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JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Walter Payton Award finalist Irv Mulligan had 116 yards rushing, Jackson State took control in the third quarter and the Tigers rolled past Southern 41-13 on Saturday to win the SWAC Championship. Jackson State (11-2) claimed the conference title for the fourth time and will play MEAC champion South Carolina State in the Celebration Bowl on Dec. 14 in Atlanta. Southern (8-5) led 10-3 late in the second quarter before Jackson State ended the half on an Emari Matthews 2-yard touchdown run and followed it up with Mulligan's 1-yard TD run to open the third quarter. Now leading 17-10, the Tigers added Gerardo Baeza's 45-yard field goal and Zy McDonald's 23-yard touchdown run to take a 27-10 lead into the fourth quarter. Jackson State wrapped up the conference title with two touchdowns in the final 6 1/2 minutes. The Jaguars' 28-yard field goal by Joshua Griffin in the fourth quarter marked the end of a six-game streak in which Jackson State had not allowed a point in the final period. Also, Southern was only the third team since Oct. 5 to score in the second half against Jackson State. In addition to Muligan's 116 yards on the ground, McDonald ran for 95 yards and the Tigers totaled 275 yards and four rushing touchdowns. McDonald completed 6 of 11 passes for 75 yards with a touchdown and an interception. Czavian Teasett had 127 yards passing and 56 yards rushing for Southern. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football

Baby kept in a drawer for almost three years ‘had never seen daylight’ as mum jailed over ‘extreme neglect’AP Business SummaryBrief at 3:50 p.m. ESTLisa Simpson once said during an episode of “The Simpsons:” What could be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football? On Monday night, the entire Simpsons universe gets to experience it in a way not many could have imagined. Recommended Videos The prime-time matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys will also take place at Springfield’s Atoms Stadium as part of “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast. The altcast will be streamed on ESPN+, Disney+, and NFL+ (on mobile devices). ESPN and ABC have the main broadcast, while ESPN2 will carry the final “ManningCast” of the regular season. The replay will be available on Disney+ for 30 days. Globally, more than 145 countries will have access to either live or on replay. “We’re such huge football fans, and the Simpsons audience and the football audience, I feel, are like the same audience of just American families and football. And the Simpsons are so much a part of the DNA of the American family and culture that for us to, like, mush them together in this crazy video game, it’s so fun,” said Matt Selman, executive producer of “The Simpsons.” While the game is the focal point, the alternate broadcast, in some ways, will resemble a three-hour episode of “The Simpsons.” It starts with Homer eating too many hot dogs and having a dream while watching football. Homer joins the Cowboys in the dream while Bart teams up with the Bengals. Lisa and Marge will be sideline reporters. “That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game. It is like a complete story, and the NFL game will happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises,” said Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN’s VP of edit and animation. This is the second year ESPN has done an alternate broadcast for an NFL game. It used the characters from “Toy Story” for last year’s Sunday morning game from London between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars. “The Simpsons” has featured many sports-themed episodes during its 35 seasons. Even though “Homer at the Bat” remains the consensus favorite sports episode for many Simpsons fans, there have been football ones such as “Bart Star” and “Lisa The Greek.” There also was a Super Bowl-themed one after Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl 33 between Denver and Atlanta in 1999. Even though “The Simpsons” remains a staple on Fox’s prime-time schedule, it is part of the Disney family after their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. All 35 seasons are on Disney+. The show’s creators have worked with ESPN and the NFL to make sure the look and sound is definitely Simpsonsesque. The theme song is a mash-up of “The Simpsons” opening and “Monday Night Football’s” iconic “Heavy Action.” There have also been pre-recorded skits and bits to use during the broadcast featuring Simpson’s legendary voices Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Yeardley Smith. The telecast will be entirely animated, with the players’ movements in sync with what is happening in real-time on the field. That is done through player-tracking data enabled by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats system and Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology. While Next Gen Stats tracks where players are on the field with a tracking chip in the shoulder pads, there is skeletal data tracking and limb tracking data — which uses 29 points per player — to get closer to the player’s movements. The other data tracking will allow Beyond Sports and Disney to add special characters to the game. For example, there might be a play where Lisa catches the ball and goes 30 yards instead of Cincinnati’s Tee Higgins. “Lisa is much smaller than the rest of the players. So, in real life, the ball would go over her head, but now, with data processing, we can take the ball and make it go exactly into her hands. So for the viewer, it still looks believable, and it all makes sense,” said Beyond Sports co-founder Nicolaas Westerhof. The other major challenge is making “The Simpsons” two-dimensional cartoon characters into 3-D simulations. Szykowny and his team worked to make that a reality over the past couple of months. “That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job,” Szykowny said. Lisa, Krusty, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph will be with Bart and the Bengals; while Carl, Barney, Lenny and Moe join up with with Homer and the Cowboys. The broadcast will also feature ESPN personalities Stephen A. Smith, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. ESPN’s Drew Carter, Mina Kimes and Dan Orlovsky will call the game from Bristol, Connecticut, and also be animated. They will wear Meta Quest Pro headsets to experience the game from Springfield using VR technology. For Kimes, being part of the broadcast and being an animated Simpsons character is a dream come true. She is a massive fan of the show and has a framed photo of Lisa Simpson — who she said is a personal hero and icon — as part of her backdrop when she makes appearances on ESPN NFL shows from her home in Los Angeles. “I didn’t have any input, and I didn’t see anything beforehand, so I wasn’t sure if it would look like me, but it kind of does, which is very funny,” said Kimes, who drew Simpsons characters when she was a kid. “To see the actual staff turn me into one was a dream.” Even though the Bengals (4-8) and Cowboys (5-7) have struggled this season, Selman thinks both teams have personalities that appeal to “The Simpsons” universe. “We were just so lucky also that the Cowboys are sort of like a Homer Simpson-type team, American team, and Mike McCarthy might be a Homer-type guy, one might imagine,” he said. ”And then you have Joe Burrow on the other side who is a cool young, spiky-haired, blonde bad boy -- he’s like Bart. And that fits our character archetypes so perfectly. “If Homer is mad at Bart and has a hot dog dream while watching ’Monday Night Football’, and then it’s basically McCarthy versus Burrow, Homer versus Bart, and that’s the simple father versus son strangling — Homer strangling Bart dynamic that has been part of the show for 35 years. I don’t know if that would have worked as well if it was like Titans versus Jacksonville. We would have found something. We would have made it work.” ___ AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

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Trump tries to force other countries to negotiating table on immigration and trade with promise to hike tariffsJonah Goldberg Among elites across the ideological spectrum, there's one point of unifying agreement: Americans are bitterly divided. What if that's wrong? What if elites are the ones who are bitterly divided while most Americans are fairly unified? History rarely lines up perfectly with the calendar (the "sixties" didn't really start until the decade was almost over). But politically, the 21st century neatly began in 2000, when the election ended in a tie and the color coding of electoral maps became enshrined as a kind of permanent tribal color war of "red vs. blue." Elite understanding of politics has been stuck in this framework ever since. Politicians and voters have leaned into this alleged political reality, making it seem all the more real in the process. I loathe the phrase "perception is reality," but in politics it has the reifying power of self-fulfilling prophecy. Like rival noble families in medieval Europe, elites have been vying for power and dominance on the arrogant assumption that their subjects share their concern for who rules rather than what the rulers can deliver. Political cartoonists from across country draw up something special for the holiday In 2018, the group More in Common published a massive report on the "hidden tribes" of American politics. The wealthiest and whitest groups were "devoted conservatives" (6%) and "progressive activists" (8%). These tribes dominate the media, the parties and higher education, and they dictate the competing narratives of red vs. blue, particularly on cable news and social media. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of Americans resided in, or were adjacent to, the "exhausted majority." These people, however, "have no narrative," as David Brooks wrote at the time. "They have no coherent philosophic worldview to organize their thinking and compel action." Lacking a narrative might seem like a very postmodern problem, but in a postmodern elite culture, postmodern problems are real problems. It's worth noting that red vs. blue America didn't emerge ex nihilo. The 1990s were a time when the economy and government seemed to be working, at home and abroad. As a result, elites leaned into the narcissism of small differences to gain political and cultural advantage. They remain obsessed with competing, often apocalyptic, narratives. That leaves out most Americans. The gladiatorial combatants of cable news, editorial pages and academia, and their superfan spectators, can afford these fights. Members of the exhausted majority are more interested in mere competence. I think that's the hidden unity elites are missing. This is why we keep throwing incumbent parties out of power: They get elected promising competence but get derailed -- or seduced -- by fan service to, or trolling of, the elites who dominate the national conversation. There's a difference between competence and expertise. One of the most profound political changes in recent years has been the separation of notions of credentialed expertise from real-world competence. This isn't a new theme in American life, but the pandemic and the lurch toward identity politics amplified distrust of experts in unprecedented ways. This is a particular problem for the left because it is far more invested in credentialism than the right. Indeed, some progressives are suddenly realizing they invested too much in the authority of experts and too little in the ability of experts to provide what people want from government, such as affordable housing, decent education and low crime. The New York Times' Ezra Klein says he's tired of defending the authority of government institutions. Rather, "I want them to work." One of the reasons progressives find Trump so offensive is his absolute inability to speak the language of expertise -- which is full of coded elite shibboleths. But Trump veritably shouts the language of competence. I don't mean he is actually competent at governing. But he is effectively blunt about calling leaders, experts and elites -- of both parties -- stupid, ineffective, weak and incompetent. He lost in 2020 because voters didn't believe he was actually good at governing. He won in 2024 because the exhausted majority concluded the Biden administration was bad at it. Nostalgia for the low-inflation pre-pandemic economy was enough to convince voters that Trumpian drama is the tolerable price to pay for a good economy. About 3 out of 4 Americans who experienced "severe hardship" because of inflation voted for Trump. The genius of Trump's most effective ad -- "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" -- was that it was simultaneously culture-war red meat and an argument that Harris was more concerned about boutique elite concerns than everyday ones. If Trump can actually deliver competent government, he could make the Republican Party the majority party for a generation. For myriad reasons, that's an if so big it's visible from space. But the opportunity is there -- and has been there all along. Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch: thedispatch.com . Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!