Local links and other news and notes for a super tasty Super Bowl.

Suddenly Seaside and Marina are making national and international news. 

In case you've been living under the bleachers and somehow missed it, Marina native and Seaside High graduate Ron Rivera is now head coach of the Super Bowl favorite Carolina Panthers.

Check out this week's piece "Fort Ord-born Ron Rivera heads to Super Bowl 50" for more on how he went from here to there.

That helped send a television crew from North Carolina to Monterey County.

WRAL-TV featured Seaside High, Fort Ord and the Weekly on a piece about Rivera in the anticipation of Sunday's big game with a segment called "West Coast Super Bowl is homecoming for Panthers' coach Rivera."

Tonight Gusto Gourmet Pizza & Pasta in Seaside (899-5825) hosts a private Ron Rivera dinner for some of his friends and former classmates—though Rivera will be busy elsewhere. (Gusto also knocks 50 percent off select cocktails, wine by the glass and beer all Super Bowl Sunday.)

Other football-and-food related nibbles appear here: 

• Another big Carolina-NorCal connection: Huge Panthers fan Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors has pounded the drum on the Charlotte, North Carolina field before games (the regular ritual clicks with the team motto "Keep pounding"). Carolina QB Cam Newton loves Curry (and consults with another Carolina basketball guy, Michael Jordan). Curry loves Cam, helping host Warriors team viewing parties of the NFL playoffs on the road. Newton will be a first time MVP as his team guns for the championship, just like Curry was last season. Both make the game more fun to watch, and both have more fun than anyone else in the league. They both wear towels on their heads while on the sideline. Curry will attend the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, likely wearing his Carolina jersey with Curry and #30 on it.

• Athletic apparel giant Under Armour—which sponsors both Newton and Curry—has developed an app called MyFitnessPal that invites users to track nutrition and other health elements. Monitoring what foods people logged last Super Bowl, its reps deduced some amusing food stats: Those reporting consumed 90 percent more beer, 67 percent more pizza, 200 percent more tortilla chips, 72 percent more potato chips and 327 percent more wings than an average day. Bonus nugget: Traditionally Super Bowl Sunday proves the biggest pizza day of the year; last year it was dethroned by Halloween, according to MyFitnessPal extrapolations.

• Carmel Valley resident Scott Fujita won a Super Bowl as a linebacker for the New Orleans Saints. In fact, he was the first player to sign with them after Hurricane Katrina, which says a lot about the way the guy thinks—i.e., bigger than football. This week, he's in the news for another effort much bigger than any game: making major inroads in the fight against, and boosting the awareness of, ALS. He's a producer of the Sundance Film Festival selection Gleason: The Diary of a Saint, which should ultimately earn an Oscar nomination for best documentary. More on that with "A look into Gleason: The Diary of a Saint."

• Americans will eat 1.3 billion, or 162.5 million pounds, of chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday, according to a Time Magazine report. 

• The sixth annual Chevron Shoot-Out tees off Tuesday, Feb. 9, during the run-up to the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, with former and current San Francisco 49ers taking on current and former San Francisco Giants for $100,000 in grant monies from Chevron (for 49ers Foundation and Giants Community Fund, respectively). In a bizarre twist, Chevron is arranging for players to have the option to choose between an air cannon or their golf club to drive down the fairway on one of the holes.

• The Monday before the Super Bowl, area native, Monterey High grad, Philadelphia Eagle great, former Kansas City head coach and ESPN analyst Herm Edwards visited MHS to award it two golden footballs as part of the crescendo to Super Bowl 50. Hear what he had to say and get more details on the fat check he handed over with "NFL great Herm Edwards gives Monterey High gold Super Bowl footballs, $10K."