The final regular-season weekend of any NFL campaign typically features games with definitive playoff implications, so many teams getting a final shot to punch their ticket, improve their seeding … or watch all of their efforts go by the wayside.

Conversely, almost any Week 18 is going to have its fair share of dogs with so many teams looking ahead to free agency, Caribbean vacations, tee times or even protecting postseason-bound stars from needless injuries. Good luck trying to forecast how those contests unfold.

But we’re here to try. From Texans-Colts and Bills-Dolphins and everything that’s on the line in those highly anticipated matchups … to Chiefs-Chargers and Browns-Bengals and a whole bunch of virtually nothing at stake for those clubs Sunday.

But we’ll prognosticate … as best we can:

NFL Week 18 game picks

(Odds provided by BetMGM. Access more BetMGM odds here.)

NFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.

NFL Week 18 game-by-game predictions, picks, odds

Pittsburgh Steelers at Baltimore RavensHouston Texans at Indianapolis ColtsTampa Bay Buccaneers at Carolina PanthersCleveland Browns at Cincinnati BengalsMinnesota Vikings at Detroit LionsNew York Jets at New England PatriotsAtlanta Falcons at New Orleans SaintsJacksonville Jaguars at Tennessee TitansSeattle Seahawks at Arizona CardinalsChicago Bears at Green Bay PackersKansas City Chiefs at Los Angeles ChargersDenver Broncos at Las Vegas RaidersPhiladelphia Eagles at New York GiantsLos Angeles Rams at San Francisco 49ersDallas Cowboys at Washington CommandersBuffalo Bills at Miami Dolphins

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Veteran running back Dalvin Cook has found a new home.

Cook is expected to sign with the Baltimore Ravens, a person familiar with the situation told USA TODAY Sports. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the matter.

Cook cleared waivers Wednesday and officially became a free agent. The Ravens then jumped on the opportunity to sign the running back. Cook signing in Baltimore comes within the same week that he and the Jets mutually agreed to part ways after he was seldom used in New York.

The Ravens’ decision to sign Cook as they broach a playoff run makes plenty of sense.

Baltimore lost promising rookie running back Keaton Mitchell to a season-ending knee injury last month and lost Week 1 starter J.K. Dobbins in the season opener. Justice Hill, Gus Edwards and Melvin Gordon have been Baltimore’s primary running backs due to the string of injuries at the position.

NFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.

Quarterback and MVP front runner Lamar Jackson is currently Baltimore’s leading rusher with 821 rushing yards.

What Dalvin Cook brings to the Ravens?

Cook isn’t the speedy running back he once was, but he still has tread on his tires. The seventh-year veteran is experienced, can catch passes out of the backfield and still has enough speed and agility to be an effective ball carrier.

Cook had just 67 carries for 217 rushing yards in 15 games in New York. The four-time Pro Bowler and former Minnesota Vikings running back has 6,207 rushing yards and 47 rushing touchdowns in his career.

Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Tyler Dragon on X @TheTylerDragon.

Former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer said in a television interview on Fox News Thursday that he “made mistakes” and was “reckless” in his personal life but has made changes to address that as he seeks to resurrect his American baseball career, including “not having casual sexual relationships anymore.”

Bauer, 32, also noted he was bullied as a kid and as a result sometimes would respond in an “immature” way to stand up for himself on social media.

Bauer discussed this in his first television interview since his Major League Baseball career came to a halt in 2021, when he was accused of sexual assault by a woman in San Diego. He denied he sexually assaulted her and others who made similar accusations, saying they were consensual encounters.

“I agreed to do things I shouldn’t have done,” Bauer told Bill Hemmer of Fox News Channel’s ‘America’s Newsroom.’ “It was reckless. It hurt a lot of people along the way. It made things very difficult for Major League Baseball, for the Dodgers, my teammates, friends, family, people close to me. So, I’ve done a lot of reflecting on that and made a lot of changes in my life to address that.

 “Not having casual sexual relationships anymore, for example. I also − you know, I made a lot of people in the media mad. I was very immature with how I handled things when people would write things about me that I didn’t agree with. I should have just had a private adult conversation with someone.”

HOT STOVE UPDATES: MLB free agency: Ranking and tracking the top players available.

Why Trevor Bauer is giving interviews now

Bauer generally hasn’t given interviews since the allegations as he defended himself in court and filed defamation lawsuits against news media outlets for how they reported on the allegations. Now the former Cy Young Award winner is opening up more with interviews that appear to show a nicer side of himself as he tries to restore his reputation and get an MLB team to sign him.

“I look back on those comments with a lot of embarrassment and regret and that certainly made the situation a lot harder on me then than it needed to be,” Bauer told OutKick’s Charly Arnolt. “I’m trying to repair all those relationships, trying to have those conversations with people. I’ve met those adjustments in my personal life. I’m just trying to do the second half of my career better than I did the first half.”

Last year, Bauer reached a settlement to end litigation against the San Diego woman but still has an active civil case against a woman in Arizona who made similar allegations against him, which he denied.

He told Fox News he’s “grown up a lot, for sure’ but wasn’t a victim.

“My viewpoints now are drastically different than they were five years ago, 10 years ago,” Bauer said in the Fox News interview. “Yes. Things are − different things are important to me.”

Asked if he’s apologizing for anything, Bauer responded, “I’m certainly taking accountability for my role in this. I’ve put myself in a lot of positions that have made things very hard for people, and I’m trying to be better.”

“You made it hard for yourself,” Hemmer of Fox News said.

“Myself, but − yes, myself, but a lot of the people around me, I think, are more important than the − you know, what − how hard it’s been on me personally,” Bauer said.

Will an MLB team sign Trevor Bauer?

Last year, he played baseball in Japan after the Dodgers released him. Bauer was never arrested or charged in relation to these allegations but was suspended by MLB for 324 games, which later was reduced 194 games after a hearing before a private arbitrator.

Bauer has portrayed the San Diego woman’s allegations as a money grab and used his litigation against her to gain access to evidence he says supports that notion, including a video that the woman took of herself shortly after a May 2021 encounter with him at his home in Pasadena. In that video, she appears to be “willingly in bed with a sleeping Mr. Bauer, and is smirking and uninjured,” as his representatives described it.

The woman met Bauer on Instagram and had two encounters at his home that started consensually but went too far, she said. She was diagnosed at a hospital after the second one with an acute head injury and assault by strangulation.

“That’s my goal, is to play baseball here in the United States,” Bauer said. “I’m still one of the best pitchers in the world. I’d like to compete at the highest level. I’m also really passionate about helping people, being good for the game. I think I’ve done a lot of damage, unfortunately, in the first half of my career, and I’d love a second opportunity to do things better.”

Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday.com

Four-time NBA champion Shaquille O’Neal will soon have his jersey hanging in the rafters of three different arenas.

The Orlando Magic announced Thursday they will retire O’Neal’s No. 32 jersey next month. He will be the first player in franchise history to have his jersey retired. Alex Martins, CEO of the Magic, made the announcement during TNT’s ‘Inside the NBA’ pregame show, where O’Neal serves as an analyst.

‘The wait is over. On behalf of the DeVos family, myself and all of us at the Orlando Magic, we want to congratulate you as we make you the first jersey number retired in the history of the Orlando Magic,’ Martins said. ‘You had a great career here at the beginning of your career and we had some good times. You took us all the way to the NBA Finals and it’s finally time to put that number up in the rafters.’

O’Neal was drafted out of LSU by the Magic with the first overall pick in the 1992 NBA draft. During four seasons with the Magic, O’Neal earned Rookie of the Year honors (1993) and led the Magic to the franchise’s first playoff appearance (1994) and first NBA Finals appearance (1995), where they were swept by the Houston Rockets, a team that featured his ‘Inside the NBA’ co-host Kenny Smith.

‘I would like to thank the DeVos family,’ O’Neal said. ‘It was a great four years there. I just wanted to come in and make a name for myself.’

In addition to his Magic jersey, O’Neal’s jersey was also retired by the Los Angeles Lakers, where he won three NBA titles alongside the late Kobe Bryant, and the Miami Heat, where he won a title with Dwyane Wade.

‘You are one of the few men that we’ve ever seen in sports play a game and love the game the right way, create your own path and do it your way,’ said Dennis Scott, O’Neal’s Magic teammate from 1992-96. ‘Now your number is retired in three different arenas. That’s something special.’

O’Neal’s ‘number one fan,’ his mom Dr. Lucille O’Neal, also sent a heartfelt tribute: ‘This award and recognition is well deserved.’

O’Neal’s jersey will be retired on Feb. 13 in a postgame celebration.

O’Neal’s co-hosts – Ernie Johnson, Charles Barley and Smith – doused the Hall of Famer in Orlando-colored confetti and congratulated him, but it wouldn’t be ‘Inside The NBA’ without a little jousting.

‘Why’s your mom so calm and cerebral,’ Smith began, before Barkley interjected: ‘And you’re such an (expletive).’

Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual abuse that may be offensive to some readers or painful to survivors of sexual assault.

Canadian Olympic figure skater Nikolaj Sørensen, one of the world’s top-ranked ice dancers, is being investigated by Canada’s Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner for the alleged sexual assault of an American figure skating coach and former skater on April 21, 2012, according to documents and emails obtained by USA TODAY Sports.

The documents said the woman, then 22, said Sørensen, then 23, held her down against her will on a bed after a party at a condominium near Hartford, Connecticut.

“He pinned me down with his left arm over my collarbone,” the woman said in a report made to Canada’s OSIC and the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a copy of which was obtained by USA TODAY Sports. “He pushed down hard on my collarbone, making me gasp for air the moment he inserted his penis into my vagina and covered his right hand over my mouth.”

The report continues: “All sound at that point became virtually inaudible and it felt like I would suffocate under the pressure of his arm on my collarbone and chest. I pushed my arms against his hips to try to get his penis out of me and I was struggling to breathe. At this point, I feared for my life and let my body go limp as I lay there and he raped me.”

The woman is not being identified because USA TODAY Sports does not publish the names of victims of alleged sexual abuse.

Olympic gold medalist Nancy Hogshead, a well-known Title IX attorney who founded Champion Women, a non-profit legal advocacy organization for girls and women in sports, told USA TODAY Sports that she is representing the victim of the alleged sexual abuse. Hogshead confirmed that an investigation of Sørensen is taking place but said she could not comment further due to a confidentiality agreement mandated by the OSIC. 

Multiple attempts to reach Sørensen via email, social media messages, his coach and the agency that represents him went unanswered. 

Karine Bedard, director of communications and brand for Skate Canada, the nation’s governing body for figure skating, said in an email, “In accordance with our policies, Skate Canada has no knowledge of matters before the OSIC.” 

Bedard did not reply to several requests for comment from Sørensen himself. 

A spokeswoman for the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada said in an email that the OSIC “operates under existing confidentiality parameters and, as such, the office does not comment on any possible or ongoing matters.”

While the U.S. Center for SafeSport has been notified of the allegations against Sørensen, it has no jurisdiction over Sørensen at this time because he is not skating for the United States, according to a document obtained by USA TODAY Sports. However, that document reveals that SafeSport has placed Sørensen on “an administrative hold,” meaning that if he were to apply for U.S. Figure Skating membership in the future (a process necessary to coach figure skating in the U.S.), SafeSport would then begin its investigative process.

Sørensen, now 34, competed for his native Denmark earlier in his career, then represented Canada starting in the 2018-19 skating season. He became a Canadian citizen in September 2021. He finished ninth at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and fifth at last year’s world championships with his ice dancing partner, Laurence Fournier Beaudry. They finished fifth at the 2023 Grand Prix Final in Beijing in early December and are expected to compete at both the Canadian nationals next week, where they are the defending champions, and the 2024 world championships in Montreal in March.

According to the report, the woman said she remained silent for years and never reached out to the police or sports officials because she feared that she would be blamed and that no one would believe her. 

The report said she sought psychological treatment and considered filing a criminal complaint in Connecticut but discovered the statute of limitations for such action had expired. 

Then, on July 22, 2023, according to the report, she opened an online article that included an interview with Sørensen in which he commented about the importance of keeping women safe in ice dancing. 

“I couldn’t believe the words coming out of the rapist’s mouth,” the report quotes the woman as saying. “It hit me at that moment that mothers would likely be sending their daughters to train with him (as a coach) at some point after he retired from competitive skating, and I could not live with the guilt of knowing I never told any authority figures.”

According to the report, the woman filed her report with the OSIC that same day. 

In a sport that has grown accustomed to recycling its national champion from the same small pool of programs, the final game of this college football season will offer something that hasn’t been seen for more than three decades and will sadly never be seen again. 

Big Ten vs. Pac-12.

Midwest vs. West Coast. 

And perhaps most surprising of all given the modern history of the sport, Michigan vs. Washington. 

Since the start of the BCS era in 1998 and extending all the way until the last year of the four-team College Football Playoff, Ohio State was the only Big Ten program to win a national title while Southern Cal was the only program from the Pacific time zone to actually finish the job.  

That’s going to change Monday thanks to this matchup. And then, for better or worse, conference-based chest beating is going to be just one more relic of the sport’s past.

There will be a lot of conversation over the next few days about how Washington and Michigan will be a conference game next season in the Big Ten — a shining moment for new commissioner Tony Petitti and a reminder of the historic embarrassment shouldered by George Kliavkoff as his Pac-12 crumbled this fall.

The fact is, conference pride — including those cringeworthy “S-E-C!’ chants — is a huge part of what has made college football interesting for decades. But it wasn’t just about which logo your team happens to wear, it was a symbol of shared traditions and idiosyncrasies that everyone within a conference understood. It was like being part of a dysfunctional family that could fight with each other all year but still come to the table and enjoy a nice Thanksgiving.

But these leagues we’re about to get next season? 

They aren’t a conference in any sense that we’re familiar with. When Texas and Oklahoma arrive to bring the SEC to 16 members, some of the great backyard brawls that made the league what it is will be turned into expendable games that rotate on and off the schedule. And when the Big Ten adds Washington along with Oregon, USC and UCLA to become an 18-team monstrosity, the only thing that will unite them culturally will be the relentless pursuit of dollars. 

Let’s not forget the ACC, which really undercut the whole Atlantic Coast thing by adding two teams from California (Cal and Stanford) and one from Texas (SMU). Or the Big 12, which was the most regionally cohesive of all the leagues until everything blew up and it needed to grab schools in Cincinnati, Orlando and the greater Phoenix area to ensure its survival. 

These are no longer cohesive leagues that were built on academic and cultural commonality, they’re chain restaurants trying to plant their flag in every suburban shopping center with foot traffic and good parking. You might as well root for Chipotle and Starbucks.

The point here is, if Washington wins the national championship, that should mean something for the institution of West Coast football. Even for Washington’s rivals, it should be a mark of pride that a team could actually do it in the Pac-12 despite all the obstacles those teams have faced. It should be an inspiration to all the high school coaches from Seattle to San Diego who have seen so many of their top players end up at schools like Alabama and Georgia because of the perception that football is taken more seriously down there than in their own backyard.

But what does any of that really mean when college football is no longer a sport where regionality matters? What’s the fun of comparing one conference to another when we now know the real argument is about which one makes the most money from its television contracts?

Sure, they’ll continue to keep score, but the most important game — the SEC vs. Big Ten — is going to continue until they finish consuming whatever parts they want from the rest of college sports. A few years ago, fans from both leagues could get into any SEC-Big Ten matchup because it was a clash of styles and ideologies.

Now it’s a fight for TV windows and the scraps of other leagues that might collapse in the near future (looking at you, ACC). That’s not nearly as charming. 

But on Monday, before college football goes completely corporate, we’re going to get a national champion that truly represents a conference and a region of the country. Sadly, it’s the last time that will mean anything.