I get to go to the KWA Commas Barrel hotline and welcome.
Up on to the show. Peter King.
Peter, longtime NFL journalist, multiple awards and obviously the pride as Grant Smith made me put down of Ohio University's E. W.
Script School of Journalism. Peter, how you doing this evening.
Benjamin, I'm great. Thanks for talking to a forgotten old man.
I appreciate it, well, not forgotten by me personally. I remember the first time that I met you was it was Ram's training camp. I believe it was twenty ten, and I was a lowly nobody and still not that I'm anybody now, but.
A lowly nobody.
You took time out to answer every question I asked you humbly and graciously. It's stuck with me. It has stuck with me over the last fifteen years. And as I was sitting there thinking about the end of this season, the state of football, the state of sports journalism, I thought, what better person to talk to than the guy who pioneered a lot of it in Peter King.
So I appreciate you taking some time tonight.
Sure I'd start with the way that football has has evolved over the years, and it is such an absolute money machine now as far as it goes, But we're we're on to seventeen game seasons and I think we all see an eighteen.
Game season down down the line.
The playoffs have expanded now we've got multiple wildcards, seven teams, and you know, as far as that goes. Over the years, as you've watched the game of professional football evolve, what has stuck with you as being, hey, that was a great advancement, and what has stuck with you is as maybe then an ill conceived choice by the game.
What a good question, Benjamin, Thank you, And I'll tell you there's two things that occurred to me when you start talking about that. One is that as you talk about increasing the number of games in a season, we just watched the end of the season where the San Francisco forty nine ers went from prime Super Bowl content under to having almost every one of their prime offensive weapons with the exception of the quarterback, go down with an injury for much, if not all, of the season.
And you know, if you look at the guys who were playing for them at the end of the year, you know, when Ayuk is gone, when McCaffrey is gone. You know, when Kittle is banged up, it just you look at it and you just say, this is something that you know. You're going to kill the Golden Goose if you try to keep doing this. And it's not only them. If you look at the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, the green Bay Packers look like Alan Alda in mash for crying out loud. It was, it was absurd.
They didn't have anybody left. And yet the NFL wants to say, okay, seventeen games, no problem, We're going to go eighteen. And you've got the new executive director of the NFLPA who comes out and tells Mike Jones of the athletic Hey, I want to see more football. Everybody wants to see more football. And I'm saying to myself, what is wrong with this picture? So that really bothers me. The way the NFL talks about health and safety all the time and then they say, oh, well, we'll just
add another game. That bothers me. But I think the one other thing that's going on in the game right now is that, at least to me. I mean, I am not one of those guys. Look, I covered the NFL for forty years. The first year I ever covered the NFL was nineteen eighty four and I worked in Cincinnati. I was covering the Bengals and Sam White's the rookie coach. My second on the job. He called me into the office and he says, you want to know who we're
going to draft? And I said, yeah, I'd love to know. And I thought he was kidding. He wasn't kidding. He told me who they were going to draft, and he told me almost every guy in like the first four or five rounds. And I wrote about it the next day and I looked like Noster Damis. But in those days you could get away with things like that. There was no Internet, there was no anything. And yet to me, I think the game is absolutely fantastic. I can't wait
for these four games this weekend. Do I think that Kansas City is going to get much of a game from Houston? I don't, But you know what, who knows the edge rushers in Kansas City could take advantage of the weakness of the Chiefs, which is their edge protection, you know. And every game I think has a chance to be a really good game, the best of which is the last one. Look I went into last weekend, I was positive the Broncos had a good chance to
give Buffalo a game, and they didn't. But that doesn't mean that I don't like the Broncos. I like the Broncos a lot, so I am not one of these a game with so much better in the old days. I love this modern game. I love everything about the game, but I don't love the powers that be trying to make it an eighteen game season. It's just you can't ask this much of the human body.
I wholeheartedly agree.
And once again we're talking with the great Peter King, whose Football Morning in America was one of my most absolute must reads at all time. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, Yeah you were. You were in Cincinnati, mentioned that that was where you started and covering the Bengals.
I believe your first game against the Broncos, was it not?
The first game that I ever covered in the NFL was Cincinnati at Denver. That was the That was the first game of the of the new era of the of the Bengals. So yeah, I remember it very well. And they had a first draft pick that year, Ricky Hunley, who they could never sign, who ended up going to Denver. And you know what's funny, when I retired, I was looking back at some old stories and right before the draft, I said, well, it's going to come down for the Bengals.
The first pick, seventh overall is going to come down to two linebackers, one Ricky Hunley two Ron Rivera. I mean, how much do you think the Bengals regret that pick now? Because obviously Ron Rivera was a centerpiece on a Super Bowl team in Chicago. But you know, look, that was that was a really, really fun time to cover Pro Football Day.
I can't imagine you were You're mentioning the anecdote about why you're sitting you down and telling you who they were going to draft, and I can't imagine anybody doing that now. I mean, we have to we have to beg borrow and steel just to get the bread crumbs. Over the years, I've been fortunate enough, you know, to be able to get a little bit.
Here or there.
But it's it's it's pulling tea. Those relationships don't exist anymore. And in the kind of cutthroat world that it is now, it's sports shertalism has changed. I mean, so much of sports journalism now is aggregation. There's there's very few trustworthy on the ground reporters doing what you did back then.
It's just a major aggregation thing.
Now.
It irritates me because a lot of false stuff gets put out there, run through the mill, and then everybody spreads it.
And you know how it is. It takes one match to burn ten thousand trees.
Yeah, I would just say that to me. And again, I don't say this because I retired, but I believe that I'm probably going to be the last person to ever do the job the way I did the job, which is and it's because of finance. Is quite honestly, I think it's, you know, because I was able to go to a game for the last i'd say thirty five years that I covered the NFL. I was able to go to almost any game I wanted to any week and report on it and write about it. And
now that just simply does not happen. I was able to spend a month every summer going to NFL training camps, which certainly is not going to happen anymore. I'm just taking an absolute wild guess that's probably a twenty thousand dollars perk now if you want to go go see twenty five twenty two to twenty five training camps, which I think is absolutely essential if you want to cover
the NFL the right way. But anyway, I do think that aggregation is easy, and I think that, like if you look, let's just say, the show Inside the NFL, which you know I don't I'm not a regular watcher, but it's you know, Chris Long, I think, Chad Johnson, and I forget who Ryan Clark, you know, and they're on it. They're sitting in a studio and they're talking to me. Isn't that what every show is now? A bunch of former players sitting around and talking. I like
all those guys, I truly do. But Inside the NFL used to be a story, a show where we would go do stories. You know, I worked there for six years, where we would go do stories, real deep, well reported stories on everybody around the NFL. I mean, I remember I went and did Drew Brees when he was breaking out in New Orleans, taking a walk with his dog and he in Autumn Park in New Orleans. You know, I don't know, it's just a lot of these things. It's so much easier to just sit in the studio now,
as ESPN does, as NFL Network does. It's just so much easier to sit in the studio and less costly than to actually go out and report. That bothers me a lot about the future of our business, and not just in covering the NFL and covering anything.
Talking with the great Peter King and yeah, I think you were probably the first, you know, insider to do it. And it's it's funny, that's a title I carry here
at this station. But I always ask, you know, what are we exactly are we inside of I'm certainly we certainly don't get the access that you used to you know, quite a bit ago, and and and that sort of fascinates me, the relationships watching you know, in your career that you built up along the way, that you were able to have those those moments, those exposures, those conversations,
and be able to do that. And I must confess from my end, there's a there's a whiff of jealousy that that does not exist in that measure, you know, anymore, or at least very rarely in the in anymore as far as that goes, you know, pivoting a little bit to football and talking about these playoffs, and you mentioned.
The Kansas City in the Texans game. You got an interesting.
Matchup here with Buffalo and Baltimore coming up here probably the one and two votes for the MVP. I think that's what the second time that's happened.
When you had Peyton Manning Tom Brady do it.
But it's fascinating to me because these are two quarterbacks that almost no one believed in when they were coming out. Lamar Jackson was a guy that they suggested you convert to wide receiver. Josh could throw the ball a mile, but you wondered if that'd be within a half mile of the target. As we look at this now and how this has evolved, what do you take away from the way that these young men's careers started to where they are now.
Well, I think Lamar Jackson is so interesting because he was sort of the you know, the tip of the iceberg for really really good quarterbacks who were also and everybody would say, well, what about Michael Vick. I don't think Michael Vick was as good a quarterback as you know as Lamar Jackson has turned out to be. I mean, he clearly was equal as an athlete maybe better, who knows, I don't know, but they're both incredibly good running the
ball and all that. But I do think that one of the great things that we have seen about Lamar Jackson is he's become more of a complete player than he was when he came in the game. Now, you know, he still does have a little bit of the you know, you got to play better in the playoffs residue to him, and you know he's done. He obviously did fine in his first game this postseason. But you know, this is the kind of game this weekend that makes legacies. It
just does. And at some point Lamark to be a great, great player, Lamar ja is going to have to win huge games, and a kind of game this weekend is a huge game. But I'll tell you the one thing I really like about Josh Allen, I mean, I love this. I remember Josh Allen's second year in the league, his completion percent or a third year in the league, rather, his completion percentage went way up. This was I think it was twenty twenty. His completion percentage went up like
ten points. And I remember I ran into Tony Romo, and Romo told me that basically he had had a conversation with Josh Allen the previous year at the Super Bowl, and in essence, you know, talk to him a little bit about how, hey, you gotta get better. You gotta you know, you got to get better at all aspects of your game and all facets of your game. And Josh Allen went to work on being a better and
more accurate pass. Yes. And I think it just goes to show you, honestly, that you very rarely find quarterbacks
who come into the NFL as finished products. It's one of the reasons why, quite honestly, if I were a Broncos fan, I would be so damn excited about the future because look what happened to bo Nicks this year, when, first of all, there were a lot of people who were kind of negative about him anyway coming in, and you know, he had the kind of year you know that you just say, oh my gosh, this guy was significantly better as a rookie than Peyton Manning was than
almost all rookie quarterbacks are. And yet and he has the kind of attitude you can just tell that he is burning to learn, and he's with a coach who can teach him so you know. To me, I love that game this weekend, but it also reminds me that you're never in the first You're never going to be a great, great quarterback, a flawless quarterback in your first couple of years. It takes time, and both of these guys are proving that.
Hey, Peter Grant Smiths here and as a fellow Bobcat, it's an honor to chat with you. I remember reading the article last year when they posted it on their website about you reflecting.
On your forty years and the future of sports.
Journalism, And with your conversation with Ben here tonight, I wonder what advice you would have for someone who's up and coming in this industry or trying to get into it. What would you tell them to really focus on in their career.
Well, I've actually talked to doing some teaching at Seaton Hall in New Jersey, and one of the things that I've said is, you know, I don't care. I mean, if you really want to do this job, if you really want to do this job, you got to be versatile, you got to be well read, and I mean you got to read some books. Get off your phone, Get off your phone. You know, the phone has become a crutch for so many people, and it doesn't help you.
It really doesn't help you. You need to actually learn to be a better writer, and you learn to be a better writer by reading. So that's one thing I think. The second thing I would say in terms of versatility, we have no idea in the next five or ten years how stories are going to be told. One of the things that I was very lucky to do was to have the ability to be in this sort of golden era of sports writing. I mean, I don't know
if I came along today, what would I do? Would I have to Even though I had a podcast near the end, and I did work a lot in TV and I did do some radio, you get the feeling that you know, you're not really going to make a great living long term by just simply writing. You've got to do other things. So I would urge people to be versatile. But you know the bottom line in this whole thing, unless you're curious, you have no chance. You got to be curious, and you have to exercise that
curiosity every day. When you watch the Denver Broncos, you know, when you wake up on Monday morning, if you cover the Denver Broncos. You have to say, Okay, here's my off season project. How is bo Nicks going to get better in year two? And I would I mean, I don't care if you have access to bow Nicks or Peyton or our college coach or maybe his off season quarterback coach, whoever it is, but you know the one
story in Denver that everybody wants to know. I think I don't know, it's what I would want to know. Tell me about bo Nix in year two? How is he going to be better? So, I mean, those are the kind of stories that, in my opinion, I think you have to be totally focused on. You got to be curious about. Peter.
We vastly appreciate your time. Thank you for being so generous and gracious with it, and you made the evening and maybe even the year of young grad Smith in there. We certainly appreciate you you jumping on here for a little bit, and I wish you well in your retirements, and I hope that you are living your best life right now. You are an inspiration of myself and many others, and I again appreciate your time this evening.
Appreciate it, guys. Thanks a lot for having me all right.
Take care, Peter King, the Great Peter King,