PHOENIX — The Rate Bowl no longer has the word “Guaranteed” in its name, and the concept of bowl games as a whole are no longer as promised. The expected expansion of the College Football Playoff from its current 12-team format up to 16, or perhaps 24, in upcoming years will mean fewer teams available for bowls.

When Notre Dame was left out of this year’s playoff, the Fighting Irish’s decision to not play in a bowl sent shockwaves through the sport.

“We are going to have an open mind of what the bowl system looks like,” Gophers athletics director Mark Coyle told the Pioneer Press on Wednesday. “I think people like the conference rivalries and the matchups when you play other conferences.”

One of the biggest reasons the bowl structure will at least resemble its current breadth is TV ratings. The 2024 Rate Bowl between Rutgers and Kansas State received 3.5 million viewers on the day after Christmas, which was its most-watched game since 2015.

The Gophers-Virginia Tech matchup in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl on Jan. 3 had 3.3 million on that Friday night, per an estimate compiled from Sports Media Watch.

“Saying that, ‘Oh, bowl games are dead,’ and taking bowl games away, I don’t think is very healthy. I don’t,” Fleck said last week. “I’m a huge advocate of bowl games. How we structure them from here on out, and what that looks like, and what conferences team up to do it, I think could be really interesting as we move forward.”

Bigger fines

Coyle said he is a proponent of schools receiving larger fines if they opt out of playing in bowls.

Both Iowa State and Kansas State — which were going through head coaching changes — were fined $500,000 by the Big XII Conference for declining to participate in this postseason. They were possible opponents for the Gophers before passing on the opportunities, which opened the door for New Mexico to take their place.

Pay to stay

The Gophers’ current revenue-sharing contracts with player include a payment for when they appear on the active roster for the bowl game. While some players will still opt out and forgo this money, the clause in their contract can be seen as an attempt to incentive players to remain with the program for the final game of the season.

Santa Fleck

Fleck and wife Heather make it a point to give a Christmas present to all of the assistant coaches’ and support staff’s children. This year, it’s up to more than 50 gifts to be opened during breakfast on Christmas Day. The staff also goes out to a restaurant for a nice meal earlier in the bowl week.

“You want to make it feel like the holiday season as much as possible and keep those traditions alive, especially for the kids,” Fleck said.

Briefly

Fleck was surprised by Jim McMahon during Wednesday’s practice in Phoenix. Fleck grew up in suburban Chicago and was a huge fan of the former Bears quarterback. Fleck has even dressed up as McMahon for Halloween many times. … When Rate dropped “Guaranteed” from its name in 2024, they issued a statement filled with corporate jargon. This bowl, in its 36th year, has also been called the Copper Bowl, Insight.com Bowl, Insight Bowl, Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, Cactus Bowl and Cheez-It Bowl. … Minnesota’s fifth appearance in this bowl ties Kansas State for the most. The Gophers also were here in 2006, ’08, ’09 and ’21.

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Some people have already made their January travel plans. But for travel overachievers, that’s uninspired, as they’re already plotting out February.

The coldest, grayest, shortest month of astronomical winter — with a little nugget of love in its midsection, thanks to Valentine’s Day — can be a challenging time to vacation. That’s where Lonely Planet comes in with its new guide, “The top 10 places to visit in February 2026.”

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The travel company’s editors put their heads together to pick a diversity of destinations, depending on whether “you need restful break after the holiday season or an exhilarating adventure to kick-start your year.” And they included tips about what makes each place worth visiting, from gorgeous beaches to historic intrigue to a sizzling street-food scene.

There’s also one spot with polar-bear safaris, though perhaps that’s best left to people who really enjoyed the movie “Grizzly Man.” Here are the recommendations and to-do suggestions.

Lonely Planet’s top places to visit in February 2026

1 St. Lucia, the Caribbean: beaches

2 Montreal: the dining scene

3 Mendoza, Argentina: enjoying wine

4 Singapore: street food

5 Wyoming: skiing

6 Madeira, Portugal: an island vacation

7 Tanzania: safaris

8 Cambodia: historic sites

9 United Arab Emirates: plenty of sun

10 Manitoba, Canada: polar-bear safaris

Source: lonelyplanet.com/articles/where-to-go-in-february

In the last year or so, health influencers — and a lot of women on social media — have talked up testosterone therapy as a kind of perimenopausal panacea. They promise boundless energy, crisper thinking, better sleep — and, most of all, a roaring libido.

Sounds awfully tempting.

But like a lot of things when it comes to women’s health, these claims are way ahead of the science, contorting it, even, in ways that set women up for disappointment.

“A lot of attention has been on selling things to midlife women, rather than just trying to help them improve their quality of life,” says Jan Shifren, director of the Midlife Women’s Health Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Shifren says women routinely come into her office asking about products, including testosterone, purported to have magical benefits with no risk. She gently tries to adjust their expectations. “When you step back, if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true,” she says.

Testosterone is a case in point. Although we tend to associate testosterone with men, women produce it too, albeit at much lower levels that decline as we age. Studies consistently show that raising testosterone levels in postmenopausal women to the upper limit of what is normal for a younger woman (say, someone in her 20s) can slightly improve sexual function. What does that look like? In clinical trials, women had about one additional “satisfying event” over four weeks compared with those taking a placebo, Shifren says.

The reality is that there is currently no FDA-approved testosterone product for women — and the only concrete evidence that testosterone might improve low libido applies to postmenopausal women. Even in that group, the effects are relatively modest.

To be clear, that modest improvement might be meaningful for many older women, and they absolutely should be offered treatment if they seek it. But it’s not the hair-on-fire, life-changing experience that some women are reporting on social media.

“When people say, ‘I want it for energy, I want it for weight loss, I want it to preserve my muscle tone’ — those are not indications for testosterone,” says Monica Christmas, associate medical director of the Menopause Society.

True, pumping up the dosage can give women an almost euphoric high, Christmas says. However, that effect will eventually subside, and to recapture it, they will have to continue increasing the dose. In doing so, they aren’t restoring testosterone levels to where they were in their 20s but rather elevating them to low levels typically seen in men.

That approach also carries risks that experts worry aren’t being sufficiently emphasized to women. Higher doses can cause hair loss (along with hair growth on the face and other areas many women would probably find undesirable), clitoral enlargement, acne and vocal changes that can be permanent. Particularly troubling is that some women are receiving those higher doses via pellets — typically purchased from compounding pharmacies that may or may not be reliable. The pellets are implanted and release the hormone over the course of months, and they can’t be removed if problems arise. There is no long-term data to show whether women taking these high doses might experience health problems down the road.

Meanwhile, the best data we have on safely using testosterone — specifically in low doses that restore physiological levels in women — also underscores the complex nature of our sexual well-being. Two recent studies conducted by Susan Davis, an endocrinologist at Monash University in Australia who has spent decades studying the hormone, underscore the disconnect between how some health influencers talk about testosterone and what it can realistically offer.

By mining data from the Australian Women’s Midlife Years Study, which has enrolled over 5,000 women, Davis found that women’s testosterone levels gradually decline around age 40, reaching a low point in their late 50s before increasing slightly again. Of note, that decline was attributed to age itself and not connected to when a woman went through menopause.

Davis then studied those same women’s sexual well-being over the menopause transition. She found that those who are perimenopausal — meaning they have started to experience things like hot flashes and night sweats and whose menstrual cycle has become less regular — are twice as likely to have a desire dysfunction as premenopausal women. Yet their testosterone levels aren’t wildly different.

Together, the two studies suggest that testosterone levels don’t change much during menopause, but sexual function does, and the change happens early on, Davis explains. That means testosterone decline isn’t the culprit. More telling, though, are the two main commonalities among the women experiencing distress: depression and being partnered.

As expert after expert stressed to me, women’s levels of desire and sexual satisfaction are typically tied to a range of issues — some physical, some mental, and some simply a part of life. They might be experiencing more pain during sex as they age, or, as Davis’ data suggests, they may be depressed or just a bit bored with their partner. Many middle-aged women also struggle to find the time, energy, and privacy for extracurricular activities because they are doing so much caregiving for children and elders while navigating their careers.

Those problems aren’t immutable. Doctors have several treatments they can and should be offering women, whether that’s vaginal estrogen or pelvic floor therapy to help with pain or discomfort, certain antidepressants that are known to have modest effects on libido, or even pills specifically designed to increase desire.

And, yes, testosterone is an option, too, but women need to remember that the only proof of efficacy is in women who are postmenopausal. On that front, US regulators could make it a lot easier for women to safely use testosterone if they approved a dosage meant for them — for example, by approving a product for low libido. Instead, women are relegated to compounders or forced to adapt high-dose products intended for men.

Given the complexity of our sexual health, it’s probably helpful to stop hoping there will be a single magic pill or potion that can transport us back to our more carefree younger years. That wishful thinking is understandable (and completely relatable). But it can only lead to disappointment and might even cause us to self-experiment in ways that could cause harm.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

‘Original Sin …’

The blame for America’s current troubles lies squarely with the Democratic establishment. Donald Trump’s re-election was always unlikely given his low approval ratings and divisive style. The Democratic establishment turned it into a certainty by: (1) running an aged and obviously ailing candidate (2) using its power over the press, almost a Democratic fief in the U.S., to close reporting on this obvious problem and (3) picking a second-rate vice president on the grounds that she ticked the right diversity boxes.

Different bits of the Democratic establishment were responsible for different bits of this disaster. The Biden family, particularly Jill Biden, together with Biden’s long-time consiglieri, bears responsibility for the first. The Democratic party-media complex bears responsibility for the second. And the party’s increasingly woke rank-and-file bears responsibility for the third.

“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, tells the inside story of Biden’s doomed re-election bid and Harris’s disastrous aftermath in toe-curling detail. The authors demonstrate that Biden’s catastrophic debate performance did not drop from a clear blue sky. The president’s close advisors conspired to keep information about his deteriorating faculties, both mental and physical, from the public — and to some extent from Biden himself. How they imagined this doddering figure could have functioned as president in 2028 is hard to fathom.

‘Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York’

The British equivalent of the Biden scandal was the Prince Andrew affair. Both involved public figures who were incapable of seeing themselves as the public saw them. Both turned on dramatic encounters with reality — Biden’s debate with Trump in June 2024 and Prince Andrew’s interview with Emily Maitlis in November 2019. And both inadvertently make the case that we need a new establishment. One difference is that Joe Biden still retains his name while Prince Andrew the Duke of York has now been downgraded into Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

In “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York,” Andrew Lownie, a literary agent and historian, provides us with hundreds of tidbits, big, small but always nauseating, of the Yorks’ appalling behavior, with his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson coming off almost as badly as her former husband and long-time housemate. The most disturbing revelations concern Windsor’s relations with Jeffrey Epstein that led to his downfall. Both Windsor and Ferguson continued to associate with Epstein long after he was convicted of pedophilia. But there are also hundreds of details about the pair’s money-grubbing and high-living ways, some of them what the British tabloids call “marmalade droppers.”

Both spent the past 50 years turning their royal titles and connections into cash, with no scheme too tawdry and no associates too dodgy. Ferguson was spendthrift to a pathological degree. Reading this book is rather like working your way through a box of Quality Street chocolates — you can’t resist gobbling down the next mouth-watering morsel, but you end up feeling thoroughly sick.

‘Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America’

Sam Tanenhaus’s “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America” is a long book but a thoroughly enjoyable one. Buckley is a big and varied enough subject to justify all the detail, a man who lived many lives rolled up in one: a conservative intellectual and a liberal society dandy, a professional writer and a world-class yachtsman, a champion debater and author of best-selling thrillers; and a one-time CIA agent to boot. There was never a dull moment in either his life or this book.

Buckley did as much as any single figure to forge the modern conservative movement — to take that whirlwind of rage at the liberal establishment that swelled in provincial America, the sunbelt and the suburbs and turn it into a coherent movement capable of shaping presidencies. He was the first U.S. conservative to identify the university — particularly his own university, Yale — as the headquarters of the liberal establishment. He was also the first to see that the various factions of the conservative movement — traditionalism, anti-Communism and free-market thinking — could be fused into one. The great work of the magazine that he founded in 1955, the National Review, was arranging and policing this fusion.

Previous biographers of Buckley have emphasized the way that he purified the conservative movement by driving out the cranks. Tanenhaus, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, tells a more nuanced story: that Buckley always had a weakness for extremists, particularly extreme anti-Communists such as Joseph McCarthy and extreme Catholics such as his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, and therefore bears some of the responsibility for injecting ethnonationalism and theocracy into the conservative mix. The Buckley revolution may have come to fruition not in the Reagan presidency, as many conservative intellectuals have fondly argued, but in the Trump presidency.

‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’

America’s political turmoil, by turns colorful, hilarious and dispiriting, contrasts sharply with China’s disciplined march forward. Every year China seems to rack up new successes: more PhDs, more scientific publications, more nuclear warheads, better and cheaper electric cars. The contrast is partly explained by the fact that America has a free press, while China’s press is a party-boosting megaphone (though America’s free press failed us until it was too late in reporting on Biden’s failing health). But it is also explained by their different approaches to government.

In “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” Dan Wang, of Stanford’s Hoover institution, presents a gripping analysis of the difference between the two countries. China is an engineering state that sets itself firm goals and pursues them with dogged energy. The most visible signs of this engineering mindset are the physical miracles that you can encounter wherever you go across the country: spanking new airports and railway stations, high-speed trains that can carry you at 500 kilometers an hour, skyscrapers that disappear into the sky, all of which add up to a rising standard of living for regular Chinese people.

America is a society not just of laws but of lawyers. Its universities mass-produce lawyers with the same careless abandon that its car companies once mass-produced cars — more are always rolling down the production line. And the American political system, with its division of powers, multiple levels and multiple veto points, provides these lawyers with endless opportunities to throw spanners in the works.

Wang argues that each society would be better off if it learned from the other: China if it put more emphasis on individual rights, as encoded in law, and America if it kept lawyers on a tighter leash and got into the habit of building again. I suspect that neither thing will happen. The Chinese will extend their engineering mindset to social problems while America’s political polarization will further warp the legal system. Wang’s vision is nevertheless a comforting fantasy.

‘The Last Titans: Churchill and De Gaulle’

One of the many peculiarities of our age is that it is an age of strong men without great men. Trump is a weak man pretending to be a strong man: hence his limitless appetite for approval, even from dubious bodies such as FIFA, which awarded him its “Peace Prize” in lieu of the better-known Nobel Peace Prize, and his ever-shifting policy positions. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping may qualify as strong men, if only because of their capacity for brutality, but they are far from great men: Putin, in particular, has trapped his country in a dead end of corruption and war-making.

“The Last Titans: Churchill and De Gaulle,” by Richard Vinen, is a wonderful read because it focuses on two men who were everything today’s leaders are not: strong men who used their strength for good. Vinen, a professor of history at King’s College, London, demonstrates that Churchill and de Gaulle could hardly have been more different: Churchill was garrulous and attention-seeking while de Gaulle was given to long silences. De Gaulle spent months in his provincial home without speaking to anybody but his own family whereas Churchill was always surrounded by admirers, not to say sycophants even when he was trying to get away from it all in his country house, Chartwell,

But both men embodied everything that was best in their countries — and deliberately so. They prepared for power by soaking themselves in their countries’ history and literature. And when the moment came, they bent history in the direction of progress. Without Churchill, the West might have collapsed in 1940 and Germany overrun Europe. Without de Gaulle, France might have become a backwater. Reading this book leaves one optimistic and depressed at the same time: optimistic because it demonstrates that great men can change the direction of history, and depressed because we seem to have lost the ability to produce such giants.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”