Editor’s note: This article contains images of assault that some may find disturbing.

The Kansas City Chiefs cut Kareem Hunt, one of the NFL’s top running backs, on Friday, hours after the release of a video showing him attacking a woman.

Now, fans are asking a familiar set of questions: What did the NFL know about the domestic violence incident, and did it try to conceal what happened?

The security camera video obtained and published by TMZ shows Hunt and a few other people in the hallway of a Cleveland apartment building. Hunt appears to argue with a woman. He shoves her several times — at one point knocking her to the ground and then kicking her — as other people try to break up the fight.

The victim told police after the February incident that they should watch the video and that she wanted Hunt arrested, USA Today reported. Police said they did not see the video until it was made public. The NFL investigated but didn’t interview Hunt or the victim and also didn’t see the video, ESPN said.

No charges were filed against Hunt at the time, and the NFL didn’t discipline him. Hunt, 23, played in each of Kansas City’s first 11 games and entered Sunday’s contests with the fifth-most rushing yards in the league.

The league and the Chiefs moved quickly after the video surfaced. Almost immediately, TMZ reported, the Chiefs sent Hunt home early from a practice. The NFL placed him on the Reserve/Commissioner Exempt List, which would prevent him from playing. Then, hours after the video came out, the Chiefs announced they were releasing Hunt.

The incident drew comparisons to the case of Ray Rice, who in 2014 was initially suspended for two games after he was charged with felony assault. Rice was set to return to the field when TMZ published a previously unseen video of the incident. It showed Rice hitting his then-fiancée who then fell to the ground.

In that case, as with Hunt, the NFL said it had asked for the security video but hadn’t been given access to it. But according to several reports, the NFL had seen the video but didn’t act until it became public — and until it faced intense public blowback over what many fans perceived as a light punishment for Rice. An independent investigation — which was led by Robert Mueller, now the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — determined that there was no evidence the NFL had seen the Ray Rice video but that the league should have investigated more thoroughly.

The specter of domestic violence and questions about the league’s willingness to address it have lingered since 2014. Other players have been arrested and accused of committing domestic violence. Teams continue to draft players who have a history of domestic violence — sometimes even players who have been seen on camera committing violence similar to Hunt and Rice.

In the wake of the Rice video and widespread criticism of the league, the NFL Players Association set up a commission to investigate domestic violence and how the league could address it. But this summer, two of its 11 members resigned. Deborah Epstein, a co-director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at the Georgetown Law Center, wrote in The Washington Post that the commission was “a fig leaf” and that the NFLPA “is no longer interested in even making a public show of concern about violence against women.”

Days before the video of Kareem Hunt became public, another NFL player lost his job. On Nov. 24, Reuben Foster of the San Francisco 49ers was arrested and charged with first-degree misdemeanor domestic violence — his second arrest this year on domestic violence charges. The 49ers released Foster the next day.

But Foster appears to have found a new home: Washington’s NFL team claimed him, with one its executives calling the allegations against him “small potatoes.”

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A single season playing football might be all it takes to change a young athlete’s brain.

Those are the preliminary findings of research presented this week in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Researchers used special MRI methods to look at nerve bundles in the brain in a study of the brains of 26 young male football players, average age 12, before and after one season. Twenty-six more young males who didn’t play football also got MRI scans at the same time to be used as a control group.

In the youths who played football, the researchers found that nerve fibers in their corpus callosum — the band that connects the two halves of brain — changed over the season, says lead study author Jeongchul Kim, a research associate in the Radiology Informatics and Imaging Laboratory at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C.

“We applied here two different imaging approaches,” he says. One analyzed the shape of the nerve fibers and the other focused on the integrity of the nerves.

Kim says the researchers found some nerve bundles grew longer and other bundles became shorter, or contracted, after the players’ initial MRI scans at the beginning of the season. He says they saw no changes in the integrity of the bundles.

The team says these results suggest that repeated blows to the head could lead to changes in the shape of the corpus callosum, which is critical to integrating cognitive, motor and sensory functions between the two hemispheres of the brain, during a critical time for brain development in young people.

The researchers say their ultimate goal is to help inform guidelines for safer football play for youths.

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A series of MRI images shows the signs of strain in nerve fibers following a season of football.

Courtesy of Wake Forest School of Medicine

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Courtesy of Wake Forest School of Medicine

Since the discovery of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the early 2000s, most of the research into the consequences of repeated head injuries during sports has been on adult athletes. This focus has occurred despite growing concerns that young athletes who experience the same kinds of collisions may also be vulnerable to their effects.

Radiologist Christopher Whitlow, a co-author of the new findings, says while the stories about NFL and collegiate players are very important, they have to be put into context.

“You have to understand that the NFL players were also most likely once collegiate players, they were also high school players and they were also probably youth players,” he says. “To us, it’s more than a question about concussions, it’s a question about long-term cumulative exposure.”

That being said, both Whitlow and Kim caution against making their findings out to be more than what they are: preliminary results from a single study with a relatively small number of participants.

“We don’t know what it means,” says Whitlow. “The natural next question is, do these changes persist over time? Do they accumulate with multiple seasons? And then No. 3, probably the most important: Do they have any relevance to long-term health?”

The results, presented at a medical meeting, haven’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Whitlow says that the team is working on a paper to be submitted to a journal.

These latest findings are actually part of a years-long research collaboration among University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Wake Forest University and Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Gerard Gioia is a pediatric neuropsychologist at Children’s National Health whose role in the larger study is to look at the functional outcomes of kids playing football. He says these latest findings are only a part of the piece of the puzzle they’re trying to solve.

“Everybody wants to know, ‘Should my kid play football? Should my kid play soccer? Should my kid play ice hockey?’ And we say, ‘Can we please study this and understand it?’ ” says Gioia, who has been pushing for funding for more long-term studies into youth and sports.

For now, he says, they still have a lot of unanswered questions.

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Hall of Fame basketball coach Jim Calhoun has returned to the bench — six years after he officially retired. He’s back, not to navigate a powerhouse program, but to coach at a tiny NCAA Division III school that was an all-women’s college for 86 years.

“I think the only person it matters to is my accountant,” Calhoun joked.

Calhoun, 76, now coaches at the University of Saint Joseph. It’s a school in West Hartford, Conn., that’s located just 30 miles from the Division I University of Connecticut, where Calhoun racked up three NCAA championships and 873 wins.

Even though Calhoun has returned to coach a bunch of unheralded Division III players that are mostly freshman, he says that basketball is basketball. The opportunity to be around that kind of excitement was too good to pass up.

“I’m seduced by the game I love. I’m seduced by the idea of teaching.” Calhoun said. “I’m seduced by the idea of watching kids grow and seeing how athletics can fit into that. And so, if you want to call me an addict, I’m an addict to the game that did so much for my life.”

On November 9 USJ played its first-ever men’s college basketball game. It was a home game, but because the school’s gym has a capacity of 406 people, it had to be played at a larger venue in nearby Hartford.

Bill Cardarelli is now the athletic director at USJ. He was Calhoun’s former assistant coach at UConn and was instrumental in plucking the coach from retirement to lead the Blue Jays.

“He’s a program builder and he really, really enjoys that,” Cardarelli said. “He did it at Northeastern [University]. He did it at UConn. He saw that challenge here.”

At Northeastern, Calhoun scored his first collegiate head coaching job in 1972. He moved on to UConn in 1986. There, his teams won NCAA Division I national championships in 1999, 2004, and 2011.

During Calhoun’s first game at USJ, it didn’t take the veteran long to transform into the Jim Calhoun of old.

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Calhoun admitted that he was “amped” during the first game back November 9. He even received a technical foul from an official. But he didn’t think his treatment of the referees was unusual. “Most good officials understand I’m competing,” Calhoun said. “I don’t think I was extraordinary.”

Frankie Graziano/Connecticut Public Radio

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Frankie Graziano/Connecticut Public Radio

He called a timeout with a four-point lead 41 seconds into the game. As his team went down by double digits, he went after the refs. And then, he picked up a technical foul.

In the stands were two long-time UConn season ticket holders that came to watch Calhoun’s return to coaching Software engineers Keith Amato and Mike Biehl sat next to each other in the bleachers.

“He’s bringing the passion back,” Biehl said.

Biehl was wearing a UConn hat and sweater. Amato, his friend, marveled at watching Calhoun coach from a wooden stool.

“He’s up and down. He’s working the refs hard. He’s giving the team a hard-time. He’s back where he needs to be.”

Calhoun’s men trailed by 11 at the half. But they fired up and attacked the dribble in the second half. The Blue Jays won 79-74 in front of 1,800 people — a huge crowd for a Division III game.

Calhoun admitted afterwards that he was amped for the first game. He also addressed a reporter’s question about whether he’d be nicer after being away for six years.

“A kinder, gentler Jim, gotcha. Wrong,” Calhoun said.

He knows his team won’t be in the national spotlight any time soon. But, that’s not why he took the job.

While some might see him now as a big-time coach at a small-time school, for Calhoun, it’s about getting back on the court with 20 players who just want to play.

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It came down to a series of rapid tie-break games, but defending world chess champion Magnus Carlsen has emerged victorious once again.

Carlsen, a 27-year-old Norwegian, has held the title since 2013. He defeated Fabiano Caruana, who would have been the first U.S. citizen to win the world title since Bobby Fischer in 1972.

The two appeared evenly matched in the 12 games they played over three weeks before Wednesday’s climax. Each of those 12 games resulted in a draw, making it the first time in the tournament’s history that no player won a game during regular play.

But Carlsen dominated the board at Wednesday’s matches in London, decisively winning three games in a row to clinch the title.

“After a generally close-fought 12 games of classical, today just felt like slaughter,” commented grandmaster Peter Svidler in a chess24 livestream of the match.

“This was a hard fought match to the end, and I want to congratulate Magnus on defending his title,” said Caruana. “I was up against one of the most talented players in the history of chess, and I gave it everything I had.”

The previous 12 games had been much slower-paced – they could take more than five hours to complete. In the tie-break rounds, the pace sped up a lot.

Carlsen won the best of four tie-break series in three straight games. These started with 25 minutes on each player’s clock, and 10 additional seconds after each move.

If the pair had been tied after those four games, it would have proceeded to additional rounds of even faster games.

Here’s an animation of the final game from FiveThirtyEight’s Oliver Roeder (Carlsen played white):

Carlsen was seen to have an advantage in the tie-break games because he is higher ranked than Caruana at faster play.

But on Monday, he made a decision that caused some chess experts to question whether he was losing his fighting spirit. Even though he was in a more favorable position in game 12, he suddenly offered Caruana a draw, which he accepted.

“In light of this shocking draw offer from Magnus in a superior position with more time, I reconsider my evaluation of him being the favorite in rapids,” legendary chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov wrote on Twitter. “Tiebreaks require tremendous nerves and he seems to be losing his.”

It appears that Carlsen kept a grip on his nerves for Wednesday’s games.

The Guardian quotes grandmaster Judit Polgár from the commentary booth: “What a match. What a player. What a drama.”

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The tragic phone call came in Friday morning.

That’s when Ballybrack FC, an amateur Dublin soccer team, told league officials that one of its players had been killed in a traffic accident on his way home from practice. Fernando LaFuente, sadly, had played his last game.

The reaction was swift. Ballybrack’s opponents that Saturday agreed to call off their scheduled game out of respect for LaFuente, and teams across the Leinster Senior Football League observed somber moments of silence before they resumed play.

There was just one minor issue: Fernando LaFuente is very much alive.

“After my work finished I was playing some video games, and suddenly I got a call from work,” LaFuente told RTÉ Radio One on Wednesday. His coworkers called Tuesday night to check in on him. They’d seen reports about his “accident.”

“They started sending me all these news articles and all these mass media,” he explained. “And that’s how I found out I was dead.”

As it turns out, Ballybrack officials had faked his death.

A Spanish national, LaFuente said he had played on the team since January. But he dropped out about two months ago, when he left Ireland’s capital for work in Galway, on the other side of the country. It appears at least one team manager used his move as a convenient opportunity to wriggle out of playing Saturday’s match.

Later asked why he thought the team did it, LaFuente said they were most likely just struggling with a thin bench as the game approached. “I think maybe they had a rough time getting players,” he told the Irish broadcaster. “They don’t play professionally. Most of them have regular jobs and some of them work in the UK or at university, people moving to other countries.”

League Chairman David Moran said the story began to come apart Monday, when he inquired about funeral arrangements. The team’s response — that LaFuente’s body had already been flown back to Spain — immediately “rang alarm bells for us,” Moran told RTÉ on Tuesday.

“We checked the hospitals, we checked everywhere,” Moran added. “Nobody could find anything about this young fella.”

The jig was up.

“This grave and unacceptable mistake was completely out of character and was made by a person who has been experiencing severe personal difficulties unbeknownst to any other members of the club,” Ballybrack FC said in a statement issued Tuesday, noting that “the person in question has been relieved of all footballing duties.”

Moran has promised a detailed investigation into what exactly happened.

Meanwhile, observers have wasted little time cracking wise about the incident — including some of club’s opponents: “Any of the alive players from Ballybrack are more than welcome to come up training,” Valeview Shankill FC quipped on Twitter. Another Irish club, which plays in another amateur league, was even moved to perform a tribute.

LaFuente himself said that as early as last weekend he was aware that something was up. His former teammates had warned him that he might see something online about his being in an accident but, he told RTE, “I thought it was going to be a broken leg-type accident.”

When he found out the true scale of the lie, he reached out right away to his mother in Spain to let her know that all the reports of his death — including an obituary in the Dublin Herald, LaFuente noted — were greatly exaggerated.

But all in all, this dead man walking is taking it in stride.

“It’s serious on their part, but I’m finding it a little bit funny,” he said. “Because basically, I’m not dead.”

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The World Chess Championship is heading toward a dramatic conclusion on Wednesday, which could give the U.S. its first champion since Bobby Fischer took the crown in 1972.

The players will embark on a series of fast-moving tiebreaks at the event in London, which will get faster and faster if they continue to draw.

Fabiano Caruana, the 26-year-old Italian-American prodigy who grew up in Brooklyn, is definitely the underdog. For 12 games so far, he has taken on the current world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen. And each game has ended in a draw.

“I’ve had mediocre years, I’ve had good years,” Caruana said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “This year has been the best by far.”

According to the organizer World Chess, it’s the first championship match where nobody has won a game through the first 12 games of regular play.

Carlsen, who is 27 and from Norway, has been on top of the game for much of his adult life. He’s held the world champion title since 2013.

But some observers think he may be losing his edge. “He’s a shadow of himself, of his best times,” chess grandmaster Judit Polgár tells NPR’s Here & Now.

Carlsen raised eyebrows at a crucial moment in Game 12, when he appeared to be in a stronger position, yet suddenly offered to leave the game as a draw.

“For whatever reason, he chose not to invest the energy and, instead, proposed a draw after 31 moves, which Caruana accepted,” according to a write-up from World Chess.

That decision was baffling to legendary chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

“In light of this shocking draw offer from Magnus in a superior position with more time, I reconsider my evaluation of him being the favorite in rapids,” Kasparov wrote on Twitter. “Tiebreaks require tremendous nerves and he seems to be losing his.”

At the same time, World Chess pointed out that even though computer calculations say Carlsen was more likely to win when he offered the draw, “the position was complicated and it was clear that it would take a lot of maneuvering, and many hours, if Carlsen hoped to break through.”

“I wasn’t in a mood to find the punch,” Carlsen said after the game, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Polgár said Carlsen has previously been known for avoiding draws. She says the two players are very evenly matched. “I think he lost the appetite of winning, or it is not so much important for him to win again, somehow he cannot motivate himself so much as he could before,” she said.

These past 12 games have been played according to time regulations that mean each game can take hours. The players have 100 minutes each for the first 40 moves, with even more time added after that.

But on Wednesday, the pace of the game is going to speed up – a lot. The challenge of the tie-breaks is that play happens in smaller and smaller amounts of time.

The faster play is expected to work in Carlsen’s favor. He’s higher-ranked in styles of chess with tighter time regulations.

The first four tie-breaker games start with 25 minutes each on the clock, and 10 additional seconds after each move.

After those four games, if the scores are still tied, it moves to even faster rounds called “blitz games.”

First, the players play two games with five minutes each plus three seconds after each move. If they’re still tied, they’ll play another two games, and this could continue up to 10 games total.

And if it’s still even after the end of the blitz games, they’ll go to a round referred to as “Armageddon.”

The player who has white pieces gets five minutes on his clock, one more minute than the player who has black. But, should the game end in a draw, the player with black pieces is automatically the winner.

And unless the referee decides otherwise, according to the rules, the players will have just 10 minutes between each of these tie-break games.

Besides the coveted title of world champion, there’s a lot of money on the line. The players are duking it out for a prize fund of 1 million euros ($1.1 million). If it had been decided in regular games the winner would get 60 percent and the loser 40 percent — now, because it has gone to tie-break games, the winner will get 55 percent and the loser 45 percent.

It’s worth noting that it’s highly unlikely that the matches will actually get to the epic conclusion of a sudden death round.

In fact, according to calculations by FiveThirtyEight, there’s a 0.02 percent chance this World Chess Championship will end in Armageddon.

We’ll just have to watch to find out. Games kick off Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET.

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