Peter King on the NFL's enduring popularity — and why that won't change soon

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1:09welcome to the sports media podcast i'm your host richard dyke my producers james jackson one guest on this episode my longtime colleague at sports illustrated peter king is of course a noted sports illustrated writer also had a long stint at nbc sports He is here, though, to promote his new book, The Game, which is a combination memoir as well as history of the NFL. It's a really, really fun book to read. If you read Peter's work over the years, whether his Monday morning quarterback column or his reports on television, you will love this book. It comes out October 13th. I believe I am his 87th interview.

1:56for this book and with that welcome peter king richard great to be with you no it's not 87 but i've done quite a few um and what's interesting about sort of i mean look the book is long it's 192 000 words but it basically is 40 stories about uh you know when i started covering the nfl in 1984, there was a Harris poll that year, what's your favorite sport to watch? And football beat baseball 24 to 23%. That year, week seven of the football season was the decisive game of the World Series between Detroit and San Diego. And there was also the same day, that Sunday afternoon when baseball was never afraid to go head to head with the NFL on Sunday afternoon was the Dallas Washington game, probably the best rivalry in the NFL at that time.

3:06And the baseball game outdrew the football game 43 share to 25 share nationally. and uh i told you about how they were basically in a dead heat football and baseball before you know at that time well when i got out of it uh same poll was taken what's your favorite sport to watch football 41 percent baseball 10 so that this book is about how on god's green earth that happened yeah we'll get into that but since you brought this up this was this was one place i did want to ask you about. My thought is that in our lifetimes, me and you, we will not see that change. The NFL will not recede in terms of its popularity.

3:57So I ask you, and I've thought about this a lot, like, so why? Like, what is the reason for it? And I sort of, you know, it's an incredible television game, obviously. The money in the game is immense and you can promote it. I do think, Peter, it has something to do with Americans' love of aggression, maybe a little bit of violence. And then lastly, culturally, it is a massive cultural figure in big parts of the country, particularly the Southern United States. But I'm sure you've thought about this a lot. Why has pro football captured so much of the United States? I think there's a lot of reasons.

4:39Okay. But Richard, I think something that is really important to consider about this is that, you know, the NFL forced America to change. Okay. And what I mean when I say they forced America to change is that they began starting in these, remember, when I started covering the NFL, Pete Rozelle was the commissioner, and Rozelle's attitude was, in essence, absence makes the heart grow fonder. He believed that he wanted football fans after the Super Bowl to go do something else in the offseason, that by getting away from football, it will whet their appetite so that when training camps and late August come around and the season is on the brink again, they will be all fired up.

5:36And that really was not very wise, as it turns out. Because when Paul Tagliabue gets in, he says, you know, we're going to do stuff. He had people in his office who wanted to make this more of a year round thing. Joe Brown, one of the best PR guys in the history of sports, believed that they were seeding, C-E-D-I-N-G, the offseason to baseball when they didn't have to. And he said, why should baseball have a hot stove league and we don't? Because remember, in that first year I covered it, 1984, the draft started at eight o 'clock in the morning. It was 12 rounds. It was one day. It was on a Tuesday morning.

6:23And that was the only event, the only one of the offseason that anybody paid any attention to. And it happened in front of 125 fans in a hotel ballroom in New York City. You know, nobody really cared about the NFL in the offseason. Well, Paul Tagliabue gets in. They're forced by Judge David Doty, the U.S. District Judge in Minnesota who forced free agency on the NFL. They hated it. They were drag kicking and screaming. Turned out to be an incredibly fortuitous thing for the NFL to have free agency come in because it allowed the NFL to have a huge hot stove month, the month of March, when it normally was not like that at all.

7:11They put the scouting combine, Paul Taglio, who put the scouting combine on NFL Network, told Mike Mayock and Rich Eisen, go do the scouting combine, put it on TV. Mike Mayock's dad was a high school football coach, said, nobody's going to watch this. Are you kidding me? And people tried. People did watch it. OK, so not huge numbers, but enough. And then there's the draft, which became an American obsession. And Roger Goodell, I thought it was idiotic to take the red carpet out of Radio City Music Hall or Madison Square Garden or wherever in New York City and bring it all over the country. Oh, my God, you're going to kill the vibe.

7:58Well, I never thought that 600 ,000 people would flood downtown Nashville for rounds two and three. But they did. So, I mean, all of these things, Richard, they made tentpole events in the offseason that never existed when I started covering the game. And that is a huge reason why the NFL got so big. One of the things I like about the book, and again, it's The Game by Peter King, on sale everywhere October 13th. You could obviously get advanced. You could place your advanced order now. is I think it's like every chapter, Peter, it's like you can tell you really enjoyed writing it. You enjoyed the process of it.

8:42You enjoyed reporting it. I had known this, obviously, working with you, but I love the story of how you basically were able to sneak your way to pick up Boomer Esiason when he was first drafted by the Bengals and sort of these guys expecting the team to pick him up and you were there doing it. But is there one was there one chapter in the book that you just like really enjoyed doing more than another? I will say and I thought you did a great job on this. It's not easy. It was it was interesting to read your list of the hundred most influential people in football history, because like as noted as you are, someone else could have a very entirely different list and their list would be legit, too.

9:27So that was pretty fun to read for me. it's just you know one of those things that um i mean it's just going to be an argument starter if anybody really cares to start an argument about it you know should number one be paul brown should number two be pete rosell then i'm sorry uh george hallis yeah that pete rosell and then paul brown somebody else could have three completely different people as the top three But that part of it is just simply about who are the people who made this gigantic cultural institution happen? You know, who are the most important people who did it? It's not who are the best players of all time.

10:12It's who was responsible for getting this done. Yeah. But, you know, you ask about the fun chapters. quite honestly the fun chapters because Richard you know you you know that if you're in this business some part of you has to be extraordinarily curious and you have to wonder when you wake up in the morning uh gee I'm writing a story on you know in your case like I'm writing about the Toronto Tempo I wonder you know what are they going to do on defense against the Indiana Fever or whatever. I'm making up silly stuff. But you've got to wake up in the morning wondering about something and about many things.

10:57And I just, every year when I went around to cover different things, I still had questions. I really had questions and I had a lot of them. And I remember one of the questions that I had, I went into reporting about Reggie White and free agency in 1993. Did he really want to go to the Packers? I think you could create an argument that he really didn't, you know, but he loved Green Bay. He really did. But Reggie White's not around to ask him. Who is around? Well, his agent who was with him every step of the way, walked him through the whole process, Jimmy Sexton, he's around. The two teams who were in it right until the end, 49ers, Carmen Policy, who ran that, you know, seek, the mission to seek Reggie White for the Niners.

11:49He's around. Ron Wolf's around. Mike Reinfeldt, the two brain trust guys of the Green Bay Packers who won it. So there are people in place who are able to tell you why things really happened 30 and 40 years ago. And Richard, as you know, when things happen, people are not altogether forthcoming about why they happened. And that is the case in so many of these cases. that why was Paul Tagliabue crying when I met him five days after the Twin Towers fell on 9-11? Why? I always wondered that. He was a solid rock of a guy. Why would he have been crying in his office with me when I went in to write about him for Sports Illustrated?

12:45Why did you call the games and all that. I'll tell you why. Very simple. Paul Tagliabue worked for the Defense Department when he got a Georgetown Law. And one of his big projects was the possibility of a foreign enemy, a foreign adversary, introducing a nuclear device into the United States. How hard would it be? Tagliabue discovered not really very hard at all. And he was worried about that. at that time? What would happen if somebody put a nuclear device in the cargo hold of a jumbo jet, landed a JFK, and you could control it remotely? All I'm saying is I answered a lot of questions in my own head, going to just very, very modern things.

13:41I wanted to find out how women got to be impact players in and around the NFL, from Donna Ponte in football administration to an analytics person, Sam Lazar for the Baltimore Ravens. How did so many women get involved in analytics to Mina Kimes? Mina Kimes is powerful in this game right now, and deservedly so. And I went and asked the question, how did all this happen? You know how it happened? Because in the words of Nicole Blake, who runs the draft for the Los Angeles Rams now, she's 30 years old. And I'm going to paraphrase. She knows she's got to be 10 % better, at least, than her male counterparts.

14:32But that forced her to work harder. That forced her to know more. And so that's one of the reasons why women have risen, because they understand that people look at them and say, ah, you guys don't belong. Well, they damn well belong. And so those are the kind of things that I really enjoyed getting into over the last 18 months.

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16:39to free range, wherever you get your podcast. One of the things I was thinking about when I read this book, and don't take this pejoratively, but I think it's true. Your timing in terms of when you came into the sport was in many ways perfect. You came in as a print person, so you're working in Cincinnati for the Cincinnati Inquirer. That's a time still when newspapers are incredibly powerful and have a ton of money. So you end up going to Newsday. Obviously, that raised your profile again. Your timing is great that you get hired at Sports Illustrated when it's close to the apex of what that magazine was in terms of revenue, profitability, and impact in the US.

17:23You then obviously moved to television, which still remains obviously a dominant force, although streaming obviously now is part of that world. So your timing in terms of just how you approached all this was perfect. So one of my thoughts, Peter, today, as good a reporter as you've been, and I obviously, you know, I have immense respect for you. If you were 25 years old right now in 2026, I think it's almost inconceivable that you would have had the same career, like maybe no way. Yeah. So you agree with that, correct? No, absolutely. Richard, I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth in this job because I got the Sports Illustrated.

18:03You'll understand this. Not a lot of people do. In 1989, when SI was bigger than ESPN, when I went into Dallas to cover a game in my second year, and Michael Irvin, you know, I meet Michael Irvin for the first time, and he says, hey, he announced to the locker room, we're in a Sports Illustrated game this week. You know, when Sandy Montag, the agent for John Madden, I don't think Madden wanted to do it, but Sandy Montag sure wanted a six or eight page spread in Sports Illustrated on John Madden, taking a bus right across, taking a bus right across the country with John Madden. I mean, I was that was such an entree piece for me, SI, and also not only just SI, but the SI travel budget.

18:59Mark Mulvoy, the managing editor, who is on my Mount Rushmore, by the way, he's on that list of 100 most important people because, you know, when print was king, Mulvoy was king of print. Yep. And at that time, they had one other thing that I needed, and that was an expense account, a travel budget. I could go where I thought it was important to go during the season. In the off season, I could travel around if there was a good story. In training camp, I could go on the road for a month. They said, good, get to know everybody. Now, Richard, that stuff doesn't happen now. Even with the great, even with, you know, like Mike Silver at The Athletic and Zach Kiefer at The Athletic and Kalen Kaler at ESPN and all these great young talent, Jordan Rod Reig, you know, all these really talented young reporters.

19:58and they don't have unlimited budgets to go where they want to go and to meet everybody. So Richard, there's absolutely no question that that played a monstrous role in what I was able to do. How do you, you write in the book, by the time I retired after the Super Bowl in early 2024, the football media life had become an overly scripted press conference dominated, closed locker room, measured, measure every word you utter world. A lot of truth to that. The stars of the media space now, Peter, in many ways are the transaction people, the Adam Schefters, Ian Rappaport, and Tom Pelissero and people like that.

20:41That's where, at least in the reporting end, that's where the big, big money is. But there is a trade-off there. And in many ways, much of what you do relies on agents and much of what you do obviously relies on a relationship with the league. And that probably prevents you probably from going to certain places journalistically. How do you, as someone who was in that space, but not in the space the way like the Schefters of the world are in that space, how do you see that position today? The transaction insider. I stopped doing that in about, I don't know, 16 or 17. I cared about news, but I mean, by that point, I was into it to do stories that were more like a week in the life of a quarterback or tailing an officiating crew and their people during the week.

21:42and in the game on Sundays and all that stuff. So I stopped caring really about those things that were big news. And I didn't stop caring about being a reporter, but I cared about finding out where was free agent X going to sign in the first minutes of free agency. I don't know. I just, it was, you know, Adam, it was, you know, he's the best who's ever done it, I think. And I say that knowing full well how great Will McDonough, Chris Mortensen, those guys were. And Ian Rappaport has turned into a huge, you know, newsbreaker. So, you know, and obviously Pellicero, there's a bunch of those guys who do a really, really good job at that.

22:36And I just thought I'd be a lot more interested in really digging, sinking my teeth into stories. So that's one. But I would say the one other thing about the business and what has happened to the business is that it has become so hard. And it did by the even late in my career, I got no a lot more than I did early in my career, a lot more. And even by people who I knew, because in essence, and Richard, I just asked this question rhetorically. If Travis Kelsey is getting paid, I don't even know what it is, but it's millions, it might be tens of millions, to do a podcast with his brother. And he has to devote most of his energy during the football season to football.

23:33I'm assuming that that's the case. But if he has to devote most of his energy to football, then why would he care about being either available or great for free with the news media when he's getting paid jillions of dollars to be at his most insightful in a podcast with his brother? And he certainly isn't the only one. There are scores of people who now make a lot of money while playing football. They're making a lot of money doing media stuff that didn't exist when I first got into it. That's just a fact of life. So you better have some other edges. And my edge was that I got to know all these people over time.

24:25I've known Andy Reid. I got to know him in 1995 when he was tight ends coach at the Green Bay Packers. And so those are the kind of things that you have to be able to do. If you want to have a long career in this, you better understand that. And I don't really think it's the agents. I think you have to really get to know one, two, three important people with every franchise. And people are going to be there for a while. the quarterbacks, the GMs, maybe the coaches, all these people. So, you know, I think that becomes more important than ever these days for young people in the media. It's interesting.

25:08During the course of your reporting, and I'm sure some of these people were in the book, can you give my listeners a sense of, in terms of people who were really stars of the game, who were particularly open, that you found that they let you in? I remember one time you, I think I was working for you when this happened, but I remember you visited Tom Brady, like maybe it was his home in Montana or Wyoming. And I just was like, I was always struck by the fact that, wow, that's pretty incredible access that Brady let you come to wherever his home was. He's married to Giselle at the time. That's his private time.

25:41So there must've been some or a number of very star players, Peter, who let you pass whatever the gate was to maybe get pretty close to them and get to know who they, at least your best interpretation of who they were. Well, I mean, it's funny, Richard, you know how people, you know, people will look at my career who follow football closely, who read a lot about it. And they might say, and I've had people say this to me, they might say, oh, geez, well, you know, Brady, well, what do you, and I interrupt him and I said, I don't know Brady well. If I had, say, one lengthy interview with him many years and then some 17-minute drive-bys after games, does that qualify as, quote, knowing someone well?

26:40I don't think so. And so that is the first thing I would say. But I think I think here's an example of something for this book that I found compelling. OK, and that is I wanted to do a chapter on Peyton Manning because I consider him uniquely anal in a business full of, you know, anal compulsive human beings. and I wanted to know like five things he had never told anybody before you know and I went and met him in Los Angeles he was doing some uh promos in the off season before the 25 season for uh for the Manning cast and so he was out there taping some things so he gave me a bunch of time on the set one day.

27:43And I remember, you know, him saying to me that what was really important to him over time was to be able, in essence, to never, ever leave a stone unturned. And to always make sure that if there was any one final thing that he could do, he wanted to do it. And he took me into how he prepared for his close up at the NFL scouting combine in 1998. When, you know, like in a stupidly, incredibly, ridiculously anal way, he wanted to be a little bit heavier than people thought he was. So he chugged however much, maybe 100 ounces of water in the hour before he was going to get weighed in. He went so his body might be glistening a little bit.

28:39He did 50 close grip pushups on a toilet stall in the Indiana Convention Center where the combine was just before he stepped on the scale and before he took his picture. And he did all this because he was in competition with Ryan Leaf, a tree trunk of a guy. And everybody looked at Peyton Manning as a skinny little twerp and or a tall twerp, but a skinny twerp guy. And and he wanted to change that. And so I wanted people to get some sense of not only Peyton Manning, the football player, but Peyton Manning, the, you know, look under every rock for every possible edge that he could ever get. and how controlling he was.

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31:35When you, um, when you're, when in the midst of writing and researching this book, were there some people that you had profiled during your career that now in hindsight, you think, I don't know, I was too favorable to them. Or I, in the end, like what was like, I know I've talked to Jeff Perlman about this and he has a couple of, I think Brett Favre is his big one. He wrote a book on him where he says, you know, in hindsight, I'm kind of ashamed of that book. I think I sold the public a story that wasn't really true. So I wonder when you were going back and thinking about all the pieces that you did, whether it was a player or a team or something like that, anything that stood out to you that like, all right, in hindsight, I wish I could have maybe reworked that.

32:20I mean, I really wish I had a couple of times with Favre where I think I really gave him the benefit of the doubt too much. Like on a sack when Strahan broke the sack record, that Strahan might have sacked him anyway. But I've watched that play 20 times over the years and he totally, totally denied it at the time. But it certainly looks like he took a dive to give Strahan the sack record. His offensive linemen, many of whom thought that. And I gave him the benefit of the doubt on that. That's not right. I shouldn't have done it. And so Favre is probably one. I didn't write all that much about Favre in the book

33:09because one of the things I wanted to write about with the Packers, quite honestly, Richard, is I thought the one person with the Green Bay Packers who never, I mean, he's in the Hall of Fame, but he never got the credit that he deserved was Ron Wolfe, the general manager, the architect of that franchise. And in the span of 15 months, he hired Mike Holmgren, traded for Brett Favre, and signed Reggie White. I mean, what more could any general manager in history have done to turn around a franchise that to this day, Richard, just think, if you're a 43-year-old man or woman who loves the Green Bay Packers and you live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, you have never gone into a season without legitimate hope that you were going to be a playoff team.

34:12Never. 34 years, the Green Bay Packers have been legit. They've never been bad. And that is one man's fault, Ron Wolfe, who trained the two general managers or personnel guys who ran the two Super Bowl teams last year. Elliott Wolfe, his son, John Schneider, the Seattle Seahawks. Brian Gutekunst, the GM now of the Packers, has his roots, deep roots inside the Packers system. So all I'm saying is I wanted to write about Ron Wolfe. And I wrote a lot of my chapter based solely on the Packers was about Ron Wolfe. And I wrote some about Farvin there, but I just always felt like there were some times where I didn't write about the obvious thing.

35:05But had I written it, and I did write some stuff that, you know, Favre was gallant. He was incredible. We all saw everything he did. But as I re-interviewed him last at great length in 2019, and he was expecting at that time that he was probably going to pay for his gallantry. And I think you're seeing now with he's got Parkinson's, he's obviously slower than he was, that he probably is paying for it right now. I feel bad for him, but, you know, it was so many of those choices were his choices. What is your Sunday like now? My Sunday is spent with Scott Hansen. And I get up at one o 'clock. I mean, I get in front of the TV at one o 'clock.

35:57I'm not a big pregame show watcher. Just don't really find much in there that I really enjoy. Plus, if there's some incredible feature, it'll be on YouTube in two hours. So I'll be able to see it if there's something that I really felt that I had missed. But I watch Red Zone most weeks. I watch it the week that Kansas City played the Raiders. I really wanted to watch that game. I wanted to see what the Raiders were all about. And, you know, Raiders are legit. And they played a great game, but I wanted to watch that entire game. So I watched the early games on Red Zone, and then I watched that game.

36:41But most weeks, I watch Red Zone. Then I'll turn on the Sunday night game. But if I'm either really bushed or I don't really find it that compelling a game, I just go to bed at quarter to 10. You know, I, I, the one thing that at the end that I just had to stop doing was, um, I just simply had to stop staying awake till four 45. I mean, when you're 37 years old, you can stay up till four 45 and it won't really bother you that much. Yeah. When you're 67, it's a different story. I just had to do it. I knew it was affecting my health and I just didn't want to do it anymore. Last one for me. You're going to do a lot of interviews, obviously, for this book.

37:34You got a big publisher. There's going to be people who are interested in you. So I'll flip it around on you a little bit. Is there a place that you would like to be interviewed? Is there one, whether it's an outlet or a person who you would love, maybe someone you haven't met yet, who you'd love to go on and chat about this book with? Well, I mean, look, over time, I've done a lot of these things for various reasons, whether it just be talk shows or people kind of pumping me for information or whatever that is. I don't really have a... I don't I don't I'm thinking about your question now, Richard, and I don't say gee whiz.

38:25I wish so and so would interview me on. I mean, nobody on 60 Minutes would ever interview me. But I I don't really have a desire to sit down with somebody. I mean, like we we reached out to Bill Simmons, who at least to this point has not shown any interest in doing anything. And I think one of the reasons I just think the Mount Rushmore section of his book was made for Simmons. he'd love to bat around uh you know why uh you know why i have joe namath so high why i have dan marino so low for instance if that's indeed what he would think but you know i don't really think about it in those ways i will say this the day the book is released is october 13th i'm going to spend an hour in studio with Chris Russo.

39:27I love talking with Russo because he has no problem with telling me that I did something stupid or that he totally disagreed with something I did. And he won't necessarily use those words, but geez, Peter, your column, you totally defended Andy Reid. He's the one who lost that game for the Chiefs. And I love going at it. I don't need anybody to tell me how wonderful I am. I love going at it with people. It's fun. It really is fun. So I will enjoy that hour with Russo and wish it lasted four. And so, but I don't necessarily think of anybody else and say, not that I don't, I know this sounds a little bit cocky, but I don't know.

40:16If somebody wants to talk to me, I am delighted to talk to them, but I don't really find myself pining over people who don't want to talk to me. I got, you know, I lied. I have one last one. You're such a, you love to travel. What's one place on earth you haven't gone to that you got to go see before you die? I really want to go to Scandinavia. You know, my wife and I have been to Italy seven times and we went for our seventh time this year, late in the summer. And I said, okay, next year, I really want to go to Scandinavia. I love Italy, love everything about Italy. It's the greatest. I love going to Tuscany and doing nothing other than drinking Chianti and having pizza.

41:00It's the greatest place in the world, I think. But I've really, especially since I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I said, I really want to go to Sweden. I want to go to Sweden. I want to walk those streets. I want to know what that's like. I'd love to see the Fjords in Norway I don't know that's probably one place and you know honestly Richard there's something else I want to go see the Canadians play in Montreal I've been to see the Leafs in Toronto which was cool Bell Center is supposedly like a religious experience to watch hockey yeah I would like to go just because I have so much respect for the great traditional places in sports history.

41:54I can say right now, I think that's probably the only one, you know, I haven't been to a lot of the college football places. I mean, I've been to Notre Dame, but I haven't been to a lot of college football places, but I've been to most state, I've been to every baseball stadium in major league baseball. I have been to every football stadium in the NFL. I have not been to see a hockey game in Montreal. That is something that is lacking. And I'm definitely going to fix that. I don't know. Maybe this winter, next winter, I don't know. But I definitely am going to go to a Canadiens game. I like hearing that.

42:38Montreal is a great city too. By the way, my quick recommendation from college football would be to go to LSU if you ever want to go see sort of football in like one of the most intense situations and then if you do end up going to Sweden email our old Sports Illustrated colleague Michael Farber who has been to Sweden I think a couple times and probably can give you the lay of the land good he's yeah I'll definitely do that we're we're gonna go so uh I definitely will reach out to him yeah the hockey guys uh they know what they're doing in those Scandinavian countries all right Peter King is the author of the game, a really rollicking read about his career covering the NFL for 40 years, part memoir, part history book.

43:23Book comes out on October 13th. You can get it everywhere books are sold. Obviously, follow Peter on social media and you can get a sense of when he will be coming to perhaps your town. He's doing a lot of book readings at some major cities. So check that out. Peter, always great to catch up. And I wish you the best of luck with the book. Hey, thanks a lot, Richard. It's really, really good being on with you. Take care. All right. Stick around, Peter, as we're going to lay out here with our outro. All right. If you enjoy that conversation, check out Peter King's book for sure. Previous episodes, just recently at a roundtable on the end of Tony Romo at CBS Sports.

44:03Check that out. The Dennis Miller era of Monday Night Football. We had Jeff Cameron, who's the director of that excellent documentary. Trey Aikman was on this podcast September 20th. Got a lot of waves, obviously, in terms of him talking about his contract. Damian Woody on September 15th. Suzy Kolbar on September 10th. Again, star reviews and notes are always welcome. Appreciate that. I want to thank James Jackson for all his hard work producing this podcast. Thanks to everybody at Odyssey for their support. Most of all, thank you for listening. We'll see you soon on the Sports Media Podcast.

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