Today, the Kansas City Chiefs draft season really kicks off when the East West Shrine Game 2011 gets under way at 4 p.m. (ET). The Shrine game is a college football all star game of sorts and the two teams will be coached by Wade Phillips and Dan Reeves. Last year, Romeo Crennel and Marty Schottenheimer were the coaches.
The Shrine Bowl is followed up next weekend by another all star game - the Senior Bowl. Then from there, we have the NFL Combine starting up in late February.
The fun part for NFL and Chiefs fans is that the Chiefs will be talking to various prospects, holding workouts and generally showing interest in particular players throughout these game weeks. We will of course be talking about them.
What we do here at Arrowhead Pride is a lot of fun. We track those interactions and put them in a sortable table that makes it really easy to see who the Chiefs are looking at, at what positions and in what projected rounds. Of course, this list isn't comprehensive and never will be but last year we were able to track nearly 100 NFL draft prospects that the Chiefs interacted with. Not too shabby.
You can check out an example of last year's Chiefs Draft Interest chart here. Personally, I think it's one of the cooler things we do around here.
As far as other draft talk, we'll be posting the bigger stories on the front page but much of the draft talk will be focused in our weekly Rec'd NFL Draft FanPosts. Instead of having each person post a full FanPost asking about a particular prospect, we try to steer much of the more casual draft talk into those threads. Our man stagdsp will usually post these FanPosts, so keep an eye out.
We'll really kick off draft season around here with an open thread close to 4 PM for the East West Shrine Game. The game is on the NFL Network by the way.
Who's checking out the game today?