Peter King on serendipity, change, and a life spent covering the NFL

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2:18Peter King is Peter King. Don't really need to tell you who Peter King is. legendary sports illustrated writer, my boss for a little bit of the MMQB, which we dug into a little bit today. Peter King's book, about 40 years covering the NFL, the game was released October 13th. And we got a chance to talk to Peter on the day the book came out about some of the stories behind it, what it was like covering the NFL in the eighties, how much of that stuff has changed following Reggie White through his free agency period, picking up Boomer Esiason at the airport the day after he got drafted, even though he wasn't supposed to.

2:51Four decades of stories of perspective on how the league has changed, the way we cover the league and how that has changed. Really, really enjoyed my conversation with Peter. Let's get into it right now.

3:08Joining us today, I mean, a man who really needs no introduction to talk about his new book, The Game, covering the NFL for 40 years at Sports Illustrated and various other places, which we'll dig into. It is my old boss, Peter King. Peter, how are you doing? Hey, listen, I was your boss for too short a period of time. Your ascendancy kind of made our time together very short, but I loved when we did work together. That's a very flattering way to frame that time. I would disagree with that framing, but it was, you came to me at a time when I absolutely needed it. Grantland had just folded. I did not have a job.

3:50I did not know what I was going to do. And you asked me if I wanted to come work at SI for the rest of the season, right? It was October and I stayed. I originally was just going to stay through the season, but then ended up staying through the draft. It's so funny. I was thinking about that time this morning and I think it was a combination of the work that we were allowed to do at MMQB and the types of stories we were able to chase. But also just the 2015 season to me was such a fun year. I just remember so many things about it. Like I did a feature about Andy Dalton because that was the year where Andy Dalton was like an MVP candidate.

4:25And that was the year where Cam won the MVP. And so I did a story about the friendship between Cam Newton and Steph Curry at the time because Steph was really ascending as a player. For whatever reason, I think for a few different factors, I really do fondly remember and deeply remember a lot of the stories that I got to write in that like four or five month period. Hey, the story I remember is Jihad Ward. That's right. That's right. You did a story on this guy who had no business by his background ever being a candidate to play in Division three NESCAC, never mind the NFL. And you you killed it.

5:06This guy, Jihad Ward, who had a few cups of coffee in the NFL and he just had this crazy, crazy backstory. And you did a great job with it. Oh, he had to he went to a small school in New York before transferring to Illinois. And he had to take like a ferry and three buses to get to practice. And so I, and this was, it was, you, you allowed us to do stuff like this, which I really appreciated. I went to New York and I retraced his commute to practice that he had to do every single day. And so I'm taking all these buses and these ferries to Staten Island to get to where the practice field was. And that was a very fun story.

5:45I'll tell you what that time. so it was the spring of 2016 and you guys had offered me a chance to stay at SI and that was we had dinner in Indy at the scouting combine at Bluebeard it was at Bluebeard we had dinner that night and I was trying to decide whether I wanted to stay at SI or go to the ringer I was convinced when I left dinner that night I called Mark Moravik our co-editor and said we're going to lose Mays and so anyway whatever I'll tell you what, it was a lot closer than you remember it. I agonized that week. I was just pacing around my apartment because there was something so attractive about going back and working with everyone at the ringer.

6:28And I felt like we kind of had some unfinished business and I was chasing that again. But at the same time, like the idea of getting to work at SI and getting to work with Adam Dewarson and just all the people that were editors there at the time. Dewarson's great. I'll tell you what, it was a much harder decision than you're making it out to be. I appreciate the fact that you even gave me the decision to make. So let's dig into the book. I want to start where the book starts because it speaks to a theme that I want to touch on a lot here. It's 1984. You are a Bengals beat writer in your first job covering the NFL.

7:01You're in Sam Weish's office a couple days before the draft, the week before the draft. And he says to you, do you want to know who we're going to draft with our draft picks? And so everything about this interaction, the idea that you're just sitting in the coach's office a couple of days before the draft and that he's just openly willing to tell you who the players are that the Bengals were thinking about drafting that year. I'm not sure there is a better note on which to start a discussion or just a lesson about how much things have changed and how we talk about and cover the NFL in 2026 compared to what it looked like in 1984.

7:37I mean, look now, you know, no one would share any sort of even halfway inside information on a guy they were thinking of drafting in the seventh round it's treated as a CIA secret um and never mind uh Sam Weich the coach of the Bengals rattling off six or eight names uh basically almost I forget I think all but two of whom they did draft. And I first thought he was kidding. So I found a phone number for Ricky Hunley, who was a linebacker from Arizona. And he was the first name that Sam mentioned. We're going to take Ricky Hunley. They had three first round picks. Then we're going to take Boomer Esaias.

8:26And then we're going to take Brian Blados. Then we're going to all this. And I called Hunley and he says, man, Bengals have been all over me. Yeah, they're really, really interested. I said, wow, maybe he's being serious. I don't know. But I think that just speaks to a time that we didn't treat the NFL like it was the most important thing in the world. You know, just, I mean, one of the reasons why I was born at the absolute perfect time and got into this business at the absolute perfect time and had the first job at the perfect place. Robert, imagine watching practice in training camp many days, standing with Paul Brown for two hours.

9:10Yeah. I mean, imagine, you know, there being so few rules around the Bengals' coach's office that I used to just walk through the office some days. I remember sitting down with Jim McNally, one of the best offensive line coaches of his day, and him teaching me about offensive line play. He was just unbelievably, the Bengals were just an open book. It was tremendous. And so that was great. Having players like, you know, like Chris Collinsworth and Boomer Esiason. I mean, imagine having those two guys, you know, the open books of the NFL, especially Boomer. Two guys who have had decades long storied media careers.

9:57Listen, Boomer Esiason the other day just got inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. I mean, just it's all I was with Boomer today as I go on this little tour to promote my book. And and I just say, do people have any idea how much you've done in your career? Because, I mean, think about it. 38 years ago, right now, this year, October, November, December 1988. 1888, Boomer Esiason was the best quarterback in football, was the MVP in a runaway. And, you know, and then he goes on to, I mean, geez, he did Monday Night Football with Al Michaels. He did. Anyway, all of this stuff. I was just fortunate.

10:42Truly, true. I'm not it's not a cliche. I'm not being humble. I mean it sincerely. And then getting to Sports Illustrated in 1989. 1989, I mean, come on. At that time, SI is bigger than ESPN. And it just, it was just one of those things that, you know, a lucky star, whatever, smiled on me. Do stars smile? A lucky star fell on the top of my head and I took advantage of it. And, but, but you know what? I, the way I feel about it is, you know, yeah, yeah, I had a lot of breaks, but you know what? I made some of my own breaks too. Absolutely. And I think that there are even little moments in that those first couple chapters where that sticks out, like the idea that you went to the airport to secretly pick up these guys that were drafted by the Bengals and told them that you were their ride from the airport, even something like that, that to me is a perfect example where of course the idea, and I feel this way about my own very small career compared to what you've done, but you just, you get into these moments of real serendipity that kind of drive you forward.

11:50And there are plenty of those, but you still have to take advantage of it. And so you going to do something like that, where you're like, Hey guys, I'm your ride from the airport. The thought that you would even try to do that is just something that I think not a lot of people would even consider in that moment. Well, I mean, look at that moment, all I was thinking is, Hey, I could get 25 minutes with the first and second round pick, Pete Koch, the middle first round pick, and then Boomer, the second round pick. And you know what I really remember about that a lot? Boomer Esiason was hot that day.

12:28And here's why. He was the 38th pick in the draft. He thought he was going to be a high first round pick. That Mel Kuyper was in his infancy then. But he thought Boomer might be the first pick in the draft. He was the, he was on the cover of his, his, his draft guide that year. But what I never forget is that Boomer gets in the back seat. And first of all, it is a two door Volkswagen hatchback. With your kid's car seat in the back, right? With Laura, my daughter, Laura, who's now 43, was eight months old. And Laura, Laura's car seat was there. I said, oh my God, I forgot to take the car seat out of the car.

13:07So as I get out of the car and I stuff it in the little trunk, and then they each have duffel bags when they get off the plane. So I got to figure out a way to stuff it in there without, you know, breaking something or whatever. And then, you know, you're in a two-door car. You got to pull the seat back. And Boomer has to crawl in the back seat because Pete Koch is 6 '6", 285. So he's sitting in front. And Boomer's 6 '5", 230. and he crawls in the back and he gets there and he stretches out. He's got to fold it into the back. And, you know, he said, welcome to the bleep in NFL. I mean, he was disgusted.

13:47He was mad that Bobby Beathard didn't take him. Washington ended up picking a lineman from Oklahoma who never played a snap in the NFL. And Boomer just thought everybody was pulling his leg going into the draft. And so he was angry when he got drafted. He was angry when he landed in Cincinnati. So I kind of bore the brunt of that, but it was worth it. There are a couple other things I want to ask about the Bengals time specifically. But before we dig into those, I just want to ask you about the process of putting the book together, because the way that you're talking about it now, there's such specificity to the details and the anecdotes from a 40 year career.

14:26Do you have journals? Do you have notebooks from back then? Is this all done from memory? Like what was the process of going back and kind of recreating a lot of these stories from the early parts of your career? The way I started it, Robert, was I had notebooks starting like when I got to SI. I really didn't save my stuff when I was at the Cincinnati Inquirer and then at Newsday for four years. I just didn't save it. So what I did was I had I hired an assistant and I had her go back and find very specific things. She didn't get every story I wrote at the Cincinnati Inquirer, but she went and found a lot of stories.

15:09I just gave her some keywords and she found it. She found one story about I was doing a diary with a linebacker from Miami of Ohio named Brian Pillman. And one night, Pillman told me a story that Larry Kinnebrew, an overweight guy, a running back who was trying to make the team, but he was on a very, very strict diet. He, uh, stole, uh, Brian Pillman's cheeseburger that he got every night from McDonald's and he stole it and he inhaled it. And he told me the story Pillman told me. And then it it's in the inquirer in, in the diary that Kinnebrew stole his cheeseburger. Kinnebrew gets fined 500 bucks.

15:52And Robert, but he walks up to me and on the sideline of training camp practice. And Larry Kinnebrew is maybe 6 '1", 260. And he walks right up to me and he gets one inch from my nose. And he goes, that wasn't no nice thing you wrote in the paper. And I said, well, okay. But anyway, I had her go find things like that. And she found it. And then I called people. You know, I called, unfortunately, Sam Weich is dead, but I called Boomer, had a long conversation with Boomer and called a couple of people with the Bengals. And and that was the process of the whole book. You know, 1985, Pete Rozelle, I interviewed Pete Rozelle.

16:40That was late in his tenure. He was kind of a beaten man at that point. and Joe Brown, who was in the interview with me, the longtime NFL VP of public relations, I had three or four different long conversations with him about Roselle. I talked to Paul Taglia about Roselle and talked to Paul Taglia about his term too, five months before he died. 1987, the player strike, the most amazing thing that people of a certain age know, but people of Robert Mays' age, you know, it's like this weird legend. But you realize that at one point in 1987, the players went on strike and the NFL said, well, bleep you, we're going to play anyway.

17:24And they hired guys. For instance, there was a truck driver from Illinois who went to play tackle for the Buffalo Bills. Lawrence Taylor crossed the picket line and had to face this guy in the game. And the guy got seven penalties called on him for trying to block or take down Lawrence Taylor the whole day. And at the end of the game, Taylor goes up to him and he goes, hey, sucker. And this guy like a clenches his fist like, oh, my God, Taylor's going to fight me. And Taylor goes, great game. And just walks away because Taylor loves the WWE. He loved the WWE aspect of that, the weirdest game he ever played in.

18:09But the one other thing about the strike here, how about this? The quarterback for the Chicago Bears strike team in the first game that they played, one of the two quarterbacks who played in the game was Sean Payton. How about Sean Payton playing for Mike Ditka? How about the color man for CBS doing that game, Terry Bradshaw? Terry Bradshaw talking about what a great athlete Sean Payton was and I sent the recording to Payton and he listened to it and he goes, oh my God, he called me a great athlete. I mean, you know, what was Terry Bradshaw thinking? But the other funny thing Bradshaw said is the reason why all the strike players love Ditka, we get on the plane in Philadelphia after that game and on every player had on his seat a plastic bag filled with ice and three cans of beer.

19:05And he said, so everybody now is going to run through a wall for Ditka. So anyway, but I went back and was able to find out all of these things, quite honestly, I never knew. All right, before we move on, let's take our first quick break. Football season has arrived. And with the U.S. Bank's Smartly Visa signature card, you earn an unlimited 2 % cash back on every purchase, including at the stadium or at home, watching on a brand new TV. Score big with unlimited 2 % cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com slash smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc.

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22:52There's something, again, getting back to the serendipity, that having Sam Weiss be the first coach that you cover day to day. I had one conversation with Sam before he passed. And obviously he's much older than, but he was a fascinating character. Fascinating. And I'm wondering, do you feel like that being the first coach that you covered influenced the way that you thought about the league or wanted to cover the NFL? Yes, yes, yes. Because I saw so many people in the league really hate Sam and think Sam was poison, you know, to the NFL. He was just, he was a terrible influence. I mean, Chuck Knoll, look, Chuck Knoll's fantastic, deserves every bit of credit for totally changing the Steelers and making them one of the great franchises in any sport in the world.

23:46But Chuck Knoll called him Harry High School, talked about him derisively all the time because of this no-huddle offense. He didn't think, he thought that was cheap and tawdry and terrible. and awful and against the spirit of the rules. Sam said, show me a rule where we have to get in the huddle. Who said I have to get in the huddle? Jerry Glanville hated him. He was counterculture. And Jerry Glanville was, you know, he and Jerry Glanville had the biggest rivalry of any two coaches I ever covered. By far, not even close. Sam once ran the score up on Jerry Glanville in a game and with, you know, 58 points, 58 points in the last minute of the game, kicked an onside kick, recovered it, and then kicked a field goal to make it 61.

24:42I mean, that's how much Sam Weich hated Jerry Glanville. Asked after the game, hey, Sam, you know, I mean, that was unbelievable out there. You have any regrets? He said, yeah, I got a regret that the game wasn't five quarters, it was four. You know, he wanted to score more. But Sam was a nutty professor, but the fact is he was also a beautiful mind. And he came up with so much cool stuff that you never saw before. And I said to myself, this is a guy who gets it. He wants to be different from everybody else. And good, good. Why do you want to just run it 62 % of the time, three yards in a cloud of dust?

25:29Hey, look, Paul Brown did that with Jim Brown. I would do it too with Jim Brown, okay? But this is a different time, a different place. And the guys who played for Sam, they rolled their eyes about him sometimes because he was kind of nuts. But they loved playing for him because every day was an adventure. and I think at the same time so Sam Sam Weish is doing that Bill Walsh should come on the scene a couple years earlier and you write this in in the first chapter of the book you have Marino John Elway Jim Kelly all coming into the league around like 1984 when you're covering the Bengals and so the football establishment couldn't ignore that there were more imaginative brains running more modern offenses Bill Walsh wasn't a singular outlier anymore and so beyond just the people in Cincinnati at the time, the way the league was changing and some of the dynamics around that and just the aesthetics of the sport are shifting pretty dramatically right as you're starting to cover the league day to day and be invested in telling the stories about it.

26:31Without any question. And I think one of the things about that time and listen, Robert, It's the exact same thing five years later, okay, where all the establishment people are saying, oh, Jimmy Johnson, what a rube. He's playing with 225-pound inside linebackers. We are going to steamroll him. Can't wait to play Jimmy Johnson. My God, you know, Godfrey Miles and Dixon Edwards. Oh, bring them on. let's do it and then you know you saw what happened speed won on defense it wasn't just you know these crushers winning on defense with the 265 pound you know inside linebackers let's say or 255 maybe is fairer but I think anytime anybody comes in and attempts to change the rules You know, again, this is not meant to, we'll get back to that, but I'm reminded of, you know, when Pro Football Focus came into being and they started, yeah, maybe really starting to be heard of and people are using them a little bit, maybe 15 years ago.

27:56And then the pro football focus got so big that by 2017, the winning play in the Super Bowl, Eagles over Patriots, was helped materially. The touchdown pass to Zach Ertz that won the Super Bowl. That was a play that Frank Reich, Mike Groh, Doug Peterson got by studying stuff from pro football focus in bunch formations. But be all that as it may. Remember, pro football focus is garbage. You can't judge everybody. And look, it's not perfect, but there's something to be said for trying new things and saying, I'm going to watch the left guard on all 68 snaps of this game. And then because nobody else is.

28:51And then I am going to make a judgment on that left guard about how he played in this game. Was it perfect? No. Was it better than nothing? Yes. And so I think that is one of the great things that I recall about what Sam Weich did for the game of football. And just five years later, what Jimmy Johnson began to do for the game of football. So many of the memorable things I remember you doing at SI were just providing context for some of the biggest moments in NFL history the morning after they happened or the two days after they happened. You were sitting with that. Andy Reid showed you the Wasp play after that game.

29:29And I think you were one of the first people to name it, to talk about it that way. What of those moments sticks with you from your career? Like those morning after night of things that where you just got a deeper understanding of one of the pivotal moments in the history of the sport. Of those, which sticks with you all this time later? Well, I think you mentioned it, two-jet chip wasp, where the 49ers are going to beat the Chiefs. And there's whatever, nine or 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter. And they've got, I think it was third and 14. And luckily, no one ever talks about this, Robert, But luckily at that moment, there was a replay review.

30:13And Patrick Mahomes, they didn't want to use a timeout because they knew they were going to need him. Patrick Mahomes comes to the sidelines, runs over and says to Eric Biennemi, do we have time to run WASP? And the reason he asked him that is WASP essentially is kind of a clear out route by Tyreek Hill. You run down maybe 20 yards and then it's sort of a choice route. OK, it's it. You have to make a judgment when you get to that point, whether you should run an out, whether you should run a go, whether you should run, you know, run a post. What what exactly should you do at that moment? And so basically Tyreek Hill gets there and he sees, hey, I got a hole here.

31:06I'm running a corner route. And he runs the corner route and Patrick Mahomes sees him. And the reason he said, do we have time to run Wasp? The reason is because he'd been getting banged around by the 49ers and they did not think that they were going to have time. But Andy Reid, this is why I write, I have a chapter about Reid and Mahomes. And I think it's the best quarterback coach relationship I've ever seen in my 40 years because when Patrick Mahomes comes to the sidelines and says to be enemy, do we have time to run Wasp? And they get Reed involved in it. Reed knows that that's the play Patrick thinks will work.

31:47If Patrick likes it, Reed likes it. And they called the play. It worked. Obviously, they go on to win the game. And Andy, after the game, told me about that play. and you might say, well, geez, why did he pick you? Why didn't he tell whoever, Vi Gregorian from the Kansas City Star, Seth Wickersham from ESPN, why did he pick you? And it's got a little, a tiny backstory. I'll tell you very quickly. 1995, I'm doing a story in Green Bay and Andy approaches me, he's the tight ends coach. and he goes, hey, at one point I wanted to do your job. Really? Yeah, I wanted to write for Sports Illustrated. I wanted to write about football.

32:36I wrote for the school paper at Brigham Young. I said, wow, that's cool. So, you know, you meet and you file it away. So over the years, Andy was always really good to me when I would come into Philadelphia to cover a game or later Kansas City. And it's because I think he saw him in me and he thought that, hey, there but for the grace of God go I. And I just think over the years, he felt comfortable because he wanted the story told. I think he thought that I would tell the story correctly. And so he did a bunch of those things with me. And for those things, I'll be eternally grateful. All right, before we move on, let's take one more quick break.

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36:35speaking of green bay i love the chapter about the start of free agency in 93 and you getting to tag along with reggie white and jimmy sexton throughout that entire process and the i think the number one thing that jumped out to me you're doing you're filing away and kind of marking the dates that they're taking these trips to these teams and as i'm looking at that my thought processes. He spent three weeks visiting these teams and figuring out where he would head in free agency as the prize of free agency when now it happens in 10 seconds as soon as free agency starts. Do you want to know why, Robert?

37:12Remember, the first year of NFL free agency, Reggie White basically got papal dispensation. He was the only guy in that first class, the only big star in the first class because free agency wasn't going to start in toto until 1994. But because Reggie White was one of the named plaintiffs on the case, Doty, the judge in here, and I forget the mechanics of it exactly, whether it was Doty or whether it was somebody else, but I think it was Doty basically said, okay, you get to be free right now. You can pick whatever team you want. He was under no time pressure whatsoever. Everybody had to deal with his timeline.

37:55And so that was tremendously informative. I only went with him for a short part of the trip, but then I followed the rest of it, you know, by phone and all that stuff. And Sexton at the time, you know, I got to really like Jimmy Sexton because the one thing about Jimmy, he was young. He was, I'm guessing maybe he was 26 or 27 at the time. He was just, he was like a little younger than me, I think. And he basically was afraid of nothing. The best agents are, right? Yeah, yeah, he was afraid of nothing. And he wasn't unreasonable at all. He did a really good job for Reggie White. And it's just so many really, really cool things.

38:43The one thing I'll never forget about that story when I didn't know this. And so this goes back to this goes to the let's go back and find out more about it today. that when Reggie White was on the road on his first trip, he was on the road for maybe six or eight days, and then he went back to Tennessee to relax for a few days in between trips. And he goes back, and he's got whatever, 92 voicemails on his thing. And the last day he was in Green Bay, Mike Holmgren said to him, Reggie, I got to know, what is going to make your decision about where you're going to go? And Reggie White said, I'm going to pray on it.

39:27I'm going to let God make that decision. And that's the way Reggie talked. He had a hoarse voice. And so Mike said, OK. So the next morning, Mike knew that Reggie wasn't home yet. He knew he'd be home soon. So he called his voicemail. He knew it would ring to voicemail. And he said, Reggie, this is God. I'm telling you, go to Green Bay. and you know Reggie thought that was the funniest thing he ever had he saved the voicemail and and always would play it for people thought it was so cool I mean it's an incredible story and it just I think it does speak to the idea of if if teams actually did that now obviously they can't for so many different reasons but part of the reason that I think he made that decision he really liked Ray Rhodes he really liked the relationships he had with the coaches that he was visiting with.

40:16And now outside of maybe a quick phone conversation, if you're Jalen Phillips, you've got to make these life decisions without doing the, without doing the full, your agent tells you, Hey, um, you know, Vegas is offering you five years, 25. And the best other offer is four years, 12. You got to take Vegas. Okay. Okay. I'll take Vegas. It's over. And you're making a life decision based on a 10 minute phone call. It's kind of silly, but I, you know, Robert, I'll just say this about all of that. Like I really feel, I feel in so many ways that, and I'm not one of those guys that said, oh, it was so much better than, because I don't really think it was necessarily better than.

41:04I know you don't. But, but I think it's great now. Absolutely great. And I think there are so many dramatic, cool stories with imaginative people and all that stuff. But the one thing I do think is that, you know, if there's a lesson, I got a chapter on what I call the perfect football career. It's about Jerome Bettis. And I say he had the perfect football career because you know why? He used his head to make a lot of decisions instead of his bank account. He could have made, I think, significantly more money in his life, had a chance to go to be the man in Chicago, you know, and make a lot more money in Chicago.

41:43He had a chance to go to Houston early on in his career, and they would have given him the ball more than Pittsburgh. But Jerome Bettis knew who he was. He didn't want to carry it 350 times in a year. He just didn't think his body could take it. And plus, he wanted to have a long-term business plan with his life after football. And he said, I love Pittsburgh. I love the people of Pittsburgh. I want to have a future in Pittsburgh. So I'm not going to go for two years to go play in Washington or Chicago or Miami just because they're offering me a million dollars more. I mean, and so I think sometimes I know this is presumptuous.

42:28I'm going to tell some PR guys, look, take these 14 pages and have your rookie class read it next year about Jerome Bettis and just look and see what a smart person, really smart person who doesn't chase every dollar can do and what it does for his life and what it does for his career. You said you don't think it was better back then. And I truly believe you. I think you've done such a good job of elevating young voices and finding people that wanted to cover the game in interesting ways. I mean, you write about it in the book, but the staff at MMQB, and I don't consider myself a part of that group, like the core people have all gone on to do such great work in other areas.

43:08And I think that you've always really been a fan of the younger generation of people who cover the sport in a way that I've appreciated. Robert, can I tell you why I did that? Because Sports Illustrated, they say, okay, you can do the MMQB, but you have a salary cap. You have X amount of that you can spend. If you can fit four people in this, you can do it. If you can fit five, you can do it, but you can't have any more money than this. So I realized, and I went out and I said, well, what can I do? And you know what I could do? I could hire young people who were working cheap and I can say, hey, this is your opportunity.

43:47Yeah. Who's my Scott Hatterberg? You know, and, and I said, it was Emily Kaplan. It was Emily Kaplan. It was Jenny Varentis. It was Robert Klemko, it was Tim Rohan, you know, Kaylin Kaler. You know, all of those people came for, you know, Kaylin Kaler started as my administrative assistant. I remember. And she was just an absolute terror. She was a bulldog. She really was. She still is. She was going to do something great in life and she's doing it now. Same with Emily Kaplan. Emily would not be denied. and so that was what was so fortunate and I've told people because look, I only had that ability to hire a certain number of people but if I were starting a website right now, I would go to five college campuses in the United States in March and I would interview 10 people at each place and I'd hire a bunch of people for, I don't even know what the number is, what,$48 ,000 or something like that and say, okay.

44:56And I don't mean to say I'm playing hunger games. I don't mean that at all, but I'm saying this is your chance. You got a couple of years, make the best of it. You know, make a name for yourself. That's what I would say. Work as hard as you can. And if you work hard and you do really, really good stories, people are going to notice and somebody's going to pay you more than I can pay you. So good luck. And it benefits them and it benefits us. I did a story once about a band, an album that they wrote. And the drummer, who still is a buddy, he said something to me that stuck with me. And he said, you never get the f*** you, your 20s back, creatively.

45:36And it's true, right? It's hard to recapture that, even if you're somebody who has a lot of energy and fire and ambition. But I wanted to, the preface, I was getting to a question about, you've always been really in tune with what the next generation of people who are covering the sport look like and the work that they're doing. As you look at the way professional football is covered now, even compared to the way it was covered when you started the MMQB, what do you think are the key differences in the way the sport is covered today? Oh, I think quite a few people who are very good probably cover it more from 10 ,000 feet than happened one and two generations ago.

46:19A lot more. Which in some ways is necessary for two reasons. Number one, they don't have the budget to travel that people like I had in the 90s, let's say. Nobody ever asked me, gee, why are you going to Seattle this week? Well, there might be a story out there. Oh, okay. All right. Good luck. The dream. Yeah, I mean, that was ridiculous. So, but there's that. And there's also the thought that people, I think, who cover the game today, as well as not having the same opportunity, get closed out a lot by teams, which didn't happen to me in that way. I feel bad. I honestly feel bad. Like I met with Ben Solak before I retired and I just said, Ben, I think you are incredible.

47:20And I think you have a great chance to be the next generation's best. I think you are awesome. And I still think he's awesome. I love Ben Solak. But the fact is, even if Ben Solak wanted to or had the ability, I have no idea what his budget. I don't know anything about how he travels or anything like that. But even if he wanted to, it's so much harder because, you know, when I went to training camp, I get an hour with the coach, get a half hour with the quarterback. I was Sports Illustrated. That was the Bible at the time. And I don't care how prominent you are, really, that's hard to get these days.

48:03Really, really hard to get. And so, unfortunately, the opportunities are simply not the same as they were, you know, when I was in my SI heyday. As you think about those constraints and just the practical reality of covering the sport now, working within those parameters, what do you think you'd like to see a little bit more of? And what do you think you'd like to see a little bit less of?

48:32I would like to see a little bit more of things like what Mike Silver does which is which are go into a game on Sunday and even if you don't know somebody and or that somebody isn't going to say much to you or talk to you sidle up to them and get something and make me feel like you were with the most important person in the league on Sunday. Instead of just going and sitting in the third row of the press conference, even if you get a question in, so what? How is that different from what anybody else has? And look, I understand. If I was a beat guy for a team and I understood that in many ways that's the only way I could do it, you got to do it.

49:21I'm not being critical of anybody for doing that, But I'm just saying that I would like to see different. Okay, that's number one. And I think number two, when something like what happens at the end of the Commander's Giants game happens, you know, and, you know, there's an absolute debacle at the end of the game. I think I would like to see from the people who cover that game just a wide variety of reporting. And what I mean is, and even in my day, it was kind of the same way. You covered one team, so you only went to one locker room. You know, I think sometimes if I was a Giants reporter there, I would make absolutely unequivocally certain, even if it cost me, that I would go and take the temperature of Washington.

50:15And somebody in that locker room, how in the bleep could this ever happen? I would just want maybe more measured stories than, and I understand your sports editor or your whoever editor is telling you, you got to cover everything with this team. But that was so utterly preposterous that I think, and I don't know, for all I know, the Post and the Daily News and everything else, it went to also got stuff from watching. I don't know, but I'd like to have a little bit more of a balanced approach. The last thing I wanted to ask you, and you write this in the final chapter of the book, and it really hit me because I found myself thinking this a lot over the last couple of years.

50:58You're talking about what you don't like about the NFL right now. And you said, I don't like the greed in the game. And as I think about the league right now and how the league has expanded and some of the decisions that it's making and just the football every day, the international games, expanding the schedule, we're at a point now where I just wonder how much is enough, How much money is enough? Where are the limits to this? And you write about Mark Cuban saying, I think it was 2014, about the idea of fat pigs getting slaughtered and the league kind of pushing up against the limits of what it should be doing and potentially overexposing itself.

51:34Where do you sit with that now? Like, how do you think about the way that the league has just tried to cannibalize and eat everything and just be this kind of like voracious, insatiable beast that it currently exists as? I really don't mind it. Because if you're a business and you're trying to expand and everything like that, listen, I am very much in favor of international football. And I don't think it's too much to ask for every team one game a year to spread the gospel of the NFL. And, you know, people are talking about, oh, my God, the Cowboys and Ravens had to get on a plane for 10 hours.

52:20My God. Oh, the inhumanity of it all, you know, to have the, let me just ask you this question. If you're in a life, if you're a young person and you're in a lie flat seat at 10 o 'clock at night, all I can say is I think you're going to get some pretty good sleep that night. So don't, don't be telling me what a terrible burden that is. Okay. That's one thing. I like international football. I've been to two of the games in Germany. Incredible, incredible atmosphere. Tom Brady walked off the field after the Tampa Bay Seattle game that I covered. And he said to me, that's one of the best times I have ever had on a football field.

53:05I mean, players, I'm sure players don't like the, you know, the, the plane trips and all that stuff. My feeling is players like it. and and all that it's a it's a cool experience so I like that I don't like the NFL saying oh yeah we we are all into health and safety we care about health and safety and by the way we're going to ask these players starting players in the NFL and and let's say there there are you know there's 32 teams and let's say there's you know 15 or so full-time starters you know on all these teams We're going to ask these 500 men to play 62, 65 more snaps every season. You know right now that the biggest thing that leads to more head trauma and more problems post-career are not necessarily concussions.

54:04They are the sub-concussive hits to the head, the accumulation of all those hits to the head. Do you think in that additional 65 snaps per season that they play that they're not going to get hit in the head? No. They're going to get hit in the head an average of 6 % more because that's how many plays there are than they would in a season with 17 games. And they're already hitting the head 6 % more in a 17-game season than they were in 2020 when it was a 16-game season. So stop with this crap. Please don't insult us by saying that, oh, it's a great idea. People want more football. Let's give them more football.

54:49Well, the heroes that you promote all the time in the NFL, let's not ask them to be guinea pigs so that there's a better chance than they have currently, there's a better chance to have a major head injury or head trauma when they're 55 years old than they have now. One of the lines in the book was Pete Rozelle saying that he liked, in the old version, the way the NFL offseason worked, where there actually was an offseason because people got to miss football. And it made them, it increased their appetite when it came back. And I read that and just, it feels so quaint now. It does. The idea that the NFL would leave for a couple months in the spring and early summer to be like, we'll see you in the fall when we get back.

55:32But how about this? How about this? First of all, in 1984, there's nothing, there's no attention paid to the scouting combine. Free agency doesn't exist. There's no revving up for the draft. I mean, people are interested in it, but, you know, it's not a big deal. And the draft happens, it starts at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. The first round and a half of the draft is on ESPN. Then there's nothing for the last 10 and a half rounds. And if you want to know who your team drafted, there is no internet. You have to look in the small type in your morning newspaper the next day. And then you know what?

56:17That happens at the end of April or I think maybe May 1st that year. Then May, June, July, half of August. You don't pay any attention. There's nothing with football. Can you just imagine that? Now, in the second week of May, there is a nationally televised prime time show on the release of the NFL schedule. And that just says it all about what has happened. The NFL has become a 12-month-a-year business. I'm telling you right now, Roger Goodell has told his events department now, today, not today, but I mean currently, I want more stuff end of June, early July. Find something. Find another tentpole event so that people can get their appetite whetted even more before the start of the season.

57:13Listen, I love the combine. I love free agency. I love the draft. I love that we have stuff to talk about all year. It makes my job exciting. It makes it more fun. I am very proud of the fact that in the 15 years that I have done this, I've never done schedule release content. Yeah, good for you. That is the one thing that I can hang my hat on. I have never done that. That's where the line gets drawn. Peter King, I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I enjoyed the book so much. Please go pick it up. It comes out, we're recording this on Tuesday the 13th. The book comes out today. The Game by Peter King, 40 years, a storied career covering the NFL.

57:50Peter, sincerely appreciate the time and we'll catch up soon. Thanks a million, Robert. Much, much appreciated your interest and thanks for your friendship.

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59:28the ones who get it done.