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After seven seasons with the New York Yankees, Masahiro Tanaka is returning home.

The Rakuten Eagles, the team Tanaka spent his first seven professional seasons with, announced on Thursday that theyve signed the the right-handed pitcher to a contract. They announced the signing with a Welcome Home our Hero graphic, a call back to Tanakas major role in leading Rakuten to its first Japan Series title in 2013.

Tanaka came to the US before the 2014 season, signing a seven-year, $155 million contract with the Yankees. Since he arrived, hes been one of the most consistent pitchers in the Yankees rotation. He has a 3.74 ERA over 174 games, including seven complete games. He battled injuries occasionally, most notably in the his first season with the Yankees when doctors found in July that hed partially torn a ligament in his pitching elbow. Tanaka also missed time in 2020 after being struck in the head by a Giancarlo Stanton line drive during a simulated game.

Tanaka was considered a top 10 free agent this offseason, but the market has been slow and teams have generally been reluctant to spend money. That could have contributed to Tanakas decision to return to Japan.

After Rakuten announced the signing on Thursday, Tanaka thanked his fans with a heartfelt message on Twitter.

In an earlier tweet, Tanaka said that he plans to explain why he decided to return to Japan at a later date.

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Its late February 2020 and Brandon Payne is sitting in the Accelerate Basketball office lined with framed basketball jerseys and clipped newspaper articles. Hes in Fort Mills, South Carolina, less than a mile from the North Carolina border, but over 2,500 miles from the Golden State Warriors practice facility.

He opens an Instagram story that bridges the gap between him and his client, Stephen Curry, who is shooting the rust off of the shot that turned the Warriors into the Beatles, searching for the finishing touch to his rehab after breaking his wrist early in the season.

For fans, the video builds excitement for the return of the baby-faced assassin. But Payne finds reason for alarm. He texts Curry. Please stop shooting until I get there in a few days. We cant let this keep going. I gotta show you something.

He had some dead spots from the surgery, Payne explains. He couldnt necessarily feel his hand great. His left hand was rotating behind the basketball a little. What happens when you rotate behind the ball is you actually end up pushing it with your left hand. But if you cant feel it you dont know that.

Payne, alongside Warriors assistant coach Bruce Fraser, have watched Curry shoot more than anyone on the planet. They scrutinize the worlds greatest shot, in search of what it lacks, imperfections the naked eye can hardly perceive, so the rest of us can bask in the sublime beauty of its seeming perfection.

Both are careful not to take credit for Currys success. Fraser compares himself to a caddy for a great golfer, a dream come true for a basketball junkie. Theyre like air traffic control, analyzing the flight of the ball when Curry shoots so it comes as close to a 45-degree angle as possible before swirling through the net. So much has to go right, but so much is oriented to go wrong.

The enemies of Currys jumper, in no particular order: defenders lunging into his chest, pulling at his wrists one of which was broken last year the bruises and scratches we blithely refer to as the blanket wear-and-tear of the regular season, a test of will in which one fights not only 29 other teams but the fatigue triggered by multiple plane rides to different time zones, a jagged sleep pattern and the bad habits it gives rise to.

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Then there is the fact that like the rest of us, every second Curry is alive is another second that hes aging. If Curry gets out of bed with a perfect shot, by the time hes arrived at the arena, its atrophied slightly, as has the rest of his body.

As we get older our mobility changes, says Payne. Our strength changes. We have micro-injuries or big injuries. Your movement mechanics change and naturally your skill mechanics will change. You can probably ask any 50-year-old golfer that played since they were in their 20s if their swing has changed as their ability to move has changed, and Im pretty sure youre going to get a resounding, Yes.

Hes human, Fraser reminds us, so he can get into places where his body is not operating the same every day, and you see that. Fraser and Payne are charged with noticing these factors and correcting them.

Payne is a competitive, detail-oriented, demanding teacher. On deep perimeter shots, he tells Curry to tell himself topush the ground harder, to hit the right pressure points in the feet to generate equal power from both legs. When Curry is tired, he over-rotates his hip to the right. I literally just point at my hip and he knows what Im talking about, says Payne.

Fraser played college ball at Arizona with Steve Kerr, and became his shooting coach. When Kerr took over the Warriors, he tapped Fraser to work with the Splash Brothers. Fraser imparted the lessons he learned from working with other all-time shooters, like Steve Nash and Reggie Miller.

If something is that good, says Fraser, the last thing you want to do is be a know-it-all and mess something up. I watched a lot, learned their processes, watched what they did.

I think shooting is definitely an art. Theres a skill to it, but theres an art to it. No two people are the same. Everyones shots just a little different. Theres a rhythm to it and a power. I try not to be super textbook with my approach anymore because I feel like youre taking away some of the persons art.

Each shot is tailored to each individuals body mechanics. The perfect shot for Curry is not the perfect shot for Klay Thompson. Shooting mechanics are as individual as your fingerprints, Payne says.

Fans used to line up hours before games to bear witness to Currys pregame routine, to be able to say they were there, that they saw him. These days, with fans locked out of arenas, Currys audience has been reduced. But Fraser, who estimates he watches Curry take 70,000 practice shots per year, is still in the crowd.

When Fraser notices a hitch in Currys mechanics, he gives him parameters to feel out rather than strict instructions. Curry started the season cold, 18-for-56 from three before exploding for a career-high 62 points against Portland. While Curry was warming up pregame, Fraser noticed he kept coming up short on his shots. He simply told Curry to generate more power from his midsection, rather than his arms. Fraser seems uncomfortable recounting the timing. I dont want to say thats the reason he had 60, he says, so its worth mentioning: Curry took it from there.

He works better that way, says Fraser. If someone doesnt have that kind of feel, that kind of motor memory, then you have to be more specific.

When Payne was in middle school, he used to trudge home from practice and list off all the things his basketball coach, the schools history teacher, did wrong. In high school, he saw gaps his teammates didnt, but he couldnt bridge the gap between mind and body, couldnt execute on the openings he saw. By then, he was already training young kids. His dad coached basketball. He grew up around the game, knew and loved every contour of it.

Early on in life I kinda decided that I want the most stressful thing in my life to be whether a ball goes into a basket or not, he says. He coached at Wingate University after graduating. The wins, he says, were a blur. The losses he remembers vividly.

Basketball cant be perfected because no in-game situation can be perfectly replicated in a practice setting. Payne tries to confront this challenge in ways big and small.

We never take multiple shots from the same spot. Thats too easy. I dont even let my 13-year-old take shots from the same spot. We change ranges, Payne says. Even if its just by one step or two steps. What happens is your mechanics can get really grooved at one range. That can create bad habits.

Youve probably seen Curry dribble a tennis ball in one hand and a basketball in another, a drill thats proliferated across the NBA since his rise. Payne doesnt see it as a dribbling drill, but an assessment drill. He watches Currys mouth, not his ballhandling speed. The first place neural overload can show itself is if a player stops breathing normally, Payne says.

He watches Currys nose to make sure its not leaning over his toes, that his core is still working to keep him stable, that his knees arent starting to angle inward. If youre paying attention, it wont happen, but if youre overloaded by something else, its gonna happen. If all those things are happening on a simple tennis ballhandling basketball drill, think about all the stimulus going on in a game when youre playing at a high level, playing fast and you gotta do all these things and keep yourself breathing, keep your body upright and keep moving with the right mechanics.

When Payne first devised the tennis ball drill, he asked neuroscientists and sports scientists to review it. Their first response would be to ask him what he studied in college. I asked him the same thing.

He laughs. Not this!

When Payne became fascinated with the idea of helping players with physical limitations rise to the level of physical specimens, the confines of the court became limiting. He looked for gains in the body, in the brain. It doesnt take a lot of talent or knowledge or expertise to come up with a shooting workout, he says. Everything about how I train players is all about neutralizing physical disadvantage. I was never fast, I was never the guy that was jumping over people. Curry and Payne are a perfect match, thanks to their shared desire to maximize the body in search of an edge.

Shooting is an act of constant maintenance and renewal, of paring down and becoming. But no matter how much he practices, every time Curry launches a shot, its more likely to miss than not. The quest for perfection is futile, evasive, walking in lockstep with the acceptance of imperfection.

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Two young children have been rescued from squalid conditions where they were allegedly fed dog meat and lived among garbage and cockroaches.

The girl, 4, and her brother, 2, were rescued from the dismal squalor in Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine, the Sun reports.

Volunteer Yevgeny Zub uploaded video of the children being removed from the home on his Instagram channel.

There is a clear threat to the life and health of children at this address, he wrote.

Garbage can be seen strewn across the floor including clothes, sheets and discarded plastic bottles.

Cockroaches are also seen in corners of the ceiling and crawling along the walls.

He claims the children ate dog meat and the home was filled with so much garbage police struggled to open the front door.

Its also alleged the mum caught stray dogs and fed them to the kids.

Mr Zub said police were tipped off about the alleged child abuse by neighbours.

The boy was reusing his old nappies, the Sun reported.

The mum reportedly had five children with three taken out of her custody.

She is now facing five years in prison.

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Children removed from house of horrors where they 'ate dog' - Yahoo News Australia

Fenaba Addo is an associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ashley Harrington is the federal advocacy director at the Center for Responsible Lending.

The debate around canceling student debt has been front and center in the wake of the presidential election, and President-elect Biden should provide substantial cancellation on his first day in office.

This crisis has reached roughly $1.7 trillion and is disproportionately affecting Black students and students of color. Significant, across-the-board student debt relief would help vulnerable students get back on their feet and create a pathway to financial freedom.

American borrowers need cancellation, and they need it now.

The truth is that measuring the benefits of cancellation based on income alone, which some opponents have argued in favor of recently, dangerously ignores the wealth ramifications of debt.

Given the extreme and persistent racial wealth gap, white and Black borrowers with similar incomes are affected by student debt differently. White borrowers typically have substantially more wealth and thus struggle less whether they carry the same or more student debt than their Black counterparts.

Black borrowers disproportionately shoulder this burden at every income bracket. This stark inequity is reason enough to cancel debt that never should have been amassed in the first place.

Historically, Black students were either denied or received limited access to most institutions of higher education. After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), higher education became more accessible to Black and low-income students.

But the promise to provide grant-based aid for all low-income students was soon broken, giving way to the debt-financed system we have today. We now have a system that denies many Black households the means of achieving financial prosperity through higher education, which has long been considered one of the ladders to American middle-class security.

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Cancelling student debt alone will not close the racial wealth gap, but that should not prevent us from taking this important step forward. Leaving Black borrowers crippled with student debt certainly contributes to its persistence and prevents Black and Latino borrowers from building wealth.

Thus, resistance to cancellation becomes just another in a long list of instances of ugly opposition to policies that would improve the lives of Black Americans.

Arguments suggesting that Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) would provide more benefits to middle-income borrowers than debt cancellation ignore the well-documented problems with the current IDR system.

Borrowers find it difficult to navigate plans with different structures and eligibility requirements, and servicers make errors and maximize their profits by serving borrowers poorly.

In response to a FOIA request from the National Consumer Law Center, the Department of Education stated that less than 20 borrowers had achieved IDR forgiveness as of November 2019. However, tens of thousands should have been eligible over the past five years.

Because of years of structural racism and persistent labor market and credit market discrimination, the average Black borrower still owes 95% of the original balance of their student debt after 20 years in repayment. Many borrowers actually find their balances increasing over time.

IDR is an inadequate solution that will leave borrowers with a lifetime of debt, stealing retirement, and keeping parents paying off their childrens debt as well as their own, certainly not a standard we should aspire to.

Cancellation of a substantial amount of student debt will benefit all Americans, including struggling borrowers who will have more of their loan balances cancelled.

Dollars that are now going to pay student debt will go toward buying homes, starting families, creating businesses, and restarting the economy. Increased consumer spending will help keep our businesses alive during these precarious times.

Federal and state policies created the student debt crisis. Now is the time to acknowledge those failings and focus on rehabilitating a system that is simply not working for low-income and low-wealth people.

Black Americans, low-income individuals, Latinos and other borrowers of color, women, and veterans have all been denied the path to the financial security and prosperity that is supposed be possible with a college education. Their relief is long overdue.

We are not, of course, in support of increasing inequality. However, we believe that this country has the resources and the capability to find creative policy solutions that will both counteract widening inequality and relieve millions of borrowers of their debt.

Substantial student debt cancellation is perhaps the most progressive and productive single action a new president in an unstable economy can take. President-elect Biden must deliver on his promise to cancel student debt for the 45 million Americans who carry this burden on Day One.

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Op-ed: Black student loan borrowers 'need cancellation, and they need it now' - Yahoo Finance

If theres one negative aspect to life at record low interest rates, its earning almost nothing on the cash you have saved at a bank.

Certificates of deposit, or CDs, which require you to lock up savings for a predetermined amount of time offer slightly better interest rates, but not much better than the paltry 0.07% annual percentage yield (APY) that is the current national average for savings accounts, according to Bankrate.

But one crypto startup, BlockFi, is letting users earn at a rate thats nearly 123-times higher on dollar-backed cryptocurrencies known as stablecoins. More specifically, the company is currently paying an 8.6% interest rate on savings accounts holding the Gemini dollar, the stablecoin introduced by the Winklevoss twins regulated and audited New York trust company Gemini. Interest is paid out monthly by BlockFi in either traditional dollars, or a favored cryptocurrency like bitcoin or ether.

You can start earning your interest and gaining passive exposure into a new asset class, BlockFi co-founder Flori Marquez explained in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live. The people who use our products span from everyday consumers who are buying bitcoin for the first time to even some small corporates.

Its important to note that the higher interest rates BlockFi offers on its accounts carry a special set of risks. Unlike traditional savings accounts, BlockFis are not FDIC-insured, which means they dont carry the traditional $250,000 of protection per depositor. Even BlockFis disclaimer warns customers that their savings account is not a risk-free product and loss of principal is possible.

Despite those risks, hundreds of thousands of customers have turned to the Peter Thiel- and Coinbase Ventures-backed platform to either trade cryptocurrencies or earn interest through BlockFis savings accounts, according to Marquez.

As opposed to most fintech platforms, our average account size is actually $50,000, she said. So people are depositing... a meaningful amount of assets.

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Similar to banks, BlockFi acts as a financial intermediary thats able to benefit in the gap between borrowing and lending. As Yahoo Finances Brian Cheung recently explained in this weeks Yahoo U installment, banks profit by enjoying a larger return on money loaned out than the interest they pay on deposits. As BlockFi CEO Zac Prince explained to Yahoo Finance in the past, the companys similar role as an intermediary comes with another perk unique to the crypto space: a lack of other established players.

We're the largest lender of cryptocurrencies to institutional borrowers, who today are primarily market makers and proprietary trading firms that are active in this asset class and have been for a while, but they can't finance that activity with their traditional prime broker relationships because banks aren't active in the space yet, he said. That's the reason why the yields are still high, because this is a new asset class. It's nascent, it's growing quickly, and it doesn't have access to the traditional sources of debt capital. And as a result, when we're lending, we're able to charge higher rates, and then we pay that back to the folks who are our clients on the front end.

As the industry matures, Prince expects that BlockFi will likely have to lower interest rates on its savings accounts at some point, but rates have held at 8.6% for more than a year.

Prince also stressed that interest earned on BlockFis accounts are also taxed much like interest revenue from traditional bank accounts, and that BlockFi provides users with an annual 1099 form to help with tax filings.

Were heavily regulated at the federal level and at the state level as a financial services company in the U.S., he said.

Zack Guzman is the co-host of the 11AM - 1PM hours on Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer and on-air reporter covering entrepreneurship, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.

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This crypto startup is offering 8.6% interest on savings accounts 123 times the national average - Yahoo Finance

WASHINGTON On Dec. 8, someone made a simultaneous transfer of 28.15 bitcoins worth more than $500,000 at the time to 22 different virtual wallets, most of them belonging to prominent right-wing organizations and personalities.

Now cryptocurrency researchers believe they have identified who made the transfer, and suspect it was intended to bolster those far-right causes. U.S. law enforcement is investigating whether the donations were linked to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

While the motivation is difficult to prove, the transfer came just a month before the violent riot in the Capitol, which took place after President Trump invited supporters to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and take back our country.

Right-wing figures and websites, including VDARE, the Daily Stormer and Nick Fuentes, received generous donations from a bitcoin account linked to a French cryptocurrency exchange, according to research done by software company Chainalysis, which maintains a repository of information about public cryptocurrency exchanges and whose tools aid in government, law enforcement and private sector investigations. Chainalysis investigated the donations after Yahoo News shared the data points about the transaction.

According to one source familiar with the matter, the suspicious Dec. 8 transaction, along with a number of other pieces of intelligence, has prompted law enforcement and intelligence agencies in recent days to actively investigate the sources of funding for the individuals who participated in the Capitol insurrection, as well as their networks. The government is hoping to prevent future attacks but also to uncover potential foreign involvement in or support of right-wing activities, the source said.

During a press conference on Tuesday on the investigation into the Capitol riot, acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin said the scope and scale of this investigation in these cases are really unprecedented. At this time, Sherwin added, prosecutors are treating the matter as a significant counterterrorism or counterintelligence investigation involving deeper dives into money, travel records, disposition, movement, communication records.

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One of the ways extremist groups have made money in recent years is online through cryptocurrency and crowdfunding. Bitcoin, which was anonymously released online in 2009 as open-source software, exists only virtually. It does not utilize a central bank or administrator to disburse funds, nor does any government control or distribute it. While bitcoin has fluctuated in value in recent years, and continues to do so, it gained mainstream popularity around 2017, the same year prominent alt-right figure Richard Spencer tweeted, Bitcoin is the currency of the alt right.

A 2017 Washington Post investigation explored how far-right groups turned even more aggressively toward bitcoin following the deadly August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. The story cited research by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center that identified a large bitcoin donation to Andrew Anglin, the editor of the Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi website that accepts bitcoin donations. At the time, the donation was worth around $60,000.

A newfound expertise in online messaging and recruitment, coupled with the fact that modern extremist groups are generally young and digitally savvy, means that these organizations and individuals have fundamentally altered the way that extremists raise money, wrote Alex Newhouse, a data analyst at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in a 2019 report that explored the links between white supremacists and digital currency.

Some prominent right-wing groups or sites display their bitcoin wallets prominently, the report noted. The lack of regulation over Bitcoin has driven its adoption by white supremacists, it said.

While cryptocurrency has been used by extremist groups and criminals to raise funds while shielding their identities, bitcoin is pseudonymous rather than anonymous. Bitcoin wallet addresses are permanent, and the digital ledger of transactions, called the blockchain, is public and cant be changed. That means if people identify their bitcoin wallet addresses, as many right-wing groups do to raise funds, transactions can be traced, which is what allowed Chainalysis to uncover information about the source of the large December donations.

The source of the funding, according to research conducted by Chainanalysis, appears to be a computer programmer based in France who created an account in 2013 and who maintained a personal blog, which was not updated between 2014 and Dec. 9, 2020, the day after the donations.

Chainalysis researchers discovered a blog post from the bitcoin user that reads like an apparent suicide note, bequeathing his money to certain causes and people in light of what he describes as the decline of Western civilization, though the researchers were unable to confirm that the user was in fact dead. Chainalysis declined to publish the users name, citing privacy concerns due to the inability to conclusively confirm his death and out of concerns over ongoing law enforcement investigations.

An email to the apparent French donor did not immediately receive a reply.

Chainalysis investigators relied on openly available information, or public bitcoin transactions, to investigate and map out the large transaction. The original donor was registered on NameID, an internet service that allows bitcoin users to tie their online pseudonym or email address with their bitcoin profile information the original donor included. Investigators tracked that email address to the blog, and to several cryptocurrency forum posts going back to 2013.

According to their research, Fuentes, a popular right-wing commentator who was suspended from YouTube last winter for violating its policies on hate speech, received the largest chunk of funding on Dec. 8 about $250,000 in bitcoin. The Daily Stormer and the anti-immigration website VDARE were among the other recipients.

Yahoo News reached out to the recipients named in this article to confirm whether they had received the funding, what information they had about the donor and what they planned on doing with the funds. None returned a request for comment, although Fuentes tweeted an obscene gesture, naming several journalists, including this reporter, shortly after the inquiry was sent.

While the Daily Stormer website openly requests cryptocurrency donations, it also includes a disclaimer that says it is opposed to violence and that anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned.

While theres no evidence that Fuentes directly participated in the Capitol riot, something he has so far denied, the financial resources of prominent right-wing actors are of growing interest to law enforcement.

Id be stunned if both nation-state adversaries and terrorist organizations werent figuring out how to funnel money to these guys, one former FBI official who reviewed the data for Yahoo News said. Many of them use fundraising sites (often in Bitcoin) that are virtually unmonitored and unmonitorable. If they werent doing it, theyd be incompetent.

Additionally, much like conversations that took place on social media in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot, the digital currency transactions are happening in plain sight. While cryptocurrency has the reputation of being anonymous and shadowy, thats actually a common misconception, explained Maddie Kennedy, Chainalysiss communications director. With the right tools you can follow the money, she said. Cryptocurrency was designed to be transparent.

While there are methods that cryptocurrency users can deploy to obfuscate their identities including using privacy coins such as Monero, which are difficult to trace, or using a mixer that allows various users to combine their bitcoins and mix them together to disguise their origin theres no indication the French programmer utilized those tools, Kennedy said.

Though the donations are not a smoking gun or indicative of a crime, and it remains unclear to what extent the Capitol riot was coordinated in advance, the activity is nonetheless revealing, according to Kennedy.

These extremist groups are probably more well organized and well funded than what was previously believed, she said. Chainalysis maintains a database of domestic extremists who have cryptocurrency accounts, and while the company has traced donations to right-wing groups over the years, the December deposit was the single biggest month weve ever observed directed toward these causes, the researchers wrote.

This is evidence to show theyre raising money, Kennedy said. Additionally, the fact that the donor was outside the United States suggests this has international scope, she continued, a fact that law enforcement should be paying attention to.

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Corey Kluber in blue Rangers jersey strides to the plate

After a winter of unfulfilled need, the Yankees struck quickly on Friday to bolster their starting rotation, agreeing to terms with Corey Kluber soon after finalizing their deal with D.J. LeMahieu.

Assuming Kluber passes his physical, the teams rotation is likely set. After paying LeMahieu $15 million and Kluber $11 million, the Yanks are just a few million under a $210 luxury tax threshold that they do not plan to exceed.

According to league sources, longtime Yankee Masahiro Tanaka is seeking a one-year deal at $15-20 million. SNY reported earlier in the offseason that a reunion with the Yankees was unlikely. Now its even harder to see how it would work.

The San Diego Padres have been engaged with Tanakas camp, but sources say those negotiations have not heated up. It remains a real possibility that Tanaka will return to Japan. Anything connecting the Mets to Tanaka has been pure rumor (as it was with LeMahieu, who the Mets never pursued).

The Yankees have talked to Cincinnati about Luis Castillo, but it sounds as if we should file those discussions under Duh, who wouldnt ask about Luis Castillo?

Though Castillo talks havent advanced to date, it does seem worth keeping at least one eye on this situation, as Castillo is set to make just $4.2 million this year. If the Yanks can unload Adam Ottavinos contract, they could accommodate Castillo. The prospect cost would be steep, too.

Back in reality, its clear that the Yankees calculation was straightforward: They chose Kluber as their major rotation expenditure this year.

After Kluber threw a well-attended bullpen session in Florida last week, several teams began bidding aggressively, including a previously unknown suitor: the Toronto Blue Jays. This pushed Klubers base salary past what many in the industry expected, considering his recent injury history.

According to league sources, the Yanks actually did not submit the highest offer for Kluber. There were multiple teams willing to pay more than $10 million.

It came down to a desire on the part of Kluber and the Yanks to work together. It couldnt have hurt that Kluber enjoys working with Eric Cressey, the Yankees new director of player health and performance.

For both sides, it felt like a fit. Now, if Kluber can stay healthy, the Yanks have more depth and experience in the rotation.

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How Corey Kluber deal happened, and what it means for Yankees rotation - Yahoo Sports

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Terez Paylor & Charles Robinson recap all four divisional round games from the weekend, starting with Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers putting away Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints on Sunday evening in what is likely to be Brees' final game before retirement.

Later in the show, they break down the Kansas City Chiefs outlasting the Cleveland Browns after Patrick Mahomes suffered a concussion in the third quarter, what's next for Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens after scoring only three points against the Buffalo Bills and why the Green Bay Packers offense should get more credit after dispatching the Los Angeles Rams on Saturday afternoon.

There's also some Wentz vs. Goff talk, and the show closes out with our experts sharing some thoughts about the hirings of Arthur Smith in Atlanta and Robert Saleh in New York. Later in the week, they'll go deep into the five head coaches hired in the last week.

Stay tuned for a special month of LIVE episodes of the Yahoo Sports NFL Podcast, streaming every Monday through the Super Bowl at 1pm EST/10am PST on the Yahoo Sports YouTube, Twitter, Twitch & Facebook pages.

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Divisional round recap: Is a win next week bigger for Rodgers or Brady? - Yahoo Sports

Drivers have been issued a warning about a mask habit that could see them fined hundreds of dollars.

With many people in the habit of keeping a face mask handy, theres one crucial spot they should never store them in the car.

Much like dangling air fresheners and decorative pairs of dice, drivers arent allowed to hang their masks from their rearview mirror.

Doing so in Queensland can cost drivers $311, while in NSW they could be hit with three demerit points and a $349 fine.

The fine is $248 and no demerit points in Victoria, and while penalties exists in other jurisdictions, the exact penalties are not listed.

The RACQ issued a warning on Tuesday, telling motorists it's a simple error but it could cost you big.

Greater Brisbane drivers are naturally in the habit of having their mask handy at all times, but having a mask dangling from the rear-view mirror isnt safe, RACQ spokesperson Lauren Ritchie said.

Drivers need to have a clear view of the road from all angles so they can easily spot other cars, pedestrians and cyclists.

Ms Ritchie said masks could easily create a blind spot and subsequently increase the risk of a crash, which was particularly dangerous on highways and busy roads.

You shouldnt have anything hanging on their mirror which could block your view that includes your mask. So pack it away where it wont be a distraction no matter how long your drive is, she said.

It comes after confusion over whether drivers would be fined for not wearing a mask while driving during Brisbanes three-day lockdown early this month.

Queensland Health told the public they must wear a mask in the car, even if they were travelling alone, which created mass confusion.

Days later, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk backflipped on the earlier request, telling residents of Brisbane they no longer were required to wear a mask while driving.

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Queensland recorded three cases of coronavirus on Tuesday, all in hotel quarantine. There are 26 active cases in Queensland.

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The face mask mistake that could cost drivers $349 - Yahoo News Australia

2021 is a few weeks old, and already the NBA mock drafts are out in full effect. The latest comes from Yahoo! Sports, who put together their first mock draft of the year as many college programs start their conference slate.

Yahoo! writer Krysten Peeks first go has USC Trojans forward Evan Mobley going No. 4 overall to the Toronto Raptors.

From Peeks article:

No other player in this draft class can do what Mobley does on the court. Hes a 7-footer who can handle the ball and shoot 3-pointers (hes made five so far this season). Defensively, hes one of the best shot blockers in the country with his 7-foot-4 wingspan. Mobley has a huge upside and the only questions surrounding his game are strength and toughness.

While the Raptors will probably rebound in the standings, likely pushing them out of the top-five, playing alongside Fred VanVleet, Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam would be a nice fit for Mobley as it would take the pressure off him needing to contribute right away, while allowing him to stretch the defense with his outside shooting.

Mobley and the Trojans will get back into conference play on Thursday evening against the Huskies from the University of Washington.

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First Yahoo! mock draft has Evan Mobley going to Toronto Raptors - Trojans Wire