What did Pro Football Focus think of how the Vikings performed on Sunday afternoon at U.S. Bank Stadium? Here’s a look at the player grades from the Vikings’ 16-3 win over the Green Bay Packers:

Top 3 on offense (minimum 20 snaps)

Ben Yurosek … 90.4

Justin Jefferson … 88.8

Jordan Mason … 73.7

Analysis: It’s no surprise that Jefferson scored very high across his snaps considering he was a focal point of the offense. The fact that Yurosek finished with the highest grade on offense in an increased role speaks to his potential. It wasn’t a horrible showing from J.J. McCarthy (61.4). He just wasn’t able to finish the game, which, in turn, left a sour taste in everybody’s mouth given his continued struggles with staying on the field.

Bottom 3 on offense (minimum 20 snaps)

Max Brosmer … 35.7

Jordan Addison … 56.1

Ty Chandler … 59.3

Analysis: If anything is clear about Brosmer, is that he can’t be the backup moving forward. He’s very much a project that needs more time to learn the ropes. He lost a fumble in the game in egregious fashion. He fell to the ground, thought he was down, then got the ball knocked out after standing up. As for Addison, he finished a disappointing campaign on a low note, which is fitting considering his body of work from this season.

Top 3 on defense (minimum 20 snaps)

Andrew Van Ginkel … 89.8

Byron Murphy Jr. … 77.4

Theo Jackson … 74.9

Analysis: The standout performances from Van Ginkel, Murphy, and Jackson were highlights from a dominant display on defense. It’s hard to put too much stock into the game itself, however, because it was mostly backups and reserves on the other end.

Bottom 3 on defense (minimum 20 snaps)

Levi Drake Rodriguez … 37.0

Eric Wilson … 52.8

Javon Hargrave … 57.4

Analysis: It feels aggressive to give anybody as low of a grade as Rodriguez given the way the defense played. It was deemed that he wasn’t up to the task as a run defender. As for Wilson, he struggled in coverage, even if he continued to be a beast as a pass rusher.

Related Articles

Takeaways from the Vikings’ 16-3 win over the Packers

Here’s who the Vikings will play during the 2026 season

Shipley: J.J. McCarthy didn’t make a good case to be the Vikings’ starter

Vikings beat undermanned Packers to finish above .500

Vikings star Justin Jefferson eclipses 1,000 yards to keep his streak alive

By MICHELLE CHAPMAN, Associated Press Business Writer

Shares of major U.S. companies in the energy sector are sharply higher Monday after President Donald Trump announced plans to take control of Venezuela’s oil industry and said American companies would revitalize it after capturing President Nicolás Maduro.

Related Articles

Wall Street gains ground as crude prices and oil company shares rise after the US raid on Venezuela

Business People: Great Plains Institute’s Rolf Nordstrom to retire next year

Real World Economics: Geography, topography shaped our prosperity

7 things you may not know about dividends

Your Money: A simple financial health check for any age

While the U.S. action is unlikely to have an immediate impact on crude prices given the current glut in the market, it could upend energy markets.

Venezuela’s oil industry is in disrepair after years of neglect and international sanctions. Some oil industry analysts believe that Venezuela could double or triple its current output of about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day and return the nation to historic production levels relatively quickly, others see a much longer road ahead.

“While the Trump administration has suggested large U.S. oil companies will go into Venezuela and spend billions to fix infrastructure, we believe political and other risks along with current relatively low oil prices could prevent this from happening anytime soon,” wrote Neal Dingmann of William Blair. Material change to Venezuelan production will take a lot of time and millions of dollars of infrastructure improvement, he said.

Any investment in Venezuelan energy infrastructure right now would take place in a weakened global energy market. Crude prices in the U.S. are down 20% compared with last year. The price for a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude hasn’t been above $70 since June, and hasn’t touched $80 per barrel since the summer of 2024.

JPMorgan foresees a brief, sharp dip in Venezuelan production, but said production could reach 1.3 million to 1.4 million barrels per day within two years of a political transition.

“With new investments and major institutional reforms, output could potentially expand to 2.5 mbd over the next decade,” JPMorgan wrote.

Yet almost all energy analysts said the situation is extremely fluid. John Freeman of Raymond James pointed to an abundance of unknowns, including how quickly U.S. energy companies would be willing to invest.

“Additionally, other areas of interest include further actions by the U.S. in Latin America (e.g., Cuba?), along with continued unrest in Iran,” Freeman wrote. “There’s plenty of uncertainty in the backdrop, and clearly 2026 is off to a ‘hot’ start.”

At the opening bell, shares in the energy sector moved broadly higher, particularly companies with large refinery operations.

Venezuela produces the kind of heavy crude oil that’s needed for diesel fuel, asphalt and other fuels for heavy equipment. Diesel is in short supply around the world because of the sanctions on oil from Venezuela and Russia and because America’s lighter crude oil can’t easily replace it.

“A bullish production outlook would be a big boost for U.S. refiners, as much of the Gulf Coast refining capacity is designed to run heavy/sour crude like those from Venezuela,” wrote Freeman said.

Big refiners like Valero, Marathon Petroleum and Phillips 66 rose between 5% and 6% at the opening bell.

Oilfield service companies, those that actually go into the field and do the drilling and upkeep, rose even more sharply.

SLB and Halliburton rose between 7% and 8%.

Major oil exploratory companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips rose between 2% and 4%.

Texas Observer reader,

Call me biased, but I do believe you’re holding a damn good magazine in your hands right now.

Michelle Pitcher continues her ascent as one of the state’s best criminal justice reporters and narrative feature writers. Josephine Lee again takes you into a corner of Houston culture you might otherwise never know (see her prior coverage online of the Taiwanese-Houstonian community and of shaved ice, in its many Bayou City forms). 

Special Correspondent Steven Monacelli braids a local Dallas power play into an overarching state- and federal-level war for control of homelessness policy. And freelancer Gaige Davila takes you to southwest Louisiana to illuminate the future of his native corner of deep South Texas. 

It’s a strong start for the Observer to a year that, for the nation, I can only expect to tend toward the awful.

(Photograph by Jordan Vonderhaar/Texas Observer)

The pattern of a midterm year under a GOP president will play out: Primary beefs of varying levels of authenticity and import will emerge, a small fraction of the country will cast some votes, hope will be found. The tea leaves of special elections will be read and, likely, will portend well for Team Blue. Money—not enough for most, too much for a few—will be spent. The best case for American small-d democracy: A leg of the national Republican tripod will be kicked out come November. 

The problem? Trump hardly needs a well-functioning Congress to further his agenda of racialized collective punishment and personalized legal vengeance. He’s got his liberated executive branch, which, frankly, the nation’s citizenry as a whole bears some responsibility for allowing. And he’s got the courts for… suffice it to say, a long time into the future.

In other words, barring the intervention of an angry god (not a bad idea), we’re just getting started. You and I, that is, are just getting started. 

Whatever you’re doing now to shift the winds of fate toward a better future for the world’s children who didn’t do a blessed thing to deserve all this mess, well, I regret to remind you that you’ve still only just begun. 

So, here’s to 2026. It’s coming one way or another.

Solidarity,

Note: To be the first to get all the stories in our bimonthly issues, become a Texas Observer member here.

The post Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our January/February 2026 Issue appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday announced that he is issuing a letter of censure to Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona over the lawmaker’s participation in a video that called on troops to resist unlawful orders.

FILE – Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., refutes efforts by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to intimidate him and other lawmakers after expressing concerns over U.S. military strikes against vessels suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean, during a news conference at the Capitol, in Washington, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Hegseth said that the censure was “a necessary process step” to proceedings that could result in a demotion from Kelly’s retired rank of captain in the U.S. Navy.

The move comes more than a month after Kelly participated in a video with five other Democratic lawmakers in which they called on troops to defy “illegal orders.” President Donald Trump accused the lawmakers of sedition “punishable by DEATH” in a social media post days later.

In November, Kelly and the other lawmakers — all veterans of the armed services and intelligence community — called on U.S. military members to uphold the Constitution and defy “illegal orders.”

Related Articles

US capture of Maduro divides a changed region, thrilling Trump’s allies and threatening his foes

Trump’s plan to seize and revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry faces major hurdles

Trump says that Ukraine didn’t target Putin residence in a drone strike as Kremlin claims

This Jan. 6 plaque was made to honor law enforcement. It’s nowhere to be found at the Capitol

Maduro and his wife to be arraigned in Manhattan Federal Court

The 90-second video was first posted from Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s X account. In it, the six lawmakers — Slotkin, Kelly and Reps. Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander and Chrissy Houlahan — speak directly to U.S. service members, whom Slotkin acknowledges are “under enormous stress and pressure right now.”

Afterward, Trump accused them of sedition “punishable by DEATH,” reposting messages from others about the video and amplifying it with his own words.

Kelly, along with some of the other Democrats in the initial video, have sent out fundraising messages based off the Republican president’s reaction to their comments, efforts that have gone toward filling their own campaign coffers and further elevating their national-level profiles.