The college all-star game/draft combine season is starting to get fired up in earnest, and will officially do so this weekend with the annual East-West Shrine Game in Orlando, Florida.
Our friends from Big Cat Country have some folks that have been watching the practices and so forth in Orlando, and they've sent us e-mails telling us who different teams have been seen talking to. To this point, the only player they've noticed the Vikings speaking with is Boise State defensive end Ryan Winterswyk.
Winterswyk is a 6'4", 270-pound defensive end. After red-shirting in 2006, Winterswyk was a pretty productive player for the Broncos, having recorded 169 tackles in 53 games played. He seems to have peaked in 2009, his junior year, as he racked up 41 tackles that season, including a whopping 17 tackles for a loss, as well as nine quarterback sacks. 2010 wasn't nearly as good. . .he increased his total tackles to 44, but only had 9 tackles for loss and saw his sack figure fall to 2.5. He's basically one of those types of guys that gets a lot of words attached like "blue collar," "non-stop motor," and "puts forth great effort."
The BCC folks will continue to provide us updates from the practices throughout the week. We thank them for providing that to us and the rest of the SB Nation football blogs. I'll have a list of the guys that I, personally, will be keeping an eye on from the Vikings' standpoint when the game takes place on Saturday afternoon on ESPN2.