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LOS ANGELES — The San Diego Padres navigated through most of this regular season as an enigma. The talent on their roster often did not match up with the quality of their play. Encouraging stretches typically followed poor ones. High expectations were usually tempered quickly. Along the way, though, they seemed to find strength in a singular thought: that they had yet to reach their ceiling and thus their best baseball was still in front of them.

It has apparently shown up at the most important juncture.

The Padres, the No. 5 seed in the National League, have begun these playoffs by winning three of five road games against two teams that combined for 212 wins during the regular season. They took two of three against the New York Mets at Citi Field over the weekend, stunning them in the wild-card round, and they have now split the first two games of their division series against a Los Angeles Dodgers team that dominated them over the previous six months. The Padres’ latest victory, by a 5-3 score at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday night, saw them display stellar defense, string together timely hits and shut down baseball’s best offense in the late innings.

Now the Padres will return home to Petco Park for the first postseason home games in San Diego — with fans in attendance — since 2006.

Suddenly a path toward defeating the mighty Dodgers seems very clear.

“Ultimately, I think we all believe in each other,” Padres third baseman Manny Machado said. “We believed in each other all year. We’ve been doing it all year as well. It’s just clicking for us now as a group. It’s just a matter of wanting it. We want to get to the World Series; we want to bring a championship to San Diego. Ultimately the group is just getting together and just grinding this out.”

The Padres dropped Game 1 on Tuesday, but they fought. They fell behind by five runs early, cut their deficit to two in the middle and kept it close late. That, Wil Myers believes, “carried over” into Game 2.

It began in the very first inning, when Machado lined a hanging slider from Clayton Kershaw over the left-field fence for a home run. The Dodgers answered with solo homers by Freddie Freeman and Max Muncy, and the Padres came back with three straight hits that produced two additional runs in the top of the third. The Dodgers tied it with another solo homer in the bottom half — this one by Trea Turner — and the Padres regained the lead on an RBI single from Jurickson Profar in the sixth. The Dodgers threatened thereafter, but Jake Cronenworth provided a major insurance run by homering off Blake Treinen in the eighth.

When Mookie Betts led off the fifth with a walk, Padres catcher Austin Nola gunned him down on an attempted steal with a perfect throw. When Turner followed with a 103 mph bullet to the left side, Machado corralled it with a slick play. And when the Dodgers put the first two runners on in the bottom of the sixth against a tiring Yu Darvish, Robert Suarez came out of the bullpen and shut them down, striking out Justin Turner and getting Gavin Lux to bounce into an inning-ending double play.

“We had ups and downs in the season,” Padres right fielder Juan Soto said, “but we all know that we have a great team and we can do a lot of damage.”

Leading up to Suarez’s arrival, Soto turned in one of the night’s most important plays. With one on and none out in the sixth, Muncy hit a deep drive to right that caromed off the fence. Soto briefly shot his glove into the air pretending he would settle in for a routine catch, creating just enough uncertainty for Muncy and the lead runner, Will Smith, to hold up, preventing a run from scoring and preserving what became a crucial double play.

“The deke got him,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of Muncy. “I think at that point in time he sold it well enough that Max slowed up and ended up at first base.”

The Dodgers turned in solid defense in their own right, particularly in the sixth, when Brusdar Graterol made a slick barehand play at home and Cody Bellinger spun twice to track down a deep fly ball to center. But Turner’s error earlier that inning helped produce a run, and the Padres ultimately made the Dodgers pay for it. It’s what good teams do.

“During the season we played a lot of close games like that,” Profar said, “and it seemed like we were always losing those games.”

But the Padres are operating like a different team now, and it’s showing against the opponent that has given them the most trouble. The Dodgers, the division rivals they’re perpetually chasing, won their last nine regular-season games against the Padres in 2021 and 14 of 19 in 2022, scoring more than twice as many runs against them this year. Their pairing in this round represented the largest margin in run-differential between two teams in postseason history.

But all that matters is who can win two of the next three, and the Padres might suddenly have the advantage. The next two games will take place at their place. Starting Games 3 and 4, respectively, will be Blake Snell, who has historically pitched well against the Dodgers, and Joe Musgrove, coming off a dominant outing against the Mets on Sunday. The Dodgers, meanwhile, have reached the uncertain portion of their rotation, with Tony Gonsolin, who hasn’t pitched more than two innings since Aug. 23, getting the ball in Game 3. His start will evolve into a bullpen game.

“During the season, they beat us,” Profar said of the 111-win Dodgers, who finished 22 games ahead of the Padres in the NL West. “They beat us. But we played pretty good games during the season. We lost them, and we know that if we play our good brand of baseball, we can beat ’em.”

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Gundy calls out Ducks’ budget; Lanning fires back

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Gundy calls out Ducks' budget; Lanning fires back

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and Oregon coach Dan Lanning are unexpectedly giving the Week 2 matchup between their teams some extra juice.

While speaking on his radio show Monday, Gundy said Oklahoma State spent “around $7 million” on its team over the past three years before referring to how much the Ducks have spent on their roster in recent years.

“I think Oregon spent close to $40 [million] last year alone,” Gundy said. “So, that was just one year. Now, I might be off a few million.”

Gundy made several other comments about Oregon’s resources — he said “it’ll cost a lot of money to keep” Ducks quarterback Dante Moore and that he believes Oregon’s budget should determine the programs they schedule outside of the Big Ten.

“Oregon is paying a lot, a lot of money for their team,” Gundy said. “From a nonconference standpoint, there’s coaches saying they should [play teams with similar budgets].”

On Monday night during his weekly news conference, Lanning responded.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning. We spend to win,” Lanning said when asked about Gundy’s comments. “Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t. … I can’t speak on their situation; I have no idea what they got in their pockets over there.”

Lanning added that he has “a lot of respect” for Gundy and praised how Gundy has consistently led his team to winning seasons over his 20-year tenure in Stillwater. Both teams are 1-0 this season; the Ducks are ranked No. 7 and are expected to be vying for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

“Over the last three to five years, they’ve elevated themselves. They have a lot of resources,” Gundy said. “They’ve got them stacked out there pretty good right now.”

Last year, Georgia coach Kirby Smart referenced Oregon’s resources, saying at SEC media days that he wishes he could get “some of that NIL money” that Oregon alum and Nike founder Phil Knight “has been sharing with Dan Lanning.”

“I think it’s impressive that guys like Kirby have been signing the No. 1 class in the nation without any NIL money this entire time,” Lanning said jokingly in response to Smart during Big Ten media days last year. “Obviously, Coach Smart took a little shot at us. But if you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better have great support. We have that.”

While Smart’s and Lanning’s barbs had the tone of two coaches who have worked together (Lanning was Georgia’s defensive coordinator from 2019 to 2021), the back-and-forth with Gundy on Monday was unexpected.

“I’m sure UT-Martin maybe didn’t have as much as them last week, and they played,” Lanning said of Oklahoma State. “So, we’ll let it play out.”

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Belichick: Heels ‘better than what we were tonight’

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Belichick: Heels 'better than what we were tonight'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If Bill Belichick were still in New England, still helming a team he’d coached for a quarter-century, where he’d won six Super Bowls, he could have shrugged off Monday’s debacle against TCU as just a hiccup on a long road to somewhere better, answering his critics with his now ubiquitous retort: On to the next game.

In Chapel Hill on Monday, with a sell-out crowd eager to get its first glimpse of a new era of North Carolina football under the tutelage of one of the game’s all-time greats, what happened couldn’t be shrugged off so easily.

Belichick’s Tar Heels were embarrassed, with TCU rolling to a 48-14 win in which UNC didn’t simply look like the lesser team, but one that often appeared utterly unprepared for the moment.

“We’re better than what we were tonight but we have to go out there and show that and prove it,” Belichick said. “Nobody’s going to do it for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Through the first drive of Belichick’s tenure as a college coach, everything had gone right.

Crowds filled the bars and restaurants along Franklin Street in Chapel Hill hours before kickoff. A pregame concert, headlined by country star and UNC alum Chase Rice, set the stage for a star-studded event. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm were all in attendance as the Belichick era at North Carolina finally kicked off.

And then the Tar Heels delivered a flawlessly executed 83-yard touchdown drive, and the packed house at Kenan Stadium exploded.

This was the dream when UNC shocked the college football world by landing Belichick, and suddenly Belichick’s promise of bringing a national championship to a program that hasn’t even won an ACC title in more than half a century felt entirely plausible.

Then TCU delivered one cold dose of reality after another, and by midway through the third quarter, after Devean Deal‘s scoop-and-score on a Gio Lopez fumble put the Horned Frogs up by 34, the once-frenetic stands emptied out and the hope for something magical in Chapel Hill seemed a distant memory.

“They out-played us, out-coached us, and they were just better than we were tonight,” Belichick said. “It’s all there was to it. They did a lot more things right than we did.”

Belichick turned over the bulk of North Carolina’s roster in one offseason, bringing in 70 new players — nearly half of whom arrived after spring practice. The transformation of the roster along with Belichick’s famously guarded approach to media meant few outside of North Carolina’s locker room had a clear vision of just what this squad would look like.

By the time the bludgeoning was over, the mantra from the Tar Heels’ perspective was that this performance hardly showcased what they’d seen on the practice field for the past six weeks.

“I thought we were prepared for the game,” backup quarterback Max Johnson said. “We prepared for a week and a half for TCU specifically, but we’ve been working on our fundamentals for a year now. We need to do a better job executing.”

After the opening touchdown drive, North Carolina went three-and-out on five of its next six drives. Lopez went more than two hours of real time between completions. UNC failed to convert its first six third-down tries, and Lopez threw a pick-six late in the first half that seemed to be the last gasp for the Tar Heels. The defense was equally catastrophic. TCU racked up 542 yards of total offense and ran for 258 yards, including a 75-yard scamper by Kevorian Barnes, and the Heels missed one tackle after another after another.

“Too many three-and-outs, too many long plays on defense, two turnovers for touchdowns. You can’t overcome that,” Belichick said. “We just can’t perform well doing some of the things we did. We’ve got to be better than that. We had too many self-inflicted wounds we have to eliminate before we can even worry about addressing our opponent.”

Johnson came on in relief of Lopez, who left after his sack-fumble with a lower back injury, and he delivered a touchdown drive that at least offered some spark of life for the Heels’ offense. Belichick said it was unclear whether Lopez would be able to play Saturday at Charlotte, but he left open the possibility that the QB competition could be re-opened.

“We’ll see how Gio is,” Belichick said. “Max came in after being off for a long time and hung in there and made some plays in a tough situation. We’ll take a look at it and see where things are at and go from there. It’s too early to tell now.”

Before the game, Belichick spent nearly a half-hour on the field watching both teams go through warm-ups. He chatted with dignitaries and appeared to bask in the moment, but the magic quickly evaporated.

The 48 points scored by TCU in Belichick’s first career game as a college coach are more than his teams allowed in any of his 333 NFL games, and for as much as he’d worked to sell North Carolina as “the 33rd NFL team,” Monday’s disaster felt like a reminder that, regardless of his success in the pros, this was new territory.

His response to the loss, however, was largely in line with what fans have come to expect of the understated coach — simple, succinct and emphatic.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “We’ll get at it.”

For a fan base that had waited nine months for this moment, however, it could be harder to turn the page. Belichick never promised a quick fix, but there were reasonable assurances that this team would play with physicality and fundamentals, that UNC wouldn’t be out-coached or out-schemed.

By halftime Monday, the veil had been lifted. Belichick has six Super Bowl rings, but this was a bigger job than perhaps any he’d assumed before.

The excitement that reached its apex after the opening touchdown drive perfectly showcased what this experiment could look like. The question now is whether UNC’s reality will ever match the dream or if Belichick’s first drive as a college coach will be remembered as the pinnacle of his tenure here.

“Don’t lose hope,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward, continue to work and trust in each other.”

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

Florida State freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was shot Sunday night and is hospitalized in critical but stable condition in intensive care at a Tallahassee-area hospital, the school said Monday.

According to the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office, Pritchard was inside a vehicle outside an apartment building when the shooting happened Sunday night in Havana, Florida, which is about 16 miles from Tallahassee, near the Georgia state line. An investigation into the shooting is ongoing.

In its statement, Florida State said Pritchard was visiting family at the time he was shot.

“The Pritchard family is thankful for the support from so many people, as well as the care from first responders and medical professionals, and asks that their privacy be respected at this time,” the FSU statement said.

Pritchard, who is from Sanford, Florida, enrolled at Florida State in January but did not play in the Seminoles’ season-opening victory against Alabama.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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