Yet, what was good then is good now. Being in the middle of the draft board for a week.
“He found that very helpful because he got a feel for their personalities and character,” Mike Brown says. “And that was helpful in deciding which ones he wanted for the Browns in the draft.”
Paul Brown drafted four of the game’s MVPs when he coached. That included Boston University junior quarterback Harry Agganis even before he played for him in the 1953 Senior Bowl. Brown could nab Agganis in the first round of the 1952 draft because he had served a stint in the Marine Corps, making him eligible.
Joe Kuharich drafted two MVPs in his three years, ranging from a first-round pick in University of Miami fullback Don Bosseler to 27th-round running back Norm Odyniec of Notre Dame, a nod to the Fighting Irish Joe Kuharich would soon coach.
“Like we all do, we love the game. He loved to coach the game,” Bill Kuharich says of his dad. “You could get your hands on them. It was an event. It was more of a social event, he would say. They had something every night for the players and the coaches and they treated the coaches so well. And he really enjoyed the chance to coach against Paul.”
Like Mike Brown, Billy Kuharich has seen the Senior Bowl grow from intimate to overwhelming. It’s now the Panini Super Bowl. It used to be the Reese’s Senior Bowl. Live televised practices, never mind the game.
Kuharich, who first went to Mobile in an official capacity with the Saints in 1986, last went ten years ago as a Sirius NFL Radio analyst. “And it was crazy then,” he says.
But there is still the need to see them and feel them and talk to them. Nearly 70 years after he listened to Agganis carve up the South, Mike Brown went to his last Senior Bowl in 2020 looking for a quarterback. No matter the decade. No matter the agents. It always seems like the quarterbacks show up in Mobile.
Unlike Paul Brown before them, the Bengals asked to coach the South team in the off-chance LSU’s Joe Burrow opted to play. It was no surprise or black mark Burrow didn’t, given he was barely a week removed from winning the national title.
The Bengals still got an eyeful from Oregon’s Justin Herbert and Alabama’s Jalen Hurts. Brown and his head coach Zac Taylor were pretty much already sold on Burrow even before they hit Mobile, but they enjoyed being around Herbert.
“I said to Zac, ‘This guy can really throw the ball. He’s got a beautiful motion. He’s strong. He’s got all the physical parts,'” Brown said. “Zac said to me, ‘I still prefer Burrow.’ We all did.”
No quarterback this year. No social events. And Brown isn’t on the ground at Hancock-Whitney Stadium. But he’ll be tuning in again, not only watching the game live, but watching the practices live and then the game tape when it arrives.
“I don’t remember whether it was a North team or a South team,” Mike Brown says of that last Senior Bowl of the ’50s. “I just know that they won, which was satisfying.”