Last week's Shrine Game practices were the first of three major cattle calls leading up to the 2009 NFL Draft. The second one is this week with Senior Bowl practices. The final major one is the NFL Scouting Combine in late February. Coincidentally enough, Under Armour (the Senior Bowl sponsor) will also be the presenting sponsor for the combine.
I'd imagine over the course of the week Scouts Inc, and others, will have plenty of buzz from the Senior Bowl. For the first time in several years, the 49ers will not be coaching either squad. Of course it will still be a big week thanks to the ever-broadening offensive coordinator search. Pretty much every team will have part of their coaching staff on hand so interviews should be easy enough.
The Senior Bowl website has the rosters as of yesterday in Word documents:
2009 Senior Bowl - North Roster
2009 Senior Bowl - South Roster
Schedule
The week actually got underway yesterday with player check-in and physicals. Practice kicked off today after the scouting weigh-in. Barrows is down there and had a particularly graphic description of the events. As can be the case at times with scouting, physical appearance will quite possibly dictate a lot of later assessments. I'm not a big fan of that, but the tradition of it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
The game is this Saturday at 4pm pacific on the NFL Network. And of course, we'll be here (in San Francisco, not Mobile) all week with any particular buzz that comes out of Mobile. After this past weekend's live blog of the Shrine Game, I've decided to go with that again. Speaking of which, I'll have some wrap up info on the Shrine Game later this afternoon tomorrow.