Travis Hunter was at it again Saturday, making plays on both sides of the ball as Colorado (No. 17 in the latest College Football Playoff rankings) secured its fourth consecutive win, 49-24 over Utah.

Earlier this week, The Athletic’s Dane Brugler ranked Hunter No. 1 on his updated 2025 NFL Draft big board — two spots up from Hunter’s preseason slot. Brugler wrote: “Hunter is the best draft-eligible player in the country, and I don’t think that will change between now and April. Does he project best at wide receiver? Cornerback? Both? Those questions will be answered as he progresses through the process, but regardless, Hunter is the clear favorite to be the first non-quarterback drafted.”

More on Hunter’s latest performance:

Stat line vs. Utah

Five catches for 55 yards; one carry for 5 yards and a TD; three tackles, one INT, one pass breakup

What other player in college football is putting up a stat line like that?

Hunter had an interception and a huge fourth-down reception in the first half alone, then put the icing on the cake with this unbelievable effort on a reverse in the closing moments:

TRAVIS HUNTER IS JUST A CHEAT CODE 😱@CUBuffsFootball pic.twitter.com/SUCHVonSOq

— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) November 16, 2024

Hunter’s teammate, Colton Hood, deserves an assist for Hunter’s first-quarter interception. On the play, Utah QB Isaac Wilson underthrew a deep corner route to Munir McClain, and Hood recovered in time to pop the ball out of McClain’s hands — and into the arms of Hunter, who broke off his coverage to track the play and record his third INT of the year. Hunter then turned back upfield for a 21-yard return.

The Heisman frontrunner is now just 89 yards shy of 1,000 yards receiving on the season, with two regular-season games plus possible Big 12 title game and College Football Playoff appearances ahead.

Hunter did have a rare slip-up in coverage. In the third quarter, Utah wide receiver Dorian Singer blew past Hunter, who was playing man coverage with no safety help over the top, and hauled in a beautiful 40-yard touchdown throw from Wilson. It was the first TD Hunter has allowed all season.

Signature moment

NFL evaluators love receivers who can finish contested catches and possess aggressive ball skills in the air. It’d be hard to show off either skill much better than this:

TRAVIS HUNTER IS UNREAL 🤯

He makes an absurd catch for @CUBuffsFootball on 4th & 8 🔥 pic.twitter.com/OuIIY8e4vD

— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) November 16, 2024

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As if the catch itself wasn’t impressive enough, keep in mind that it came on fourth-and-8 in a one-possession game just before halftime. Colorado scored a TD on its next snap when QB Shedeur Sanders hit WR Will Sheppard.

With that 28-yard reception, Hunter has a catch of 20-plus yards in eight of Colorado’s 10 games this season.

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What it means

The only remaining question Hunter has to answer is whether he wants to focus on one side of the ball at the next level. It’ll likely be as much about the needs of his new team — the fit, scheme, everything else — as it will Hunter actually declaring himself exclusively a corner or WR.

He’s good enough to play in the league now, just as he was at the start of the year (and maybe even at the end of last season). Even with some injuries and missed games, the durability it’s taken for Hunter to handle these snap loads over and over — and not lose any of his zip or explosion — is out of this world by itself.

DEFLECTED TO TRAVIS HUNTER @CUBuffsFootball with another big defense play 🔒🦬 pic.twitter.com/zAsNDKPLYA

— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) November 16, 2024

If you start breaking down Hunter on a more finite level, he’s got the best ball skills of any player in college football. He’d have an argument on that front in the NFL, too. His ability to track, locate, adjust and catch a football in the air against other people is incredibly rare. We even saw an instance Saturday in which he basically set up a defensive back to run into him and commit pass interference.

His interception was a direct result of working back to the ball and, frankly, having absurdly quick reaction speed. Not only did he make it look easy to pluck that deflection, but his transition from a squat to a full-tilt sprint the other way was seamless. He’s one of the most fluid full-body skill athletes we’ve seen come out of the college ranks in a long time. Should Hunter test during the pre-draft evaluation period (and he has nothing to gain from doing so), the numbers will be dazzling.

However, what makes him truly special is his ability to control the pace of other people around him. There’s never a better athlete on the field than him — and he knows it. He’s playing with a special, special football confidence. — Nick Baumgardner

(Top photo: Andrew Wever / Getty Images)

TURIN, Italy — Olé, olé olé olé, Sinner, Sinner.

Olé, olé olé olé, Sinner, Sinner.

Jannik Sinner is trying to speak, but his own name is resounding too loudly across the Inalpi Arena in Turin. Lit up on billboards, written on placards, chanted across the aisles. Sinner, the first Italian to achieve the men’s world No. 1 ranking, isn’t just the featured attraction of the ATP Tour Finals tournament in his home country: He is the tournament, on the court and off it.

There he is on billboards in the train station. There he is on banners hanging from light poles. There he is — well, not him, a character of him — on GialappaShow, a satirical comedy programme in the vein of Saturday Night Live, which does skits playing off Sinner’s poodle of red hair and his meticulously even manner of speaking.

And there he is on the court, blowing away basically everyone who isn’t Carlos Alcaraz as he has done most of the year, slaloming into the semifinals with three wins from three and the noise of around 12,000 fans about his ears on every point.

Three years ago, despite flashes of brilliance, Sinner had kind of stagnated in tennis no man’s land.

Two years ago, he was a work in progress who fell short of making the season-ending Tour Finals here in Turin, the city that was supposed to be his northern Italian playground.

A year ago he lost in the final to Novak Djokovic but beat him along the way, hinting loudly at what might be coming. Alcaraz said he was the next No. 1.

This year, he fulfilled that prophecy: he is world No. 1 and maybe the most popular athlete in Italy — a country that doesn’t have a lot of sport oxygen left once soccer sucks on the hose.

“It’s different,” Sinner said on Tuesday of competing on home soil for the first time in nearly a year.

“I never take these chances for granted.”

Italy has a long and illustrious conveyor belt of soccer stars. Major figures in other sports, especially ones who can penetrate the consciousness of people who barely pay attention to sports, are far more rare. But the country does have a way of rallying mightily around its Olympic champions and standouts in other sports.

For years, motorcyclist Valentino Rossi and then swimmer Federica Pellegrini were all the rage. People who have never clicked into a ski binding know all about Sofia Goggia, the Olympic downhill champion in 2018. Sinner is the latest of their number, and perhaps the most adored. Inter Milan played Napoli Sunday in a showdown of two of Italy’s biggest soccer clubs. The match drew 1.7million television viewers in Italy. Sinner’s match against Alex de Minaur of Australia, hardly a glamor matchup, drew 2.27million.

Tennis stars in their homeland are always a featured attraction, but maybe because he is the first Italian No. 1, or maybe because of that unmistakable mop of red hair, Sinner in Italy seems a different order of magnitude. As his steady, subdued demeanor anchors his game of grace and fury, one of those oddball alchemical pairings of a star and a nation catalyzes match after match.

Young and old alike are on board for the ride. He is what the Italians refer to as “fuoriclasse”, which roughly translates as out of this world, or world-class. He is one of the “predestinato”, predestined, as it were, for greatness.

“He’s young, but he’s not young in the way he plays,” said Turin native Federico Vangha, who was sipping on Aperol spritzes on Tuesday evening with his girlfriend, another mad Sinner fan named Monica Merlo.

Sinner walks duck-footed and does not appear to own a comb nor a hair dryer. His transformation from no-one’s idea of a Gucci model into, well, a Gucci model also makes him different. When he isn’t playing tennis, he’s now pitching: Gucci, Head, Nike, Rolex, La Roche-Posay, the pharmaceutical company, internet service provider Fastweb, Enervit, a nutrition company, and Pigna, a paper products company. The deal with Nike is $158million (£125.2million) over ten years; the annual value of his off-court deals is around $15m (£11.9m).

He also has a deal with pasta company De Cecco, and Italian coffee magnate Lavazza. During changeovers, his opponents don’t even get a break. Video screens play commercial after commercial, Sinner drinking an espresso or pushing Intesa Sanpaolo, the financial giant.

The madness started with the “Carota Boys”, the group of young men who seemingly will spare no expense to travel to a Sinner match wearing a carrot costume in honor of that flaming red hair. At his matches this week, the crowd has been littered with fans wearing fluorescent orange. Their shirts glow in the blue light of the Inalpi Arena, as the carrot and fox emojis — his other symbol — burn orange across every social media platform.

Jannik Sinner with his trophy for being year-end world No. 1. (Valerio Pennicino / Getty Images)

Italian players who aren’t even in the tournament show up to watch is matches. Lorenzo Sonego, Sinner’s Davis Cup teammate, was courtside the other night.

Everyone else, including the other seven competitors, are the supporting cast, even Alcaraz.

“Exactly what I expected here in Turin,” De Minaur said in a news conference after Sinner beat him 6-3, 6-4 on Sunday. “Great atmosphere.”

Taylor Fritz said the Italian faithful were a lot to deal with, but not too much. He’s had some run-ins with some raucous crowds pulling for their own, especially facing Frenchmen at the French Open. That wasn’t this.

“Fun match to play,” he said, even though he lost in straight sets.

Ubiquity carries a cost, especially at home. Sinner has given up hope of going out for a cup of coffee or a meal this week. There’s always a horde of fans outside the players’ hotel in the middle of the city. He wouldn’t get very far. Better to stay in and rest. At least that’s what he tells himself, as fans queue up to get a glimpse of a man who is a hero to them for his person as much as his tennis.

“It’s important that he’s No. 1 but it’s who he is,” said Francesco Baccarani, a 12-year-old player who arrived at the Sinner-Fritz match wearing a red, white and green headdress. “He’s the example for all of us kids for how we want to play.”

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Sinner is only 23. This could go on for a long time, especially with the ATP close to another five-year deal with Italy’s tennis federation that would keep the tour’s richest event in the country through 2029.

Angelo Binaghi, the president of Italy’s tennis federation, the FITP, said in an interview in Turin that Sinner took something that was already happening — a growth in interest in tennis — and made it explode. His rise has coincided with expansion of a free-to-air tennis channel in Italy, SuperTennis, which has even begun carrying the U.S. Open. Conveniently enough, Sinner won that, and lots of less advantaged Italians who might not have been able to pay for television were able to see it.

Now Binaghi has another problem — accessibility. There aren’t enough tennis schools and clinics to accommodate all the children who want to play, and building new courts and facilities is going to take time.

“The bureaucracy,” he said, falling back on the notorious Italian lament. “It’s very difficult.”

Still, Sinner is the answer to Italian tennis prayers in other ways. A few years back, it appeared Matteo Berrettini and his hammer-like serve might have a shot at the pinnacle. He made the Wimbledon final in 2021.

Danillo Baccarani, Francesco’s father, said that the Berrettini power game doesn’t appeal to Italian tennis sensibilities the way Sinner’s does. Here, the tennis hero is Nicola Pietrangeli, the star of the 1950s and 1960s known for his stylish and instinctive play.

“Sinner is more close to someone like (Roger) Federer,” Baccarani said.

And what about the idea that Sinner is somehow less Italian, because he comes from the mountains of San Candido in northeastern Italy near the Austrian border that is closer culturally to its neighbor than to Rome? Sinner’s first language is German.

“A stupid idea,” Baccarani said.

Sinner has managed to turn this into something of an advantage. With the retirement of Dominic Thiem, Austria is without a tennis star. The country has staked some claims to Sinner.

All the hoopla is a something of a goof to him.

“I’m just a 23-year-old man who just plays tennis,” he said in a news conference earlier this week. He walks outside, he sees a massive version of himself on a billboard. He turns on the television, he’s hawking coffee. His father was a chef. His mother a restaurant worker. He was supposed to become a skier.

Jannik Sinner has assumed the mantle of Italy’s most-beloved sportsperson, at least outside of football. (Tallio Puglia / Getty Images)

“I try to get used to it,” he said.  “I’m just trying to play some good tennis.”

Other than some other hotshot besides Alcaraz coming along, there is one thing that could send the Sinner train off course. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is seeking a ban of one or two years in its appeal of his doping case, which it submitted to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in September.

Earlier this year, Sinner twice tested positive for clostebol, an anabolic steroid. Three tribunals convened by the tennis anti-doping authorities accepted his explanation that the substance inadvertently ended up in his system after his physiotherapist used it to treat a cut on his own finger, then gave Sinner a massage. WADA, too, accepts this explanation but believes he should bear some responsibility for the actions of his support team.

Clostebol has become a problem in Italian sport, with numerous athletes in different disciplines testing positive as a result of using healing creams. Memories linger of the doping scandal at Juventus of the 1990s, which went to the highest level of the Old Lady of Turin before Italy’s Supreme Court acquitted the club.

Sinner’s verdict is unlikely to come until 2025 and, even in Turin, it gets lost in the noise from point to set to, thus far at least, the inevitable conclusion.

Gioco, partita, incontro, Sinner.

And the olés strike up again.

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton)

(Additional reporting: James Horncastle)

As the Denver Broncos prepared to make their third-round pick in the NFL Draft in April, they were ecstatic to see Jonah Elliss’ name still on the board.

Denver coach Sean Payton said earlier this season that the team had a second-round grade on the pass rusher out of the University of Utah. They believed he had the tools to be a Year 1 contributor on the edge, a need enhanced by a spring injury to the prior year’s third-round pick, Drew Sanders.

There was only one problem. Selecting two picks ahead of the Broncos were the Atlanta Falcons. Their general manager is Terry Fontenot, who previously worked in the front office of the New Orleans Saints during nearly all of Payton’s 16 seasons as the team’s head coach. And on Atlanta’s roster was a linebacker named Kaden Elliss, Jonah’s brother and a seventh-round pick of Payton, Fontenot and the Saints in 2019.

“I turned to George (Paton, Denver’s general manager) and I said, ‘Terry’s going to draft the brother; I know it,’” Payton said this week. “They drafted another player and then we were excited, obviously, to make our selection.

The Falcons selected Washington outside linebacker Bralen Trice, who suffered a season-ending ACL injury in the preseason, with the 74th pick. Two picks later, the Broncos took Jonah Elliss.

Payton’s phone immediately buzzed with a text message. It was Kaden.

“I won’t tell you what it said,” Payton said with a laugh, “but I would say the exposure with Kaden really helped us understand the football mindset as it pertained to the next pick.”

Kaden Elliss didn’t spill many details of the exchange, either.

“(I was) just, ‘You got a good one,’” the Falcons linebacker said. “Other things were said, but it is what it is. I’m just so excited he’s in Denver and with Sean (and) a good staff out there. We’ve got family out west so it’s a good spot.”

Two weeks after the draft, the NFL’s schedule was released and a date for an Elliss family reunion was born. On Sunday, when the Falcons visit the Broncos in a matchup of two teams trying to take another step toward the playoffs, Kaden and Jonah will face each other in the NFL for the first time. Both play defense — Kaden as a starting inside linebacker who leads the Falcons with 88 tackles; Jonah as an outside linebacker who has carved a role in the pass-rush rotation and has two sacks — so there won’t be any direct clashes between the two brothers.

Unless …

“We may find a way to sneak in a special teams matchup,” Kaden said.

Atlanta linebacker Kaden Elliss leads the Falcons with 88 tackles through 10 games. (Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)

The brothers are two of five Elliss family members who have reached the NFL. Christian Elliss is linebacker for the New England Patriots and Noah Elliss is a defensive tackle who spent time during the past two seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles and is a free agent. Along with Kaden and Jonah, they are believed to be the only set of four brothers to have played in the NFL. Jonah said Friday he wouldn’t be surprised to see Elijah Elliss, a freshman defensive end at Utah, join the family’s NFL fraternity in the coming years.

“Can’t help but know an Elliss,” Falcons coach Raheem Morris said this week. “There’s a million of them.”

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Their father, Luther Elliss, played 10 seasons in the league as a defensive tackle. The first nine came with the Detroit Lions, who drafted him in the first round in 1995 after an All-American college career at Utah. He played his final season, in 2004, with the Broncos, a fitting career end for someone who grew up in Mancos, Colo. Elliss later became a team chaplain for the Broncos, a role he filled during the team’s Super Bowl season in 2015.

This 1 pm slate is actually very funny because I just watched Elliss 55 try to sack Dak and then watched Elliss 52 try to cover Justice Hill and then I saw Elliss 53 step up to tackle Tony Pollard.

— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) November 3, 2024

During Elliss’ lone season with the Broncos, it wasn’t rare to see the family’s full-sized van pull up to the team’s facility. Luther and his wife Rebecca have 12 children, seven of whom were adopted. With a family that size, competition was inevitable. Sometimes the fiercest races were the ones to the dinner table.

“We’d make up games. We’d play every game under the sun, every sport,” Kaden said. “Sometimes it was football. Sometimes it was soccer or random games we made up.”

Luther’s career served as a road map. Most of the Elliss boys didn’t play tackle football until eighth grade — Kaden snuck in seasons in fifth and seventh grade — but love for the sport that was baked into their collective upbringing grew quickly.

“My dad was obviously able to guide our work,” Kaden said. “So not only working hard but working smart, showing us where we needed to improve, what we needed to do if we wanted to make that step.”

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The matchup between the Broncos and Falcons on Sunday is full of familiar connections. Falcons safety Justin Simmons spent the first eight years in Denver after the team drafted him with a third-round pick in 2016. Thirty of his 31 career interceptions came in a Broncos uniform. He and his wife, Taryn Simmons, rooted themselves deeply into the Denver community through their work with the Justin Simmons Foundation, and the safety was named the team’s Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee three different times. He said this week he’ll be “a Bronco for life,” but his focus Sunday will be helping the Falcons get their seventh win.

“Practicing against him for years is one thing, but to get live bullets is going to be fun,” said Broncos wide receiver Courtland Sutton. “I jokingly told him, ‘Hey, bro, if you see me coming across the middle, just remember we’re friends.’”

Falcons offensive coordinator Zac Robinson, meanwhile, grew up in Denver. He was a Broncos fan whose family had season tickets. He later became a standout football player at Chatfield High School in the suburb of Littleton, Colo.

“Definitely, when I saw we were going to Denver, (my) family got excited,” Robinson said. “The atmosphere is tough to beat. Probably there and K.C. are the top two in the NFL. Looking forward to getting back home.”

Those returns will be special, but reunion games and homecomings happen every week in the NFL. A matchup of brothers, in one of their father’s home stadiums, with more than 30 family members on hand? Not so much.

“I played with one of my brothers in college, but this is obviously different,” said Broncos tight end Adam Trautman, whose locker is next to Jonah’s in Denver and who was previously a teammate of Kaden’s in New Orleans. “It was always competitive with me and my brother, and I’m sure that’s how they’re treating it, too.”

Broncos rookie Jonah Elliss (52) has 21 tackles and two sacks for Denver this season. (C. Morgan Engel / Getty Images)

The Elliss brothers aren’t taking Sunday’s opportunity for granted. But at the end of the day, it’s another competition in a never-ending string of them. Each year, usually during Fourth of July weekend, the family gathers for the Elliss Olympics, an event that spans multiple days and has a rotating list of competitions, from corn hole to board games. The event includes a trophy, emblazoned with the names of the winners, that resides at Luther and Rebecca’s home. Including spouses and close family friends, the competition can include more than three dozen participants.

Trash-talking is an inherent part of the spectacle. Jonah shared this week that he and his fiancée dominate the pickleball competition, a fact that rankled his older brother.

“I think the most someone scored on us in a game to 11 is three or four,” Jonah said. “We’re pretty good. We killed (Kaden). He did not like it.”

Most seem to agree, though, that Kaden sets the pace in the chirping department. So perhaps it’s no surprise the Falcons linebacker, who already owns a head-to-head NFL win over Christian when they met in 2022, delivered the parting words ahead of his matchup with Jonah.

“I’m 1-0,” he said of the Elliss matchups. “We’re going to make this 2-0 this week.”

(Top photos of Kaden and Jonah Elliss:
Todd Kirkland and Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)