Speaker 1: I get to go to the KWA Commas Barrel hotline
Speaker 1: and welcome.
Speaker 2: Up on to the show. Peter King.
Speaker 1: Peter, longtime NFL journalist, multiple awards and obviously the pride
Speaker 1: as Grant Smith made me put down of Ohio University's E. W.
Speaker 2: Script School of Journalism. Peter, how you doing this evening.
Speaker 3: Benjamin, I'm great. Thanks for talking to a forgotten old man.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it, well, not forgotten by me personally. I
Speaker 1: remember the first time that I met you was it
Speaker 1: was Ram's training camp. I believe it was twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and I was a lowly nobody and still not that
Speaker 1: I'm anybody now, but.
Speaker 2: A lowly nobody.
Speaker 1: You took time out to answer every question I asked
Speaker 1: you humbly and graciously. It's stuck with me. It has
Speaker 1: stuck with me over the last fifteen years. And as
Speaker 1: I was sitting there thinking about the end of this season,
Speaker 1: the state of football, the state of sports journalism, I thought,
Speaker 1: what better person to talk to than the guy who
Speaker 1: pioneered a lot of it in Peter King.
Speaker 2: So I appreciate you taking some time tonight.
Speaker 1: Sure I'd start with the way that football has has
Speaker 1: evolved over the years, and it is such an absolute
Speaker 1: money machine now as far as it goes, But we're
Speaker 1: we're on to seventeen game seasons and I think we
Speaker 1: all see an eighteen.
Speaker 2: Game season down down the line.
Speaker 1: The playoffs have expanded now we've got multiple wildcards, seven teams,
Speaker 1: and you know, as far as that goes. Over the years,
Speaker 1: as you've watched the game of professional football evolve, what
Speaker 1: has stuck with you as being, hey, that was a
Speaker 1: great advancement, and what has stuck with you is as
Speaker 1: maybe then an ill conceived choice by the game.
Speaker 3: What a good question, Benjamin, Thank you, And I'll tell
Speaker 3: you there's two things that occurred to me when you
Speaker 3: start talking about that. One is that as you talk
Speaker 3: about increasing the number of games in a season, we
Speaker 3: just watched the end of the season where the San
Speaker 3: Francisco forty nine ers went from prime Super Bowl content
Speaker 3: under to having almost every one of their prime offensive
Speaker 3: weapons with the exception of the quarterback, go down with
Speaker 3: an injury for much, if not all, of the season.
Speaker 3: And you know, if you look at the guys who
Speaker 3: were playing for them at the end of the year,
Speaker 3: you know, when Ayuk is gone, when McCaffrey is gone.
Speaker 3: You know, when Kittle is banged up, it just you
Speaker 3: look at it and you just say, this is something
Speaker 3: that you know. You're going to kill the Golden Goose
Speaker 3: if you try to keep doing this. And it's not
Speaker 3: only them. If you look at the Green Bay Packers
Speaker 3: on Sunday, the green Bay Packers look like Alan Alda
Speaker 3: in mash for crying out loud. It was, it was absurd.
Speaker 3: They didn't have anybody left. And yet the NFL wants
Speaker 3: to say, okay, seventeen games, no problem, We're going to
Speaker 3: go eighteen. And you've got the new executive director of
Speaker 3: the NFLPA who comes out and tells Mike Jones of
Speaker 3: the athletic Hey, I want to see more football. Everybody
Speaker 3: wants to see more football. And I'm saying to myself,
Speaker 3: what is wrong with this picture? So that really bothers me.
Speaker 3: The way the NFL talks about health and safety all
Speaker 3: the time and then they say, oh, well, we'll just
Speaker 3: add another game. That bothers me. But I think the
Speaker 3: one other thing that's going on in the game right
Speaker 3: now is that, at least to me. I mean, I
Speaker 3: am not one of those guys. Look, I covered the
Speaker 3: NFL for forty years. The first year I ever covered
Speaker 3: the NFL was nineteen eighty four and I worked in Cincinnati.
Speaker 3: I was covering the Bengals and Sam White's the rookie coach.
Speaker 3: My second on the job. He called me into the
Speaker 3: office and he says, you want to know who we're
Speaker 3: going to draft? And I said, yeah, I'd love to know.
Speaker 3: And I thought he was kidding. He wasn't kidding. He
Speaker 3: told me who they were going to draft, and he
Speaker 3: told me almost every guy in like the first four
Speaker 3: or five rounds. And I wrote about it the next
Speaker 3: day and I looked like Noster Damis. But in those
Speaker 3: days you could get away with things like that. There
Speaker 3: was no Internet, there was no anything. And yet to me,
Speaker 3: I think the game is absolutely fantastic. I can't wait
Speaker 3: for these four games this weekend. Do I think that
Speaker 3: Kansas City is going to get much of a game
Speaker 3: from Houston? I don't, But you know what, who knows
Speaker 3: the edge rushers in Kansas City could take advantage of
Speaker 3: the weakness of the Chiefs, which is their edge protection,
Speaker 3: you know. And every game I think has a chance
Speaker 3: to be a really good game, the best of which
Speaker 3: is the last one. Look I went into last weekend,
Speaker 3: I was positive the Broncos had a good chance to
Speaker 3: give Buffalo a game, and they didn't. But that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean that I don't like the Broncos. I like the
Speaker 3: Broncos a lot, so I am not one of these
Speaker 3: a game with so much better in the old days.
Speaker 3: I love this modern game. I love everything about the game,
Speaker 3: but I don't love the powers that be trying to
Speaker 3: make it an eighteen game season. It's just you can't
Speaker 3: ask this much of the human body.
Speaker 2: I wholeheartedly agree.
Speaker 1: And once again we're talking with the great Peter King,
Speaker 1: whose Football Morning in America was one of my most
Speaker 1: absolute must reads at all time. I believe, if I'm
Speaker 1: not mistaken, Yeah you were. You were in Cincinnati, mentioned
Speaker 1: that that was where you started and covering the Bengals.
Speaker 2: I believe your first game against the Broncos, was it not?
Speaker 3: The first game that I ever covered in the NFL
Speaker 3: was Cincinnati at Denver. That was the That was the
Speaker 3: first game of the of the new era of the
Speaker 3: of the Bengals. So yeah, I remember it very well.
Speaker 3: And they had a first draft pick that year, Ricky Hunley,
Speaker 3: who they could never sign, who ended up going to Denver.
Speaker 3: And you know what's funny, when I retired, I was
Speaker 3: looking back at some old stories and right before the draft,
Speaker 3: I said, well, it's going to come down for the Bengals.
Speaker 3: The first pick, seventh overall is going to come down
Speaker 3: to two linebackers, one Ricky Hunley two Ron Rivera. I mean,
Speaker 3: how much do you think the Bengals regret that pick now?
Speaker 3: Because obviously Ron Rivera was a centerpiece on a Super
Speaker 3: Bowl team in Chicago. But you know, look, that was
Speaker 3: that was a really, really fun time to cover Pro
Speaker 3: Football Day.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine you were You're mentioning the anecdote about
Speaker 1: why you're sitting you down and telling you who they
Speaker 1: were going to draft, and I can't imagine anybody doing
Speaker 1: that now. I mean, we have to we have to
Speaker 1: beg borrow and steel just to get the bread crumbs.
Speaker 1: Over the years, I've been fortunate enough, you know, to
Speaker 1: be able to get a little bit.
Speaker 2: Here or there.
Speaker 1: But it's it's it's pulling tea. Those relationships don't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: And in the kind of cutthroat world that it is now,
Speaker 1: it's sports shertalism has changed. I mean, so much of
Speaker 1: sports journalism now is aggregation. There's there's very few trustworthy
Speaker 1: on the ground reporters doing what you did back then.
Speaker 2: It's just a major aggregation thing.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: It irritates me because a lot of false stuff gets
Speaker 1: put out there, run through the mill, and then everybody
Speaker 1: spreads it.
Speaker 2: And you know how it is. It takes one match
Speaker 2: to burn ten thousand trees.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would just say that to me. And again,
Speaker 3: I don't say this because I retired, but I believe
Speaker 3: that I'm probably going to be the last person to
Speaker 3: ever do the job the way I did the job,
Speaker 3: which is and it's because of finance. Is quite honestly,
Speaker 3: I think it's, you know, because I was able to
Speaker 3: go to a game for the last i'd say thirty
Speaker 3: five years that I covered the NFL. I was able
Speaker 3: to go to almost any game I wanted to any
Speaker 3: week and report on it and write about it. And
Speaker 3: now that just simply does not happen. I was able
Speaker 3: to spend a month every summer going to NFL training camps,
Speaker 3: which certainly is not going to happen anymore. I'm just
Speaker 3: taking an absolute wild guess that's probably a twenty thousand
Speaker 3: dollars perk now if you want to go go see
Speaker 3: twenty five twenty two to twenty five training camps, which
Speaker 3: I think is absolutely essential if you want to cover
Speaker 3: the NFL the right way. But anyway, I do think
Speaker 3: that aggregation is easy, and I think that, like if
Speaker 3: you look, let's just say, the show Inside the NFL,
Speaker 3: which you know I don't I'm not a regular watcher,
Speaker 3: but it's you know, Chris Long, I think, Chad Johnson,
Speaker 3: and I forget who Ryan Clark, you know, and they're
Speaker 3: on it. They're sitting in a studio and they're talking
Speaker 3: to me. Isn't that what every show is now? A
Speaker 3: bunch of former players sitting around and talking. I like
Speaker 3: all those guys, I truly do. But Inside the NFL
Speaker 3: used to be a story, a show where we would
Speaker 3: go do stories. You know, I worked there for six years,
Speaker 3: where we would go do stories, real deep, well reported
Speaker 3: stories on everybody around the NFL. I mean, I remember
Speaker 3: I went and did Drew Brees when he was breaking
Speaker 3: out in New Orleans, taking a walk with his dog
Speaker 3: and he in Autumn Park in New Orleans. You know,
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's just a lot of these things.
Speaker 3: It's so much easier to just sit in the studio now,
Speaker 3: as ESPN does, as NFL Network does. It's just so
Speaker 3: much easier to sit in the studio and less costly
Speaker 3: than to actually go out and report. That bothers me
Speaker 3: a lot about the future of our business, and not
Speaker 3: just in covering the NFL and covering anything.
Speaker 1: Talking with the great Peter King and yeah, I think
Speaker 1: you were probably the first, you know, insider to do it.
Speaker 1: And it's it's funny, that's a title I carry here
Speaker 1: at this station. But I always ask, you know, what
Speaker 1: are we exactly are we inside of I'm certainly we
Speaker 1: certainly don't get the access that you used to you know,
Speaker 1: quite a bit ago, and and and that sort of
Speaker 1: fascinates me, the relationships watching you know, in your career
Speaker 1: that you built up along the way, that you were
Speaker 1: able to have those those moments, those exposures, those conversations,
Speaker 1: and be able to do that. And I must confess
Speaker 1: from my end, there's a there's a whiff of jealousy
Speaker 1: that that does not exist in that measure, you know, anymore,
Speaker 1: or at least very rarely in the in anymore as
Speaker 1: far as that goes, you know, pivoting a little bit
Speaker 1: to football and talking about these playoffs, and you mentioned.
Speaker 2: The Kansas City in the Texans game. You got an interesting.
Speaker 1: Matchup here with Buffalo and Baltimore coming up here probably
Speaker 1: the one and two votes for the MVP. I think
Speaker 1: that's what the second time that's happened.
Speaker 2: When you had Peyton Manning Tom Brady do it.
Speaker 1: But it's fascinating to me because these are two quarterbacks
Speaker 1: that almost no one believed in when they were coming out.
Speaker 1: Lamar Jackson was a guy that they suggested you convert
Speaker 1: to wide receiver. Josh could throw the ball a mile,
Speaker 1: but you wondered if that'd be within a half mile
Speaker 1: of the target. As we look at this now and
Speaker 1: how this has evolved, what do you take away from
Speaker 1: the way that these young men's careers started to where
Speaker 1: they are now.
Speaker 3: Well, I think Lamar Jackson is so interesting because he
Speaker 3: was sort of the you know, the tip of the
Speaker 3: iceberg for really really good quarterbacks who were also and
Speaker 3: everybody would say, well, what about Michael Vick. I don't
Speaker 3: think Michael Vick was as good a quarterback as you
Speaker 3: know as Lamar Jackson has turned out to be. I mean,
Speaker 3: he clearly was equal as an athlete maybe better, who knows,
Speaker 3: I don't know, but they're both incredibly good running the
Speaker 3: ball and all that. But I do think that one
Speaker 3: of the great things that we have seen about Lamar
Speaker 3: Jackson is he's become more of a complete player than
Speaker 3: he was when he came in the game. Now, you know,
Speaker 3: he still does have a little bit of the you know,
Speaker 3: you got to play better in the playoffs residue to him,
Speaker 3: and you know he's done. He obviously did fine in
Speaker 3: his first game this postseason. But you know, this is
Speaker 3: the kind of game this weekend that makes legacies. It
Speaker 3: just does. And at some point Lamark to be a great,
Speaker 3: great player, Lamar ja is going to have to win
Speaker 3: huge games, and a kind of game this weekend is
Speaker 3: a huge game. But I'll tell you the one thing
Speaker 3: I really like about Josh Allen, I mean, I love this.
Speaker 3: I remember Josh Allen's second year in the league, his
Speaker 3: completion percent or a third year in the league, rather,
Speaker 3: his completion percentage went way up. This was I think
Speaker 3: it was twenty twenty. His completion percentage went up like
Speaker 3: ten points. And I remember I ran into Tony Romo,
Speaker 3: and Romo told me that basically he had had a
Speaker 3: conversation with Josh Allen the previous year at the Super Bowl,
Speaker 3: and in essence, you know, talk to him a little
Speaker 3: bit about how, hey, you gotta get better. You gotta
Speaker 3: you know, you got to get better at all aspects
Speaker 3: of your game and all facets of your game. And
Speaker 3: Josh Allen went to work on being a better and
Speaker 3: more accurate pass. Yes. And I think it just goes
Speaker 3: to show you, honestly, that you very rarely find quarterbacks
Speaker 3: who come into the NFL as finished products. It's one
Speaker 3: of the reasons why, quite honestly, if I were a
Speaker 3: Broncos fan, I would be so damn excited about the
Speaker 3: future because look what happened to bo Nicks this year, when,
Speaker 3: first of all, there were a lot of people who
Speaker 3: were kind of negative about him anyway coming in, and
Speaker 3: you know, he had the kind of year you know
Speaker 3: that you just say, oh my gosh, this guy was
Speaker 3: significantly better as a rookie than Peyton Manning was than
Speaker 3: almost all rookie quarterbacks are. And yet and he has
Speaker 3: the kind of attitude you can just tell that he
Speaker 3: is burning to learn, and he's with a coach who
Speaker 3: can teach him so you know. To me, I love
Speaker 3: that game this weekend, but it also reminds me that
Speaker 3: you're never in the first You're never going to be
Speaker 3: a great, great quarterback, a flawless quarterback in your first
Speaker 3: couple of years. It takes time, and both of these
Speaker 3: guys are proving that.
Speaker 4: Hey, Peter Grant Smiths here and as a fellow Bobcat,
Speaker 4: it's an honor to chat with you. I remember reading
Speaker 4: the article last year when they posted it on their
Speaker 4: website about you reflecting.
Speaker 2: On your forty years and the future of sports.
Speaker 4: Journalism, And with your conversation with Ben here tonight, I
Speaker 4: wonder what advice you would have for someone who's up
Speaker 4: and coming in this industry or trying to get into it.
Speaker 4: What would you tell them to really focus on in
Speaker 4: their career.
Speaker 3: Well, I've actually talked to doing some teaching at Seaton
Speaker 3: Hall in New Jersey, and one of the things that
Speaker 3: I've said is, you know, I don't care. I mean,
Speaker 3: if you really want to do this job, if you
Speaker 3: really want to do this job, you got to be versatile,
Speaker 3: you got to be well read, and I mean you
Speaker 3: got to read some books. Get off your phone, Get
Speaker 3: off your phone. You know, the phone has become a
Speaker 3: crutch for so many people, and it doesn't help you.
Speaker 3: It really doesn't help you. You need to actually learn
Speaker 3: to be a better writer, and you learn to be
Speaker 3: a better writer by reading. So that's one thing I think.
Speaker 3: The second thing I would say in terms of versatility,
Speaker 3: we have no idea in the next five or ten
Speaker 3: years how stories are going to be told. One of
Speaker 3: the things that I was very lucky to do was
Speaker 3: to have the ability to be in this sort of
Speaker 3: golden era of sports writing. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 3: if I came along today, what would I do? Would
Speaker 3: I have to Even though I had a podcast near
Speaker 3: the end, and I did work a lot in TV
Speaker 3: and I did do some radio, you get the feeling
Speaker 3: that you know, you're not really going to make a
Speaker 3: great living long term by just simply writing. You've got
Speaker 3: to do other things. So I would urge people to
Speaker 3: be versatile. But you know the bottom line in this
Speaker 3: whole thing, unless you're curious, you have no chance. You
Speaker 3: got to be curious, and you have to exercise that
Speaker 3: curiosity every day. When you watch the Denver Broncos, you know,
Speaker 3: when you wake up on Monday morning, if you cover
Speaker 3: the Denver Broncos. You have to say, Okay, here's my
Speaker 3: off season project. How is bo Nicks going to get
Speaker 3: better in year two? And I would I mean, I
Speaker 3: don't care if you have access to bow Nicks or
Speaker 3: Peyton or our college coach or maybe his off season
Speaker 3: quarterback coach, whoever it is, but you know the one
Speaker 3: story in Denver that everybody wants to know. I think
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's what I would want to know.
Speaker 3: Tell me about bo Nix in year two? How is
Speaker 3: he going to be better? So, I mean, those are
Speaker 3: the kind of stories that, in my opinion, I think
Speaker 3: you have to be totally focused on. You got to
Speaker 3: be curious about. Peter.
Speaker 1: We vastly appreciate your time. Thank you for being so
Speaker 1: generous and gracious with it, and you made the evening
Speaker 1: and maybe even the year of young grad Smith in there.
Speaker 1: We certainly appreciate you you jumping on here for a
Speaker 1: little bit, and I wish you well in your retirements,
Speaker 1: and I hope that you are living your best life
Speaker 1: right now. You are an inspiration of myself and many others,
Speaker 1: and I again appreciate your time this evening.
Speaker 3: Appreciate it, guys. Thanks a lot for having me all right.
Speaker 2: Take care, Peter King, the Great Peter King,