, the Capitol Riot feels like it happened yesterday, but in reality, half a decade has passed since that day in the nation's capital.

In the years following,President Donald Trumpdefended many of the rioters, calling them"hostages"and"political prisoners."Once back in office, Trump approved pardons for nearly1,600 people charged in the riot.

"These people have been destroyed," Trump saidin Jan. 2024. "What they've done to these people is outrageous."

Although years have passed, the photos of the insurrection and its aftermath remain as striking as they were on that day.

See some of the images below.

Rioters gather and breach the Capitol

National front pages capture the chaos

A damaged Capitol begins to recover

Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach him at fernando.cervantes@gannett.com and follow him on X @fern_cerv_.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:See photos from January 6 Capitol riots, 5 years after attack

Amid increasing concerns thatGreenland, a vast Arctic territory ruled by Denmark, is still being coveted by the Trump administration, the Danish prime minister has delivered a stark warning to the White House.

In nationally televised remarks, Mette Frederiksen reminded Danes that she had already "made it very clear where the Kingdom of Denmark stands, and that Greenland has repeatedly said that it does not want to be part of the United States."

But she also warned of the consequences of US military action to seize Greenland – something US President Donald Trump has pointedly refused to rule out.

"First of all, I think you have to take the US president seriously when he says he wants Greenland," Frederiksen said, reflecting heightened anxiety about Trump's intentions in the aftermath of his extraordinarymilitary actionin Venezuela.

"But I also want to make it clear that if the US chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of World War II," she added.

It is a serious and widely shared concern among NATO allies that the Greenland issue has the potential not only to anger and humiliate a longtime US partner, but also to fracture the Western military alliance as pressure from Washington escalates.

Trump repeated on Sunday that the US needs Greenland "from the standpoint of national security."

"We need Greenland … It's so strategic right now. Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. "We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it."

Late Monday, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller reiterated those claims that "Greenland should be part of the United States," but he rejected that military force would be necessary to acquire it.

"Nobody's gonna fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland," Miller said on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper."

When pressed whether military intervention is off the table, Miller instead questioned Denmark's claim over theArctic territory.

His remarks came after Miller's wife, and Trump ally, Katie Miller posted on X an image of the map of Greenland overlaid with the American flag, writing, "SOON."

It's the latest reminder of a repeatedly stated Trump-administration ambition that has set Washington's traditional European allies – most of all, Denmark – on edge.

CNN visitedGreenland in October, as the Danish military staged an unprecedented show of military force officially meant to deter what are said to be growing Russian and Chinese military threats.

Moscow may be bogged down fighting in Ukraine at the moment, but once that brutal conflict is finally over, Danish military officials tell CNN they fully expect Russia to divert resources and use its warfighting experience to pose a much greater threat in the Arctic region.

China, too, has been stepping up its Arctic claims, taking part in patrols and exercises with Russian vessels, as well as funding Arctic infrastructure projects and developing a "polar silk road" plan for Arctic shipping. It's even declared itself a "near-Arctic state," even though its most northerly major city, Harbin, is roughly as far north as Venice in Italy.

But in face-to-face meetings, senior Danish military commanders say that neither Russia nor China currently present any significant military threat to Greenland.

"I don't think we have a threat to Greenland right now," Major General Søren Andersen, the chief of Denmark's Joint Arctic Command, told CNN.

What's more, Danish military officials insist the world's largest island – the size of six Germanys or two of the biggest US states, Alaska and California, combined – is relatively straightforward to defend. Harsh weather, mountainous terrain and a lack of infrastructure make the entire east coast of the territory "virtually unconquerable," according to one Danish military official.

Privately, Danish military officials told CNN the maneuvers on land, air and sea were really designed to show Trump how seriously it took Greenland's security, after his repeated threats to take it over, in the hope of convincing him to change his mind.

But that strategy, it seems, does not appear to have worked. And with a Trump administration seemingly emboldened by what it regards as a stunning success in Venezuela, the future of Greenland and the cohesion of the Western military alliance are once again being plunged into uncertainty.

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