Injury news during Super Bowl week is never what a team wants to see, but the Seattle Seahawks are dealing with it after standout cornerback Nick Emmanwori suffered an ankle sprain during practice on Wednesday.

Emmanwori, though, isn’t missing his first crack at a Super Bowl ring in his first NFL season.

“Feel good,” he told reporters Thursday during a Super Bowl media availability. “Training staff has a good plan for me… I’ll be good to go.”

The injury occurred when Emmanwori was defending a pass during practice, rolling the ankle that resulted in a sprain. Luckily, it was a low-ankle sprain, as a high-ankle would be much harder to play on.

Emmanwori walked off the practice field on his own, with teammates and coaches coming to his side as reinforcement.

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Head coach Mike Macdonald said on Wednesday that the team will “kind of go from here and figure out what are the next steps.”

A potential Defensive Rookie of the Year, Emmanwori has been a crucial piece for the NFL’s top defense this season. The 35th overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft started 11 of his 14 games during his rookie year, tallying 81 tackles, 2.5 sacks and an interception.

What has made Emmanwori great in his inaugural season is his versatility, being able to fly around the field in both run and pass situations. Emmanwori broke up 11 passes this year.

In the event Emmanwori can’t go on Sunday, or is having trouble playing to the best of his abilities, Ty Okada could slot in at the nickel for Seattle.

Emmanwori isn’t the only Seahawks’ player dealing with something this week despite the time off. Quarterback Sam Darnold has been nursing an oblique injury throughout the playoffs, but Macdonald said he was “right on schedule” with where he needs to be for Sunday’s game at Levi’s Stadium.

Darnold was also dealing with the oblique issue when he threw for three touchdowns in the NFC Championship Game victory over the Los Angeles Rams to reach the Super Bowl.

As always, football players will do whatever it takes to play on gameday, and even more so now that it’s Super Bowl week.

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MILAN — Alysa Liu wore a hollow smile on the ice. She had achieved a dream, skating at the Beijing Olympics at just 16, but in a mostly empty arena, few were there to see the moment.

Perhaps that was what Liu secretly wanted.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to be seen,” Liu said. “It’s just I had nothing to show.”

The 20-year-old now proudly presents Alysa Liu 2.0.

Four years after shocking the sport by retiring as a teenage phenom, the Oakland native could win two gold medals at the Milan-Cortina Olympics. She is a title contender in her individual event that begins Feb. 17 as the United States tries to end a 20-year Olympic medal drought in women’s singles figure skating, and she will skate Friday in the women’s short program of a team competition the United States is favored to win.

Armed with a new perspective from her two-year retirement, Liu now smiles genuinely on and off the ice, no matter if there’s a medal around her neck or not.

“I have so much I want to express and show, whether that’s through skating or just through my presence,” said Liu, who placed sixth in Beijing. “It’s exciting to think about that being seen.”

When she made her Olympic debut, Liu didn’t feel like her career belonged to her. Her father, Arthur, was a driving force in her skating career. In a sport where coaches and choreographers often call the shots for young athletes, Liu entered the Olympic stage with programs she didn’t like and clothes she didn’t pick. She was behind a mask and couldn’t express herself. She barely knew how to.

Skating had consumed her entire life. She felt “trapped and stuck” in the sport. So she left.

After retiring following the 2022 world championships — where she won a bronze medal — Liu got her driver’s license. She hiked to Mount Everest base camp with friends. She went shopping for not-skating clothes, played Fortnite until 4 a.m. with her siblings and enrolled at UCLA. She loved studying psychology.

“I found what I like and what I didn’t like,” said Liu, who took time off from UCLA to prepare for the Olympics but hopes to return before her friends graduate. “Really got to know myself, because [when] I had skating, I didn’t really know myself. I couldn’t know myself. I only ever did one thing.”

After a casual ski trip reminded her of the joys of skating, Liu made the decision to return to the sport that shaped, and nearly stole, her childhood. But she would only do it on her terms.

The choreography, the music and the costumes would all be her choice. She doesn’t compete to win. She skates to show her art, she said.

In the process, she’s winning more than ever.

She won the world championship in 2025, becoming the first U.S. woman to win the world title since 2006. She won the Grand Prix final in Japan in December, the last major international competition before the Milan-Cortina Games to announce herself as a potential Olympic champion.

The day before her last performance at the U.S. championships, the final competition that would decide her Olympic bid, Liu ran to a St. Louis salon to dye her hair to match a new skating dress. Unbothered by the pressure of the moment, she debuted a Lady Gaga free skate that brought fans to their feet and earned her a silver medal.

“When you are an Olympic athlete that has a chance in front of the world every four years, it literally is your life’s work that’s on the line,” NBC analyst and two-time Olympian Johnny Weir said. “And she has found a way to compartmentalize that and put it down. … I just think it’s so wonderfully healthy and brave and strong to be doing what she is, because it takes a lot of bravery to put down the pressure that the sport naturally has.”

Liu is just a natural talent in the sport, 2022 Olympian Mariah Bell said. Bell remembered during the Stars on Ice tour in 2022 when the skaters rolled into a new city, tired, groggy and sore from the long bus ride, Liu, dressed in a baggy hoodie and billowing sweatpants, could go on the ice and throw perfect jumps without warning. Bell stood in awe.

U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu practices on Thursday in Milan.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

After Liu’s short program at the U.S. championships last month set a national championship record, Bell was blown away for different reasons.

“She’s so sophisticated and mature and emotional,” Bell said. “When she was younger, she was incredible. But when you’re 13, you don’t skate the way that you do like how she did the short program [at the U.S. championships].”

Skating to Laufey’s “Promise,” a haunting piano ballad, Liu glided through a flawless short program that she said nearly moved her to tears. Fans showered her with stuffed animals.

Liu has always commanded attention in the sport. She was the youngest skater to perform a triple axel in international competition at 12, became the youngest U.S. champion at 13 and followed with another national title at 14. She was the first U.S. woman to complete a quad lutz in competition, doing so in the 2019 Junior Grand Prix in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Six years later, back in that same arena for Skate America in 2025, Liu told her coaches she didn’t remember her historic accomplishment.

“It feels like I’m watching or I got someone else’s memories,” said Liu, who had similar, disconnected, but overall positive memories of her Olympic experience in Beijing. “It feels like a totally different person, but we are definitely the same person.”

U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu practices in Milan on Thursday as she prepares for the team competition, which starts Friday.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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Exchange the delicate, ballerina-like skating dresses with bold, modern asymmetrical designs. Undo the tight, slicked back bun and bring in halo dyed hair, dark eyeliner and the piercing she did herself on the inside of her upper lip. With three horizontal stripes dyed into her hair, each layer represents a year of the new life Liu is finally happy to put on display.

“I want to be seen more because I like what I have going on,” Liu said. “I like what I’m doing.”

The Maryland Freedom Caucus, a group of GOP delegates in the Maryland state legislature, made a post on social media showing a sign that appeared to have been hung by Democrat colleagues, dismissing concerns over trans athletes in women’s sports. 

The post claimed the sign was hung Wednesday, which was National Girls & Women in Sports Day. 

The sign, which has a signature from the Maryland Legislative LGBTQ+ Caucus, was hung on the offices of Democrat state delegates Eric Ebersole and Nick Allen.

Ebersole and Allen provided a joint statement to Fox News Digital addressing the sign. 

“As proud allies, we support the LGBTQ+ Caucus and its work to fight discrimination and counter the rampant misinformation targeting the transgender community. Our office is next door to that of our friend, colleague, and Chair of the LGBTQ+ Caucus, and it will always be a safe space. At a time when adults, especially those in positions of power, feel compelled to publicly bully trans kids, we choose to stand with the LGBTQ+ community today and always,” the statement read. 

The sign makes the claim that “trans women have no competitive advantage” in women’s sports. 

In 2021, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a study that said transgender women maintain an advantage over biological women even after a year of hormone therapy treatment.

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The sign also went on to state, “anti-dignity policies put transgender youth at risk,” “banning transgender youth is illegal” and “invasive enforcement creates fear.” 

This all happened a day before the Maryland state legislature is scheduled to vote on the Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act.

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The bill would require “certain interscholastic and intramural junior varsity and varsity athletic teams or sports sponsored by certain schools and certain locker rooms to be expressly designated based on biological sex; prohibiting certain entities from taking certain adverse actions against a school for maintaining separate interscholastic and intramural junior varsity and varsity athletic teams or sports or locker rooms for students of the female sex.” 

So far, 27 states in the U.S. have similar laws in effect that enforce bans on trans athletes in girls sports. 

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