Unbeaten Hoosiers and their coach and quarterback dominate the AP's Big Ten midseason awards

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Unbeaten Hoosiers and their coach and quarterback dominate the AP's Big Ten midseason awards

2024-10-16 02:17 Last Updated At：02:20

First-year coach Curt Cignetti promised a new and improved Indiana, and he has delivered with the unbeaten Hoosiers off to their best start since 1967.

The Hoosiers have already doubled their win total from last season, and for that they earned four of the 10 Associated Press Big Ten midseason awards.

Nine AP writers who cover the conference voted 16th-ranked Indiana the most surprising Big Ten team of the first half of the season, Cignetti the top coach and quarterback Kurtis Rourke the top first-year transfer and most surprising player.

Since 1968, the season after its only Rose Bowl appearance, Indiana has finished with just 12 winning records and never won more than eight games. The Hoosiers went 14-7 in 2019-20 but slipped back to 9-27 the next three seasons.

Enter Cignetti, who at 63 has his first head coaching job in a power conference. He arrived after going 52-9 in five seasons at James Madison and flipped the Indiana roster with 54 newcomers, half of them transfers. Of the 27 transfers, 13 followed him from James Madison.

The one who has made the biggest impact came from Ohio: Rourke, a sixth-year player who has made a better-than-expected transition from the Mid-American Conference to the Big Ten. His 292 yards passing per game rank second in the league, he's tied for the lead with 14 touchdown passes, and his 73.8% completion rate is third in the country. He's the first Indiana quarterback to throw for three TDs in three Big Ten games since Harry Gonso in that magical '67 season.

Rourke operates an offense that averages 516 yards and 48 points per game and leads the Big Ten with 32 pass plays of 20 yards or longer.

Dillon Gabriel, Oregon. The quarterback who transferred from Oklahoma for his final season has completed 76% of his passes for 298 yards per game. He's thrown for at least two TDs in every game and has a total of 13. His 1.5% interception rate (3 on 201 attempts) is tied for fifth-best among the power-conference quarterbacks with at least 200 attempts, according to Sportradar.

Last week, he threw for 341 yards and two touchdowns and ran for another score in the second-ranked Ducks' 32-31 win over Ohio State in a top-five matchup.

Mason Graham, Michigan. The defensive tackle has lived up to his preseason AP All-America billing and is building his NFL draft stock. He regularly has contended with double-teams and, according to Pro Football Focus, has played no fewer than 46 snaps in five of the Wolverines' six games. He played more than 46 in only one game last season.

Graham, who teams with Kenneth Grant to form one of the nation's top defensive line duos, has 3.5 sacks, four tackles for loss and 21 tackles. His PFF rating is eighth-highest among FBS interior linemen and third-highest in the Big Ten.

Jeremiah Smith, Ohio State. The wide receiver averages 17.3 yards on his 32 catches and 92 yards per game, the second-best numbers by a freshman behind Alabama star Ryan Williams. Physical and able to pick up yards after the catch, Smith caught a season-high nine balls for 100 yards and a touchdown last week while being covered by top Oregon CB Jabbar Muhammad.

Southern California has found life in the Big Ten challenging, to say the least. The season started out with a neutral-site win over LSU, but now the Trojans are 3-3 overall, 1-3 in the Big Ten and out of College Football Playoff contention.

USC was No. 11 in the AP Top 25 just two weeks ago after erasing a double-digit deficit to beat Wisconsin. But a bad loss at Minnesota was followed by last week's home overtime loss to Penn State in a game in which it led or was tied the final 49 minutes of regulation. This week the Trojans go to Maryland for their longest road trip of the season.

USC is 5-8 since it opened last season 6-0, and the Trojans' start in Big Ten play has upped the pressure on Lincoln Riley.

The biggest issue is defense. Stopping the run is crucial to success in the Big Ten, and that's where the Trojans have struggled. They're 16th out of 18 in the conference in rushing defense. They've given up five runs of 30 yards or longer, including four that have gone for 40-plus.

There's a tie between Wisconsin quarterback Tyler Van Dyke and USC linebacker Eric Gentry.

Van Dyke transferred from Miami and beat out Braedyn Locke for the starter's job. Van Dyke led the Badgers to wins in the first two games before going down with a season-ending knee injury against Alabama. The Badgers are 2-1 since.

Gentry was coming off the best game of his career — 12 tackles, three tackles for loss, one sack against Michigan — when he left the next game against Wisconsin with an undisclosed injury. The Trojans have been without their defensive anchor for two games.

AP Sports Writers Dave Campbell, Tom Canavan, Larry Lage, Steve Megargee, Eric Olson, Anne M. Peterson, Joe Reedy, Andrew Seligman and Mitch Stacy contributed.

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Death toll in attack on Christmas market in Germany rises to 5 and more than 200 injured

2024-12-21 20:17 Last Updated At：20:21

MAGDEBURG, Germany (AP) — Germans on Saturday mourned both the victims and their shaken sense of security after a Saudi doctor intentionally drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers, killing at least five people, including a small child, and wounding at least 200 others.

Authorities arrested a 50-year-old man at the site of the attack in Magdeburg on Friday evening and took him into custody for questioning. He has lived in Germany since 2006, practicing medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Magdeburg. officials said.

The state governor, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters that the death toll rose to five from a previous figure of two and that more than 200 people in total were injured.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that nearly 40 of them "are so seriously injured that we must be very worried about them.”

Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Mourners lit candles and placed flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and gloomy day. Several people stopped and cried. A Berlin church choir whose members witnessed a previous Christmas market attack in 2016 sang Amazing Grace, a hymn about God's mercy, offering their prayers and solidarity with the victims.

There were still no answers Saturday as to what motivated the man to drive his black BMW into a crowd in the eastern German city.

Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who left the faith.

He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he said was the “Islamism of Europe.” Some described him as an activist who helped Saudi women flee their homeland. He has also voiced support for the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Haseloff said Friday that authorities believed the man acted alone.

The violence shocked Germany and the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that’s part of a centuries-old German tradition. It prompted several other German towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg’s loss. Berlin kept its markets open but has increased its police presence at them.

Germany has suffered a string of extremist attacks in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen in August.

Magdeburg is a city of about 240,000 people, west of Berlin, that serves as Saxony-Anhalt’s capital. Friday’s attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg on Saturday, and a memorial service is to take place in the city cathedral in the evening. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings across the country.

Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency dpa showed the suspect’s arrest at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone, his head arched up slightly. Other officers swarmed around the suspect and took him into custody.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is located in a mall across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs and thought at first they were fireworks. She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.

Shaking as she described the horror of what she witnessed, she recalled seeing the car bursting out of the market and turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee street and then coming to a standstill at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.

The number of injured people was overwhelming.

“My husband and I helped them for two hours. He ran back home and grabbed as many blankets as he could find because they didn’t have enough to cover the injured people. And it was so cold," she said.

The market itself was still cordoned off Saturday with red-and-white tape and police vans every 50 meters (yards). Police with machine pistols guarded every entry to the market. Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.

Christmas markets are a German holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages, now successfully exported to much of the Western world.

Aboubakr reported from Cairo and Gera from Warsaw, Poland. Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin.