San Diego, CA
Tom Krasovic: Josh Allen wows with his arms, legs and head in Bills’ playoff win
Josh Allen came into this Super Bowl tournament as the most capable quarterback in the 14-team field.He showed it Sunday.
Allen made top-tier plays as a passer, rusher and thinker — none better than on a late-game touchdown drive for the lead, and the Bills held for a 27-24 win against the Jaguars in Jacksonville.
The NFL is flexing its theatrical muscles in this wild-card round.
Saturday, league MVP candidate Matthew Stafford drove the Rams to a 34-31 road win after the Panthers, 10 1/2-point underdogs, took their second fourth-quarter lead. Hours later as the Bears and Packers reprised their century-plus rivalry, QB Caleb Williams’ playmaking fueled a 25-point fourth quarter in Chicago’s 31-27 homefield win.
Allen’s performance stood as the best, though, and made it six straight years Buffalo (13-5) has won a playoff game.
Start with his rushing prowess.
At 6-foot-5, 237 pounds, bullish, quick and agile, the 29-year-old stands as the NFL’s all-time leader in rushing TDs by a quarterback.
He can’t be stopped short on most sneaks. Pass-rushers detest him, knowing he can break their tackles or get off passes in a blink.
Keep this in mind: if they charge at him too fast, he’ll sidestep them.
Allen’s rushing and rushing threat bled out the Jaguars.
Where the North Florida team couldn’t stop him from bulling for two 1-yard touchdowns and several other other successful sneaks, Bills defenders stopped quarterback Trevor Lawrence’s fourth-and-2 rush at their 8.
The Jags (13-5) found Allen too adept as a passer, too. He went 28 for 35 for 273 yards without a turnover. He hit former University of San Diego tight end Dalton Kincaid for a 15-yard touchdown — one of four TDs in the game’s fourth quarter.
The decisive 66-yard drive Allen that capped with his second rushing TD, putting the Bills ahead by four points with 64 seconds left, featured one of his best career throws, a 36-yard completion to Brandin Cooks.
A San Diego County product had a good look at Allen on that first-down play.
Though he got a free run as a blitzer, Chula Vista’s Devin Lloyd had to respect Allen’s evasivenes. The Otay Ranch High School alum raised his arms without jumping, nor could he approach at max speed.
Though Cooks hadn’t run past the man covering him, Allen chose to throw the ball downfield ahead of him. The QB was able to flick it some 45 yards, despite stepping back from Lloyd and lacking leverage.
Cooks ran under it and gathered it.
Nixing the Jaguars’ comeback bid on the first snap, Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White broke up Lawrence’s accurate pass and safety Cole Bishop caught the deflection.
It was Allen’s seventh win in 13 playoff games.
For many reasons, he hasn’t reached a Super Bowl. He was frenetic in his first playoff game, a loss at Houston five years ago. He was sensational a year later, only for the Bills to collapse on defense — the infamous “13 seconds” loss to the Chiefs.
The great Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs have dealt him four playoff losses, and Joe Burrow and the Bengals got him en route to the Super Bowl.
With Mahomes and Burrow absent from this postseason, it’s tempting to say the door has opened wider for Allen — but that’s too simplistic. Allen outplayed Mahomes in one playoff loss. The Bengals ran for 172 yards at snowy Buffalo.
Though this Bills’ defense remains suspect against the run and lost a good safety Sunday in Jordan Poyer, Allen looks close to peak form, notwithstanding medical checks Sunday to his throwing hand, head and a knee.
49ers fallout
By beating the Eagles 23-19 on Sunday, the 49ers may have helped their top rivals.
The Seahawks will face a 49ers team hit hard by injury instead of drawing the healthier Rams.
Two weeks ago, the Seahawks smothered the Niners in Santa Clara, 13-3. George Kittle will sit out the rematch. An Achilles’ tendon injury has ended the All-Pro tight end’s postseason.
The Niners get an A+ for winning. Coordinator Robert Saleh’s defense allowed no second-half touchdowns.
Playcaller Kyle Shanahan’s gadget play went for a 29-yard, go-ahead TD to open the fourth quarter. Receiver Jauan Jennings threw to Christian McCaffrey after the fake suckered Reed Blankenship, a veteran safety.
The Eagles, my preseason pick to win the Super Bowl, got two interceptions from Quinyon Mitchell. But they scored just 19 points off 72 plays, a fitting end to the offense’s ugly season.
Eagles All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson didn’t play. Defensive star Jordan Davis went down late. But the defending champs couldn’t match the Niners’ resourcefulness. A shakeup within Philly’s offensive staff seems likely.
Patriots-Chargers
Jesse Minter’s defense looked well-prepared early against a Pats team that averaged 28.8 points per game, second-best in the NFL.
Several Chargers players had traction problems on New England’s synthetic field.
A late first-half non-call on a Patriots blow to Justin Herbert’s head was mystifying. The Chargers stood to break a 3-3 tie with those 15 yards.
San Diego — Before we see elephants at Elephant Valley in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we come face to face with destruction, only the wreckage is beautiful. A long, winding path takes guests around and under felled trees. Aged gray tree hunks form arches, for instance, over bridges that tower over clay-colored paths with hoof prints.
The design is meant to reorient us, to take us on a trail walked not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and hunted for its cataclysmic-like ability to reshape land, and sometimes communities.
“It starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care for the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are ecosystem engineers.”
Elephant Valley will open March 5 as the newest experience at the Escondido park, its aim to bring guests closer than ever to the zoo’s eight elephants, which range in age from 7 to 36, while more heavily focusing on conservation. The centerpiece of the 13-acre-plus parkland is a curved bridge overlooking a savanna, allowing elephants to walk under guests. But there are also nooks such as a cave that, while not previewed at a recent media event, will allow visitors to view elephants on their level.
In a shift from, say, the Safari Park’s popular tram tour, there are no fences and visible enclosures. Captive elephants remain a sometimes controversial topic, and the zoo’s herd is a mix of rescues and births, but the goal was to create a space where humans are at once removed and don’t impede on the relative free-roaming ability of the animals by keeping guests largely elevated. As an example of just how close people can get to the herd, there was a moment of levity at the event when one of the elephants began flinging what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces up onto the bridge.
“Our guests are going to be able to see the hairs on an elephant,” Burtis says. “They can see their eyes. They can see the eyelashes. They can see how muscular their trunks are. It’s really going to be a different experience.”
Elephant Valley, complete with a multistory lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, boasts a natural design that isn’t influenced by the elephant’s African home so much as it is in conversation with it. The goal isn’t to displace us, but to import communal artistry — Kenyan wood and beadwork can be found in the pathways, resting spaces and more — as a show of admiration rather than imitation.
“We’re not going to pretend that we’re taking people to Africa,” says Fri Forjindam, now a creative executive with Universal’s theme parks but previously a lead designer on Elephant Valley via her role as a chief development officer at Mycotoo, a Pasadena-based experiential design firm.
“That is a slippery slope of theming that can go wrong really fast,” she adds. “How do we recognize where we are right now, which is near San Diego? How do we populate this plane with plants that are indigenous to the region? The story of coexistence is important. We’re not extracting from Africa, we’re learning. We’re not extracting from elephants, we’re sharing information.”
But designing a space that is elephant-first yet also built for humans presented multiple challenges, especially when the collaborating teams were aiming to construct multiple narratives around the animals. Since meetings about Elephant Valley began around 2019, the staff worked to touch on themes related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to personalize the elephants.
“Where can we also highlight each of the elephants by name, so they aren’t just this huge herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You see that in the lodge.”
That lodge, the Mkutano House — a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili — should provide opportunities for guests to linger, although zoo representatives say reservations are recommended for those who wish to dine in the space (there will also be a walk-up, to-go window). Menus have yet to be released, but the ground floor of the structure, boasting hut-like roofing designed to blend into the environment, features close views of the elephant grazing pool as well as an indoor space with a centerpiece tree beneath constellation-like lighting to mimic sunrises and sunsets.
Throughout there are animal wood carvings and beadwork, the latter often hung from sculptures made of tree branches. The ceiling, outfitted with colorful, cloth tapestries designed to move with the wind, aims to create less friction between indoor and outdoor environments.
There are, of course, research and educational goals of the space as well. The Safari Park works, for instance, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying human-elephant conflict and finding no-kill resolutions. Nonprofits and conservation groups estimate that there are today around 415,000 elephants in Africa, and the African savanna elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Studies of the zoo’s young elephants is shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in the hopes of delivering care to elephant youth to prevent orphanage. Additionally, the Safari Park has done extensive examination into the endotheliotropic herpes virus. “The data that we collect from elephants here, you can’t simply get from elephants in the wild,” Burtis says.
One of the two entrances to Elephant Valley is outfitted with bee boxes; bees are known to be a natural elephant deterrent and can help in preventing the animals from disrupting crops or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the plane is outfitted with timed feeders in an attempt to encourage movement throughout the acreage and establish a level of real-life unpredictability in hunting for resources. Water areas have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make it easier for the elephants to navigate.
With Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the goal was to allow visitors to “observe safely in luxury — whatever that is — but not from a position of power, more as a cohabitor of the Earth, with as much natural elements as possible. It’s not to impose dominance. Ultimately, it needed to feel natural. It couldn’t feel like a man-made structure, which is an antiquated approach to any sort of safari experience where animals are the product, a prize. In this experience, this is the elephant’s home.”
And the resulting feel of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their house guests.
A man in the Mission Bay Park community of San Diego was fatally struck Sunday morning by a hit-and run vehicle, authorities said.
The victim was also struck by a second vehicle and that motorist stayed at the scene to cooperate with officers, the San Diego Police Department reported.
The initial crash occurred at about 2:20 a.m. Sunday in the area of West Mission Bay and Sea World drives.
The pedestrian was in the southbound lanes of the 2000 block of West Mission Bay Drive when he was struck by a silver vehicle also in the southbound lanes. That vehicle fled the scene, continuing southbound, police said.
A 28-year-old man driving his vehicle southbound ran over the downed pedestrian.
“That driver remained at the scene and is not DUI,” according to a police statement. “The pedestrian was pronounced deceased at the scene.”
Anyone with information regarding the initial crash was urged to call Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477.
San Diego County is known for having wet, cold weather in February. But it had numerous hot spells this year. And when the month ended on Saturday a high pressure system produced heat that broke or tied temperature records in nine communities from the desert to the sea, the National Weather Service said.
The most notable temperature occurred in Borrego Springs, which reached 99, five degrees higher than the previous record for Feb. 28, set in 1986. The 99 reading is also the highest temperature ever recorded in Borrego in February.
Escondido reached 95, tying a record set in 1901.
El Cajon reached 92, three degrees higher than the record set in 2009.
Ramona topped out at 88, five degrees higher than the record set in 2009.
Alpine hit 88, four degrees higher the record set in 1986.
Campo reached 87, four degrees higher than the record set in 1999.
Vista hit 86, four degrees higher than the record set in 2020.
Chula Vista reached 84, one degree higher than the record set in 2020.
Lake Cuyamaca rose to 76, four degrees higher than the record set in 1986.
Forecasters say the weather is not likely to broadly produce new highs on Sunday. Cooler air is moving to the coast, and on Monday, San Diego’s high will only reach 67, a degree above normal.
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