Super Bowl Week Begins … Monday Cup O’Chiefs

Somewhere in the Texas Nation headed to Dallas

His name was Jones Ramsey and he was the sports information director at the University of Texas many years ago. That’s him to the right.

Ramsey was once asked what were the two biggest sports at Texas?

“Football and spring football,” Ramsey said without taking a breath.

There are very few places where football is more important than Texas. Whether it’s the pros, college or high school, it’s always topic No. 1 on the sports agenda in the Lone Star State.

Except right now, in the aftermath of the 2010 season when things didn’t go right in so many avenues of Texas football. The Cowboys and the Texans had bad seasons and missed the playoffs. The Texas Longhorns had their worst season in decades. No Texas team was in the national championship game in college football.

And to rub salt in the wound, the Super Bowl is coming to Texas. The eyes of football will be on the eyes of Texas and the only thing related to the Cowboys that will be in the picture is their stadium.

Super Bowl week kicks off Monday with both teams arriving in Dallas and escaping their snowy hometowns so they can begin practicing for the championship game. It figures to be an interesting week, filled with great personalities and story lines with two of the classic NFL franchises involved in the meeting.

Our boots hit the ground in Big D on Monday as well and we’ll be there all week giving you some of the better stories and behind the scenes type activities.

Plus we’ll be positing plenty of stuff from Mobile and the Senior Bowl. It was a productive week and provided a chance to get the ball rolling on draft coverage. That will become the No. 1 subject in the league quite soon, even with the labor situation so uncertain. There will be a draft, that’s one thing the parties agreed to sometime ago.

But first, the Texas folks have to sit back and watch everybody else enjoy their football palace, while they lick their wounds from 2010.

PICKING FOR THE CHIEFS FROM THE SENIOR BOWL

I know there are fans that love mock drafts. But throwing up a mock draft together in January seems like such a waste of time. So I’m going in a different direction. Here are the seven players I think the Chiefs will draft that played in the Senior Bowl. The draft pool was open only to those who were in Mobile for the game. I’ve paired them up with positions of need and with some faint idea of where league teams value those players at this time.

Here’s a shot in the dark at what the Chiefs would do with the Senior Bowl talent pool:

• Round #1 – G/T Gabe Carimi from Wisconsin. If there were no underclassmen in this draft pool, then Carimi would probably be a top 10 pick. But the addition of at least 15 highly rated underclassmen is going to push him down the board and the Chiefs should have a legitimate shot at him. He’s athletic, smart and versatile.
• Round #2 – DL Christian Ballard from Iowa. A young man with roots in Lawrence, who used to see Chiefs games at Arrowhead, Ballard would appear to be a strong end candidate in the 3-4 defensive scheme. He’s 6-4, 288 pounds and plays like he would fit perfectly at DE.
• Round #3 – WR Titus Young from Boise State. He’s a very talented receiver, with good to top end speed and very good quickness. Young has a small frame at 5-11¼, 174 pounds. He also has a personality; not sure if that’s a good thing with the Chiefs these days or not.
• Round #4 – NT Ian Williams from Notre Dame. Big, bulky body in the middle at 6-1¼, 311 pounds, he seems to have nice explosion out of the middle.
• Round #5 – QB Christian Ponder from Florida State. He was the Senior Bowl MVP and he had a good, but not great week in preparing for the game. He’s an experienced starter who played some of the best teams in the country for four years.
• Round #6 – RB Da’rel Scott from Maryland. At some point, a back needs to be found to replace Thomas Jones as a legitimate part of the rushing attack. Scott flashed a few times in Mobile. He’s 5-11, 205 pounds and runs well.
• Round #7 – C Kevin Kowalski from Toledo. He’s 6-4, 300 pounds and like all the other OLinemen in the Senior Bowl, he was shuffled between the three spots on the line. Kowalski looked good at center and guard, not so much at tackle.

A TIDBIT OUT OF AUSTIN

This nugget of information appeared in a Sunday column written by Kirk Bohls of the Austin American-Statesman newspaper:

“Mack Brown’s first choice for offensive coordinator, I am told by two sources, was Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Charlie Weis, and the Texas head coach all but considered it a done deal that the former Notre Dame head coach would join his staff in Austin. However, Weis’ high school senior son had bonded with Longhorn defensive coordinator Will Muschamp and had planned to learn under him at Texas until Muschamp bolted to Florida and the entire Weis family followed to Gainesville.”

NFL PERSONNEL FILE FOR JANUARY 28-29-30

• BEARS – team vice-president Tim McCaskey, a grandson of franchise founder George Halas, passed away on Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 65.
• 49ERS – named former WR Bobby Engram as an offensive assistant coach.
• SEAHAWKS – signed reserve/futures contracts with G Paul McQuistan and OT/TE Caz Piurowski.