MIAMI LAKES, Fla. (AP) — The Dukes got in over Duke, and facing the Ducks is their reward.
Bob Chesney will be bringing his UCLA team to Oregon next year, which would have been his first time going up against the Ducks. But he's about to get an unplanned preview of that matchup when he takes James Madison to Eugene, Oregon for the biggest game in program history: a first-round College Football Playoff contest on Dec. 20.
It will be the first meeting between the schools, which is likely no surprise considering James Madison has been at the top level of college football for only four seasons. The first two were with Curt Cignetti as coach, who left for Indiana and has the unbeaten Big Ten champion Hoosiers as the No. 1 seed in this year's CFP field. The last two were with Chesney, and he simply has the Dukes rolling.
“I think you’re going to see an inspired bunch and I think you’re going to see us continue to attack every single opportunity that we have — confident, inspired attack,” Chesney said when asked about his team on the bracket reveal broadcast on ESPN. “That’ll be our mantra as we go through this.”
James Madison (12-1) finished at No. 24 in the final College Football Playoff rankings this season, but the combination of being the champions of the Sun Belt Conference and being ranked ahead of Atlantic Coast Champion Duke was enough to give Chesney and the Dukes the No. 12 seed on the 12-team playoff bracket before he leaves for UCLA.
Oregon, the No. 5 seed, is 11-1.
The winner of the Oregon-James Madison game will face No. 4 Texas Tech (12-1), the Big 12 champion, in the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, Florida on Jan. 1 at noon, the first of three CFP quarterfinals scheduled for that day.
Texas Tech has a talent-rich roster, without question, and has won 12 games for the first time in school history. And the Red Raiders have taken plenty of criticism for the big-spending manner in which the team was built, which is now perfectly acceptable in this era of college sports. It has clearly paid off: The Red Raiders are in the CFP field for the first time.
“If we are going to buy a team, why not be the best?” star linebacker Jacob Rodriguez said after the Big 12 championship game win over BYU.
None of those three teams have ever played in the Orange Bowl. If Oregon gets there, it’ll mean the Ducks will be playing at Hard Rock Stadium, the place where Miami — and former Oregon coach Mario Cristobal — play home games.
But first, a home playoff game at Oregon's Autzen Stadium awaits.
“I'm excited to see what Autzen is going to look like with our fans,” said Oregon coach Dan Lanning, who is 46-7 in his four seasons with the Ducks. “That atmosphere, I think we all saw how special those moments could be last season.”
Chesney will fly to UCLA on Monday, be formally introduced as the new coach there on Tuesday, then fly back to Virginia to jump into CFP game planning. The Dukes will practice Thursday and Friday, then get into their traditional game-week schedule before flying to Oregon.
He's been through the playoff grind before: Chesney worked his way up from Division III and made seven appearances as a coach in the Division II and FCS tournaments — levels of college football that have had a bracketed way of deciding a champion for much longer than the top level has.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for his path to get to where he’s at,” Lanning said.
Chesney has been at James Madison for just two seasons, going 9-4 last year and winning the Boca Raton Bowl, then going 12-1 and counting this season.
Oregon was the top seed in the playoff last year, then fell 41-21 in the quarterfinals at the Rose Bowl to eventual champion Ohio State. In the four-team playoff era, the Ducks beat Florida State 59-20 in the semifinals following the 2014 season, then fell 42-20 to Ohio State in the final.
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Oregon head coach Dan Lanning looks on from the sideline against Washington during the first half of an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Nov. 29, 2025, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Nearly 25,000 children caught in conflict were victims of a record number of violations last year, including killings, rape and recruitment to fight, and for the first time, government forces — not armed groups — were the main perpetrators, a new United Nations report says.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ annual report, released this week, has a blacklist of violators against children: government forces from eight nations and 67 armed groups from 16 countries and territories.
The number of violations — which also include abductions, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access to help them — rose for a fourth straight year to 38,558, according to the report that is based on verified U.N. data. It said 24,174 children, a third of them girls, were affected, with several thousand subjected to multiple violations.
“The scale and persistence of these violations demand more than acknowledgment — they demand resolve,” the U.N. special representative for children in armed conflict, Vanessa Frazier, said in an analysis of the report.
She urged the 193 U.N. member nations to confront the findings and “recognize that protecting children is not an aspiration but an obligation, and that the decisions taken today will shape the futures they may or may not live to claim.”
For the first time since the U.N. authorized monitoring of abuses against children in conflict 30 years ago, the report said that “government forces were responsible for a majority of grave violations.”
Topping the 2025 list are the Israeli military and its security forces, with 12,445 violations. That is followed by Congo, with 4,114 violations, and Myanmar, Somalia and armed groups in Nigeria, all with over 2,000 violations. Government forces from Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Russia's armed forces in Ukraine are also on the blacklist.
The blacklist also includes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which carried out the Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attacks in southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and sparked the war in Gaza. The U.N. says Israeli settlers were responsible for 326 grave violations last year, and Guterres warned that if these attacks continue, the settlers could be put on the blacklist.
The report says government forces were “the main perpetrators” of 6,266 killings of children — a 34% increase from last year — as well as 7,958 injuries.
The U.N. said it verified the killing of 2,668 Palestinian children by Israeli forces in Gaza and 55 Palestinian kids in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The U.N. received reports of the killing of an additional 4,588 children in Gaza and injuries to 346 Israeli children that it is in the process of verifying, the report said.
Guterres said he was “appalled by the magnitude of grave violations against children” in Palestinian territories and Israel, “gravely alarmed by the staggering increase in grave violations” perpetrated by Israeli forces, and “deeply alarmed at the staggering rise in attacks carried out by Israeli settlers” affecting children with no accountability.
The U.N. chief urged Israel to develop and sign a plan with the United Nations to end the killing and maiming of children and attacks on schools and hospitals with time-bound commitments.
Israel's U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon accused Guterres of blurring “the fundamental distinction between a democratic state fighting for its survival and murderous terrorist organizations” like Hamas and Islamic Jihad rather than standing with the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. He said this will be Guterres' legacy — “one of the greatest moral failures in the history of the United Nations.”
Frazier, the special representative for children in conflict, told reporters Thursday that there are a number of reasons government forces were responsible for more violations this year. That includes “the impunity that we are seeing towards international law” and changes in warfare from battlefields to densely populated places using new weapons like drones and explosives that cover a wide area, she said.
“Children were impacted while escaping fighting, seeking food, water or medical care, and navigating areas heavily contaminated by explosive remnants of war, often contributing to life-long disabilities,” she said in the analysis of the report.
The U.N. said it verified the recruitment and use of 6,607 children in conflict, with the highest numbers in Congo, Nigeria, Haiti, Somalia and Colombia. It said 5,129 youngsters were abducted, mainly in Nigeria, Congo, Somalia, Myanmar and Mozambique.
And it reported 1,783 child victims of rape and sexual violence, with the highest number in Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and Haiti.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during a press conference at the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) in Port-au-Prince, Tuesday, June 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
