Senior Bowl week and Bengals president Mike Brown won't have to drive into the Boston suburbs to pick up the radio signal from Mobile, Ala., to follow Saturday's game, now beamed to the world on NFL Network at 2:30 p.m.

It was probably the 1959 game. The last of the record eight Senior Bowls his father Paul coached, and one of the record six he won nearly a decade before they founded the Bengals.

Mike Brown, then a Harvard Law School student, would try to pick up Ken Coleman's regal radio calls of the Cleveland Browns games anyway he could. On this Saturday, he recalls being at some sort of a social event when he found a hideaway with a crackling radio that he tuned to the Senior Bowl.

"I had this keen interest in the game because my father was a coach," Mike Brown says.

That's back when there were still bragging rights for this sort of thing. And they coached it because they wanted to, not because they were assigned to it.

They played that Senior Bowl on Jan. 3, eight days after the1958 NFL title game, otherwise known as "The Greatest Game Ever Played," that overtime Yankee Stadium classic where the Colts edged the Giants to put pro football on TV.

Bill Kuharich knows if it was North or South because his father coached the North team that Brown's South team beat that day in '59, 21-12, a month before the music died in the Buddy Holly plane crash. Joe Kuharich, the coach of Washington, took along his soon-to-be six-year-old son.

It was the third time straight year they met in Mobile and the last. Kuharich soon left Washington to become head coach of his alma mater at Notre Dame and Brown's South team was bequeathed to his old Miami University teammate Weeb Ewbank, the coach of the Colts.

"Dad told me he introduced me to Paul Brown," says Billy Kuharich, who spent more than 30 years in the game himself as an exec for three teams. "When I got older, and we would sit around the table and talk about the Senior Bowl, he would say, 'Yeah, I beat Paul once even though he always had to coach the South.' Of course, the South had the better players. He would needle Paul about it afterwards. He had so much respect for Paul. How could you not?"

Paul Brown, the Ohio icon, knew all about Joe Kuharich, the South Bend kid who played in Notre Dame's famous 18-13 comeback win over Ohio State in 1935.

"He had great respect for Paul as an X and O coach. He talked about how Paul was an innovator of the game," Bill Kuharich says. "He felt Paul was always forward thinking. Always trying to find an advantage for his teams. He felt he was ahead of his times."

So, no way Paul Brown was giving up coaching the South. He had coached the North from 1952-55, absorbing his only North loss in a 12-6 verdict two weeks after he coached the Browns to the 1954 NFL championship.

"Then they asked him if he wanted to coach the South," Mike Brown says." If you coached the South team, you were offered social opportunities. When you coached the North team, you went back to your hotel room. And they were just starting to get the bigger, better players. For years, the Big Ten's guys were bigger."

As the '50s evolved, so did the country.

"The community really supported the game, so you knew they were going to give the South the best team they could," Bill Kuharich says. "All those guys from Alabama, Auburn."

There is no more North at the Senior Bow. No more South. Instead, it's American and National. No longer are the draft prospects coached by an NFL staff because the game has also turned into a coaching showcase with the teams led by assistant coaches who have formed their own staffs from across the league.

For instance, the National team is led by Eagles defensive line coach Clint Hurtt. David Overstreet, the Dallas secondary/cornerbacks coach, is his defensive coordinator while the offensive coordinator is Eagles assistant head coach and running backs coach Jemal Singleton, a former Bengals assistant.

Bengals assistant offensive line coach Mike McCarthy gets his own group with the National O-line.

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 27^th-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."