Why Do I Continue to Read Peter King?

scottyno

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He said Gronk was invisible out there again yesterday vs the Chargers. I guess all those rushing yards gained in no small part by his superb blocking didn't count.
Also the first touchdown which came after he drew a flag in the endzone. His only other target of the game was his 1 catch because they had no need to try to target to him with Edelman and White open all day, but I guess it's easier for national media to force a narrative.
 

joe dokes

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And now for something completely different:

Defensive Players of the Week
An odd confluence of defensive stars. Sorensen and Van Noy were Brigham Young teammates in 2013.
Daniel Sorensen, safety, Kansas City. Two huge plays for a glue guy in the K.C. secondary that were huge in the Chiefs winning the AFC title game. He knifed through the New England line on a Patriot fourth-and-one run by Rex Burkhead, stoning Burkhead for no gain and turning the ball over to the Chiefs. Then Sorensen picked off Tom Brady midway through the fourth quarter, leading to a K.C. TD. And he had 14 tackles. Must be nice, playing the best game of your life in the biggest game of your life.
 

Humphrey

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"If the flag gets thrown, which is the logical move in retrospect, does the outcome change? The Saints are convinced it does. We’ll never know."

Do the math Peter!

1:49 left. Rams had 1 time out left, clock is stopped.

They are at either the 5 or the 10, either way, more than close enough. One run or knee, Rams take time out #3. Second run or knee, now there's about a minute left. Third one, under 20 seconds. Only real chance I can see them having, barring a Miami type scenario; is that on one of those runs the Saints don't take a knee and they let them score a TD unopposed. The odds on the field goal being good are maybe 98%.
 

snowmanny

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He also says the call “quite possibly” kept the Saints from the SB and later writes “if the call gets made it’s conceivable and perhaps likely” the Saints win.

Sure there could have been a fluke missed FG or a brain fart Miracle in the Meadowlands play but if that call is made it is indeed 98%+ the Saints win, which is much higher than “quite possibly” or “perhaps likely.”
 

E5 Yaz

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He also says the call “quite possibly” kept the Saints from the SB and later writes “if the call gets made it’s conceivable and perhaps likely” the Saints win.

Sure there could have been a fluke missed FG or a brain fart Miracle in the Meadowlands play but if that call is made it is indeed 98%+ the Saints win, which is much higher than “quite possibly” or “perhaps likely.”
The difference between Peter King and us is that his professional training activates a chip that requires him to couch what he says when describing such events. He has to use the qualifying phrases; we do not.

That said, I must now shower in scalding water to cleanse myself for defending Peter King
 

Harry Hooper

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He puts the Steelers at the #2 seed in the AFC, without an iota of explanation.
 

nattysez

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Based on his mvp picks and standings predictions, he clearly thinks Brady is going to fall off this year.
 

Mystic Merlin

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I especially liked his haughty swipe at Mark Cuban's comment that the NBA has one over on the NFL in terms of marketing. I'm not sure why he really cares.
 

Leather

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He is who he always was: buttering up players and fans to get clicks and interviews.
 

Mystic Merlin

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He’s such an asshole:

‘Matthew Slater’s cap number this year is $2.9 million. If the Thursday night games went away and New England applied the lost revenue equally across the board to all contracts, Slater would be facing a loss of $153,700 in revenue.

So the answer should not be: “We shouldn’t be playing Thursday night football.” The answer should be: “I’m willing to forgo 5.3 percent of my compensation this year in order to not play Thursday night football.”’

You tell ‘em, Peter! Goddamn players can’t do math. Moreover, each and every comment one of them makes that could have impact on league revenue and thus CBA discussions should be put through that filter. And, naturally, this discussion should focus entirely on lost revenue figures that Peter MADE UP and disregard the possibility that the Thursday night games erode the quality of play - which may affect viewership - because players typically have THREE days off prior to the games to recover and prepare.
 

Kliq

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He’s such an asshole:

‘Matthew Slater’s cap number this year is $2.9 million. If the Thursday night games went away and New England applied the lost revenue equally across the board to all contracts, Slater would be facing a loss of $153,700 in revenue.

So the answer should not be: “We shouldn’t be playing Thursday night football.” The answer should be: “I’m willing to forgo 5.3 percent of my compensation this year in order to not play Thursday night football.”’

You tell ‘em, Peter! Goddamn players can’t do math. Moreover, each and every comment one of them makes that could have impact on league revenue and thus CBA discussions should be put through that filter. And, naturally, this discussion should focus entirely on lost revenue figures that Peter MADE UP and disregard the possibility that the Thursday night games erode the quality of play - which may affect viewership - because players typically have THREE days off prior to the games to recover and prepare.
Volin had a similar take in yesterady's Globe, basically saying that the $600 million FOX is paying for TNF allows NFL teams to spend $2.9 million on a special teams player and that Slater should be grateful for it because without it, he would be gone. Of course, there is no way that the Patriots would pay that much money for a special teams player if the cap went down 1 percent, right???

It is also never brought up that maybe the owners would just lose a little bit of money and the salary cap would stay the same.
 

RIFan

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edoug

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Maybe it's because of the story, or the time of year, but if you read anything of King's column this week, read the Burrow section

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2019/12/23/eagles-carton-wentz-nfl-playoff-picture-fmia-peter-king/#the-lead-playoff-talk
Amazing story, amazing person. Thanks
I wouldn't have read the column without your post. Thanks for sharing it. Definitely worth the read and he's gained himself a new fan.
Make that two.
 

Reverend

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Maybe it's because of the story, or the time of year, but if you read anything of King's column this week, read the Burrow section

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2019/12/23/eagles-carton-wentz-nfl-playoff-picture-fmia-peter-king/#the-lead-playoff-talk
Thank you for this. Interesting read.

I like this Burrows guy. Peter King though—
about things you don’t hear, ever, in a nationally televised
—still sounds like a goddamn Tory to me, though. :wooper:
 

Reverend

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I'm still mad about the time he was put off by people cheering at a graduation.
 

Cotillion

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It was back in his SI days.

Not sure I could find it anymore.

He was relating one of his many folksy “travel about the country stories”.

and he was talking about the time he was at spring training or maybe it was a diamondbacks game, but I feel like it was in Arizona. (I could be remembering it wrong)

He was watching someone warm up I think. And he was there. Of course there was also a bunch of young kids hanging around to get a ball. Key point of this story is how Peter King never got a ball as a kid.

A ball gets near them after it’s all done but it rolled to a spot but the kids didn’t know where it went. But Peter did. He acted like he didn’t know where it went. And may have even pointed it went somewhere. I forget all the details. But he had an opportunity to make a little kid’s day by making sure they got the ball. He of course only thought of Peter King.

He then went and retrieved the ball. super proud of how he finally got a ball

He wrote this all up in one of his MMQB stories. Then people started getting on him about him robbing the kids of a chance to get a ball. He got super defensive about it. He couldn’t see what he did might not have been the best thing especially the idea was he never got a ball as a kid. Why was everyone raining on his ball story. Woe is me.

I swear there is a part where he got the ball partially cause he was there in a press pass allowing him to go somewhere the kids couldn’t or something too, but I can’t find the story so I’ll keep it at he knew where it was and let the kids run off in the wrong direction
 

Cotillion

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There are classic articles, such as the one back from March 2003 when King attended an exhibition baseball game, retrieved a foul ball hit by Miguel Tejada, and infamously assured a young kid that the "True Ball" was the one that the kid had.

Can’t find the article yet but here is something talking about it.
 

Cotillion

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Oh shit. I never saw the postscript before.

I gave it to a kid on my softball team several months later. And you all still think I am pompous jerk.

As if that was the plan all along. You know if he hadn’t gotten the shit about it from the mailbag he would have kept it.
 

Red(s)HawksFan

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He's not wrong that it's a grotesque event. I watched it live for the first time ever yesterday and it is an absolutely disgusting sight to see these guys stuffing hot dogs down their gullet.

I disagree with King that it isn't a sport. Joey Chestnut is an athlete and what he does is a feat. I'd call it sport. But even so, the "E" in ESPN stands for entertainment, and competitive eating is, if nothing else, entertainment. Regardless, it's on ESPN because people want to watch it. If it's not your cup of tea, don't watch. Simple. Frankly I don't think there's a better representation or celebration of what is truly American than a bunch of people stuffing themselves silly with hot dogs.
 

Mystic Merlin

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This is an exquisite King paragraph:

2. KIDS GAME, MORE THAN EVER. Now the four coaches in L.A. and New York are in the fold. In Los Angeles, Sean McVay is 34, Staley 34. In New York, Joe Judge of the Giants is 39, Robert Saleh of the Jets the old man at 41. Coaches used to be older, lots older. Interesting trend in the places with the biggest population. Maybe meaningless, but interesting.’
 

Bowhemian

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This is an exquisite King paragraph:

2. KIDS GAME, MORE THAN EVER. Now the four coaches in L.A. and New York are in the fold. In Los Angeles, Sean McVay is 34, Staley 34. In New York, Joe Judge of the Giants is 39, Robert Saleh of the Jets the old man at 41. Coaches used to be older, lots older. Interesting trend in the places with the biggest population. Maybe meaningless, but interesting.’
Definitely meaningless. I highly doubt that the population of the city a team resides in has anything to do with the age of the coach. Like, why would he even consider that to be a trend? If anything, it is a coincedence.
 

Leather

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It’s a textbook correlation not causation. He’s such a dumb dumb sometimes.

He’s also lazy. Matt Nagy (Chicago; 3rd biggest city) is 42. So is 42 “old” or did he just not feel like looking that one up?
 

E5 Yaz

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This hasn't been bumped for months, and i expect this to be fixed before long, but c'mon

Last point about the Jets: It’s easy to say—if the Panthers come calling—that trading down from two to eight this year and picking up extra ones in ’22 and ’23 is a no-brainer. Easy, but perhaps painful, if Zach Wilson turns into a star, the quarterback the Jets have been seeking since the days of Willie Joe Namath. And isn’t that the tormenting part of the NFL draft?
then later, in the same column

r. Come on, CBS Evening News. You can’t even pronounce Megan Rapinoe’s name correctly? That’s a pretty famous name to be mispronouncing. It’s not “RAP-in-oh.” It’s “Ruh-PEEN-oh.”
https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2021/03/28/urban-meyer-jaguars-trevor-lawrence-nfl-draft-trades-fmia-peter-king/?cid=fmiatw
 
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Mystic Merlin

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Ha, gotta love it. He clearly doesn’t have an editor. I don’t read his weekly column regularly, but it is in a way reassuring how reliably he hits his beats. My favorites -

‘ Never in NFL history have we seen a Super Bowl champion return as weaponized as the 2021 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.’

Except for the 2017 Patriots, who added Brandin Cooks and Stephon Gilmore to a SB winning team that retained its coaching staff and all key players. Or the 2004 Patriots, who returned their core, staff, and added Corey Dillon. You could also throw in teams like the 2011 Packers, too. It was so long ago! Weird!

‘ 2. I think this summary, by Kalyn Kahler of The Defector, of the lawsuits filed against Deshaun Watson, illustrates why we both need to take this story very seriously, and we need to not make judgments till both sides of the story are told in full This is some very weighty evidence, as Kahler writes:

(...Cut excerpt)

Reading this piece—summarizing the legal actions in each case—it’s difficult to think this is a frame job.

I mean, come on. There aren’t twenty of his own words separating these sentences.
 

Harry Hooper

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From Peter's latest, a discussion of working on the NYT crossword with his wife Ann:

How about these two clues in the July 11 puzzle:

36 Down (11 letters): Rock star who wrote the poetry collection “The American Night.”

40 Down (11 letters): 36 Down’s anagrammatic nickname.

Gotta be pretty smart to construct crosswords anyway, but this one took a while to figure out. After a few of the 11 letters showed up in 36 down, I got that one: J I M M O R R I S O N. But I didn’t know the Doors’ frontman’s nickname. Ann did.

M R M O J O R I S I N.




He did offer a surprising smackdown on the Commish regarding WFT woes:

The Washington Football Team was fined $10 million but there is no suspension of owner Daniel Snyder or further discipline for the rampant sexual harassment in the organization for years. Per Forbes’ recent NFL team valuations, the sanction is one-third-of-one-percent of the franchise worth ($3.5 billion), and less than 3 percent of WFT’s projected 2021 revenues. Roger Goodell called the work environment “for many years” in Washington “highly unprofessional.” He found evidence of bullying, intimidation and repeated sexual harassment, and said Snyder and his management team “paid little or no attention” to the behavior. Goodell has made some curious decisions in his 15-year tenure, but allowing Snyder to skate without anything but monetary sanction, to simply “step back” from owner duties for an undetermined period, is absurd.
 

Marciano490

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From Peter's latest, a discussion of working on the NYT crossword with his wife Ann:







He did offer a surprising smackdown on the Commish regarding WFT woes:

If only ol’ Jim sang his nickname over and over again in the Doors’ best song.
 

joe dokes

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I read PK's Monday opus for the 1st time in a while, and he referred to a 6-3 GB win over LA in 1965. So I looked at the box score and it had this:

Packers Don Chandler 7 yard field goal 3 6
 

Humphrey

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The goal posts were on the goal line, but it's still a statistical impossibility I would think. 7 yards from the los is where they set up for the kick and you cannot say the ball is on the goal line, the 1 yard line is the limit. So if it said 8 yards I would buy that.

Chandler was a pretty good kicker for that era- but you'll notice how much lower the standards were, his career fg percentage was 58.4%. Mostly over 65% but two horrible years where it was in the mid-to-low 40s.

I have fond memories of the guy- my dad, pre-net days, caught one of his extra points at Yankee Stadium. Still have the ball.

Perhaps his most famous fg kicked was actually a miss- in the tiebreaker game against the Colts in 1965 his tying fg was ruled good and a bunch of people proved it wasn't good. Led to the height of the goal posts being raised and the positioning of the officials under the two uprights.
 
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tims4wins

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The goal posts were on the goal line, but it's still a statistical impossibility I would think. 7 yards from the los is where they set up for the kick and you cannot say the ball is on the goal line, the 1 yard line is the limit. So if it said 8 yards I would buy that.
I thought they also used to count FG distance as from the LOS, not the spot of the kick?
 

joe dokes

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I knew about the goalposts, but I dont think the counted FG from the LOS, even back then.
Chandler also led the league in punting more than once, IIRC.
 

E5 Yaz

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I thought they also used to count FG distance as from the LOS, not the spot of the kick?
This brings up a pet peeve of mine: Why are punts still measured from the line of scrimmage? Official can drop the blue beanbag from where the punter connects just as they do where it's caught.
 

E5 Yaz

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Cross-posting from the death thread

Peter King, in his Monday column
y. RIP Irene Cara. Who could dance like Irene Cara? Who?
Now, in all the obituaries about Irene Cara, no one focused on her abilities as a dancer. Yes in "Fame," she danced ... but the primary focus was on her vocals. Here's what I think happened ... King thinks she starred (and did all the dancing) in "Flashdance," instead of singing the theme song. Even Jennifer Beals didn't do all the dancing in "Flashdance."

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2022/11/28/josh-jacobs-chargers-jaguars-peter-king-fmia-week-12/