บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ How the Eagles Pulled Off the Philly Special and More Incredible NFL Stories with Peter King

quarterback wants it. I love it. 00:06:10 Speaker 1: Let's do it peter i mean i told you i cooked the book for you to answer that but you to know that it was 2.23 seconds precisely of peterson just staring and we're gonna roll the play underneath us a little bit i'm gonna re-watch it you've seen this a million times maybe something else jumps out of you here's the third down play where foals tried to find jeffrey there was a lot of contact they were wondering if there'd be a foul one other piece of background on this play right 38 seconds before half, fourth and goal. The first thing is, they're not exactly running it at this moment. Do you remember what the play was in the huddle right here, the play before the timeout? 00:06:48 Speaker 3: No. In fact, I asked Doug Peterson... And although he told me it was very unfamous, he said, I didn't love the play. 00:06:58 Speaker 1: Well, that's famous enough, right? So that's an amazing backstory, yeah. 00:07:02 Speaker 3: Yeah, I went down to the ref. There's Bobby Angelo of NFL Films, one of the greatest videographers of all time, right behind Peterson. And he goes to him and he asks him right there, and you could see, you want to run Philly, Philly? And Doug, for 2.23 seconds, looks at him, he's not sure. And then finally he says, yeah. There it is. I think there's one other kind of amazing thing about that play itself. When Nick Foles ran onto the field, if there was an ISO camera on Nick Foles, you would have seen him betray no emotion whatsoever. You would have seen him not say anything to the guys in that huddle other than calling that. 00:07:48 Speaker 1: Play so here's the huddle right here he's calling the play and as you write in the book the one thing he was thinking was don't smile. 00:07:57 Speaker 3: Don't smile and don't tell trey burton because he was afraid that trey burton would take off his glove because obviously you would want to throw a football on a night when It's warm enough in there. You don't want to have your glove on. OK, but his fear was if Burton takes his glove off, somebody on the Patriots could say, hey, what the hell is this guy doing? So he didn't say a word to Burton. They broke the huddle and he didn't have time or he couldn't even think about taking his glove off. He had to keep it on. 00:08:34 Speaker 1: How insane is this call, historically? I mean, we've seen Super Bowls and Dan Reeves, I remember, throwing a pass to John Elway in a Super Bowl. We remember Tom Brady having a pass thrown his way. But this is a fourth and goal. This is now asking a tight end to throw a pass. He's never done that in his NFL career, threw passes in college. 00:08:54 Speaker 3: Yeah, he was, you know what the benefit of this was? Yeah. The great thing for the Eagles, he'd never done it, And he was like the fourth quarterback on the roster. He had thrown, I'm going to guess, 10 to 12 passes in his college career. But because he'd never done it in the NFL, who would have ever thought

he would have done it in this particular play? And more importantly, Nick Foles had never caught one in his NFL career. So this was absolutely, totally unpredictable. 00:09:26 Speaker 1: Here's the play right here. We're going to be able to recognize he's yelling, kill, kill, kill here. which again is subterfuge, right? For Belichick, he's not killing the play. 00:09:35 Speaker 3: The reason that he was yelling kill, kill, kill is because when you yell kill, kill, kill, the defense then is expecting a new call to be made. He just yelled kill, kill, kill, but he didn't make another call. And so the Patriots were expecting, what are they going to call? What are they going to do? All they did was yell kill, kill, kill. And especially, because Foles went to the right of the formation and basically outside the shoulder of the right tackle, you know, and just stood there for a second. Nobody covered him because they just thought he was a useless appendage. Wow. 00:10:18 Speaker 1: It's it to me, it's, there's so much bravado, confidence. It's a beautiful play. I mean, it's aesthetically pleasing. You're asking guys, your backup quarterback, I mean, he's of course your starter in this game, but he's a guy who had to know the playbook, but until three quarters of the season, he's your backup. You're asking a tight end who's not your primary pass catching tight end to figure prominently here. You're up against Belichick. Everything about it just adds on and adds on and adds on. One more thing on Nick Foles. You've already kind of answered this, but what did you learn about Nick Foles that makes all of this possible? He can stay calm. Is it about trust in the end between Peterson and Foles? 00:11:04 Speaker 3: A lot of it is about trust. But I think you also have to have an ethos that you know that in this big moment in your life that you can let your talent and your skill take over. And your nerves are not going to overwhelm you. And I think something that's really, really important. Tony, over the years, I've run into a lot of players who are religious. And I'm doing an interview with them, and they might talk about religion a lot. But very seldom do I write about it at all. Just because, you know, unless I believe, unless I believe that they are, what's the right word to say? Unless I believe that is a tangible reason for why whatever happened happened. I don't write about it. But in this particular case, Nick Foles needed to shut the outside world out. So he would go in every morning with Christian music playing while he's watching tape for an hour and a half at 6.15 in the morning. He would need to just shut everything about the outside world out. And the only media he would do was press conferences, which he had to do, and then production meetings with the TV. Didn't do one-on-ones, didn't do anything. He just wanted to be in the moment. And I'm going to tell you one other thing that I really grew to learn and appreciate about Nick Foles in this week. Disney goes to every quarterback in a Super Bowl And at least they did in 2017, in that era. They go to every quarterback and they say, listen, just sign this. It's going to guarantee you $ 150, 000 whether you win the game, lose the game, whatever. 00:12:55 Speaker 1: Guaranteed. 00:12:57 Speaker 3: This is a guaranteed $ 150, 000. So even if you lose, you're getting a check for this. And if you win, it's going to be a lot more. But here's the minimum that we're going to pay you. And Foles is the first guy in the history of the Super Bowl who said, no, I'm not signing it. And his agent said, this is 150,000 free dollars. Just sign this. He goes, no, I'm not signing anything. 00:13:23 Speaker 1: You want the distraction? 00:13:24 Speaker 3: Enter my mind. It could enter my mind that, hey, I've got this money on the line here. I mean, I have a geez, I. They're paying me 150 and I'm in the Super Bowl and all this. And he said, anything that was one tenth of one percent to take away my attention or my focus on this game, I'm not going to do it. If I win the game, fine, I'll do 100 things because then I can cash in. But I will not sign anything to make any money before the game. That. 00:13:56 Speaker 1: Is an incredible story. Of course, it's in the book, The Game by Peter King. We're going to go chapter by chapter. If I could take you for the next 24 hours, Peter, that's how much depth there is in this book. And I'm still, you're still learning things. I'm still learning things about that. One button to this entire story. That was maybe the best button you could possibly have. I'm not sure if you do a Mick Jagger impression. Peter. But there is a Mick Jagger moment here in this story, which is another part for Nick Foles. Mick Jagger knows who Nick Foles is, according to the quote in your book here. 00:14:30 Speaker 3: Nick Foles was in Jacksonville. You know, he went to Jacksonville in free agency. And when he went to Jacksonville, he went playing for the Jaguars. And that summer, the Rolling Stones played at Everbank Field or whatever it's called now. And then after that, like a week later, the Rolling Stones played Lincoln Financial Field. So he comes on stage and he goes, hello, Philadelphia. Hey, I just came from Jacksonville. Nick Foles says hi. And the crowd went wild. Because the one thing about Philadelphia, They remember Dr. J. They remember Mike Schmidt. They remember Sylvester Stallone. They remember Bobby Clark. They remember everybody, every sports hero, Michael Jack Schmidt. They remember all these guys. And people will love Nick Foles forever. And when Mick Jagger mentioned Nick Foles' name, they just lost it. 00:15:42 Speaker 1: The game... Peter King, 40 years covering the NFL. You covered and uncovered so many incredible, big, big changes in the league in that time. I'm talking about free agency, draft, combine, player safety, analytics, the supremacy of the league over other sports. That all flipped in the 40 years of

recovering. Which of the big changes surprised you most? 00:16:09 Speaker 3: I think just the simple fact, Tony, that The year I started covering the NFL, right around that time, there was a national poll, the Harris Poll of sports fans. What is your favorite sport to watch? Football beat baseball 24% to 23%. And by 2024, that had been put on its head. It was now football was four times as popular. as baseball is. And I think the way that football managed the offseason is the biggest reason why. They made tentpole events of the scouting combine, of free agency, of the draft, of minicamps, of back-to-football weekend, of these international games they play. they made tentpole events of the schedule release. Everybody knows who's playing everybody else, but the dates they're on, they made America care whether the Panthers and the Titans played on September 21st or December 21st. You know, it's just, it's crazy how the NFL sort of put it all out there and said, we're going to make a big deal. When I started covering it, You know what Pete Rozelle thought? He thought, listen, let's not do anything in the offseason. We'll have one event, a 17-hour draft in 12 rounds. We'll have one event, and that's it. And you know what our philosophy will be? Absence makes the heart grow fonder. They're going to be so excited about football when they come back in August. And Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell basically have said, hey, um, Bleep that. We are going to flood the market with football as much as we can. And so now you see what became of that. 00:18:17 Speaker 1: And even in your 40 years, even in my time on Horn and PTI, I can remember doing a story where Mark Cuban– was talking about the NFL is going to kill the golden goose. They're doing too much, too many games, too much. And we still, do you ever foresee there ever being a point where too much is too much? 00:18:38 Speaker 3: I mean, there might be somewhere down the road, but I think the other question that I wonder sometimes is, will football exist in 25 years? And I think back to one event, like in the last year I covered it, I was in Dallas covering a game. It was a Sunday morning. And I got the Dallas Morning News and I opened it, broadsheet newspaper, and I opened it and two facing pages had nothing on them but the agate, the tiny print score of every high school football game in the state of Texas on Friday night. There was like 1,500 games. That means to me, you want to walk into Abilene, Texas and tell the high schools in Abilene, Texas, oh, by the way, we're not playing football anymore. Oh, really? We are going to play football. And you can take that and you can go shove it there because nobody in the state of Texas is giving up football. And so it's going to continue to exist. In what form? I mean, as I write in the book, please, please, please, please do not play an 18th game. Stop saying you care about player safety. And at the same time say, oh, we're going to add an 18th game to the schedule so starters can play another 63 to 65 plays a year. It's just, you know, please, please. take care of the people who make your sport so great. 00:20:12 Speaker 1: Something that was true for the game when you started 40 years ago plus, and is true now, and you wrote would be true 40 years from now, that the most important impactful relationship in football is quarterback and coach, coach and quarterback. Is there a commonality in the truly great ones? 00:20:30 Speaker 3: I mean, first of all, the coach has to sort of imbue the... ethos in his quarterback that the coach is going to help him win. The coach and that coaching staff, when Patrick Mahomes comes to the sidelines in the Super Bowl down in the fourth quarter against San Francisco, third and long, and he says to Eric Biennemi, the offensive coordinator, do we have time to run WASP? And it's two-jet chip WASP at the end of that Super Bowl against the 49ers. And Andy Reid's attitude, he wasn't thinking about that play at the time. But when he heard Patrick Mahomes say that he wanted to play it, all of a sudden he said, yeah, we have time. Let's run it. Let's do it. If your quarterback wants to run a play that you like anyway, but weren't necessarily thinking of it, just like Doug Peterson and Philly Philly, exactly like that, then your coach is going to say, okay, I trust you. Let's do it. And it works. They ended up winning the game. And your quarterback has to be the coach on the field. Has to be. He's got to be the leader of your team. I saw a great moment in training camp in St. Joseph, Missouri in 2025, where Patrick Mahomes, it's 98 degrees, high, high humidity. It is a miserable day. There's not a cloud between St. Joe's and Manitoba. It is just a brutally hot, hot day. And all of a sudden, Mahomes looks over, and he looks to the side, and there is Rasheed Rice kneeling on the ground, puking his guts out. And Patrick Mahomes does not say, hey, Rasheed, you doing okay? You all right? Mahomes yells, get another guy. Which is, unfortunately, unfortunately, you know, we got a game going on here. 00:22:38 Speaker 1: We got to play. 00:22:38 Speaker 3: If this happens during a game, they're not stopping the game, you know, because somebody's puking out there. You got to play. So Juju Smith-Schuster comes on the field, they run another play. But the point is, Patrick Mahomes is perfect for Andy Reid. Andy Reid is perfect for Patrick Mahomes. 00:22:58 Speaker 1: You came into this league, though, it was Walsh and Montana. You witnessed, of course, Belichick and Brady. And there's so many. You think of Knoll and Bradshaw. You think of Landry and Staubach. You think, what is the best combo in football history? 00:23:13 Speaker 3: I mean, in history, I mean, I've only done it 40 years. So I've done it 38% of the history of the NFL. But in my time, it's definitely Mahomes and Reed. Because Reid, I saw one time Reid made a call that Matt Nagy gave to him in New England in 2023, I think.

Might have been 22. But he gave him a play against New England that Matt Nagy had found in a Columbia Penn Ivy League game from the 40s. He saw it on grainy old film and he gave it to him. They ran it in the game. And it turned out to be a shovel pass from Jarek McKinnon to Rasheed Rice. Easiest touchdown of the year. It was the first time ever that Patrick Mahomes had lined up in a three-point stance. And he had everybody on the Patriots pointing at him, saying, what the hell is going on? And while they were doing that, at that exact moment, ball gets snapped. Nobody even goes near Rasheed Rice. Easiest touchdown he's ever going to score. That is why Patrick Mahomes trusts his coaches. 00:24:26 Speaker 1: I was going to ask you, is there a thing that the fans don't know? What's the thing about the NFL that the fans understand least? But one nomination, just from my head, from your story, is that these guys are studying film from 80 years ago and still finding the essence of the game there in today's game and using it for a touchdown. It's amazing. 00:24:50 Speaker 3: There is that. And I think also Probably the one thing that I don't think people know, even people who cover the game, that in 2009, the NFL established this thing called the calendar wheel. And what they did was they emphasized all of the tentpole events in the offseason. You know, the scouting combine, free agency, the draft, all the other things in the offseason that magnetize people to the sport. And they made literally, I've got it in my book, it is a circular calendar that it's designed to tell the network partners, the people who work for the league and the people who work for teams, hey, the game never ends. And by the way, that dead period at the end of June and very early July, Roger Goodell wants something in there. He wants an event in there. So I believe at some point, I don't know what it'll be, I propose something in the book. Why don't you have this football festival in Dallas or some football nutty place, have a hundred of the biggest stars in the game come in for a day or two to do all this stuff. You pay them a boatload of money. People pay to get close to Mahomes or Josh Allen or whoever. And who knows, maybe a bunch of people won't go because they want to get away from football for a while, but some people will go. But Roger Goodell wants another tentpole event in an area he doesn't want it. They're just, he's sort of restlessly unsatisfied with the status quo, even though the status quo is so different from what it was. 00:26:36 Speaker 1: They've already stole Christmas from the NBA. I mean, July 4th from baseball. I mean, I guess that's the next move or, yeah. 00:26:43 Speaker 3: Could be. Could be. 00:26:45 Speaker 1: Can I play, I mean, this has all been story time, but could we play rapid fire story time with Peter King? 00:26:50 Speaker 3: Of course. 00:26:51 Speaker 1: I'm going to say a phrase. You just take it from there. Boomer Esiason's taxi driver after he was drafted by the Bengals was? 00:27:00 Speaker 3: Peter King. I picked him up in my two-door Volkswagen Rabbit on draft day 1984. Two guys from Maryland at the Cincinnati airport. Pete Koch, the first round pick. Boomer Esiason, the second round pick. Boomer Esiason folded himself into the back of this tiny hatchback. And he goes, welcome to the bleeping NFL. 00:27:23 Speaker 1: But did he know you were Peter King and writing? 00:27:26 Speaker 3: No. I was nobody. 00:27:30 Speaker 1: So you, in order to get the story, you impersonated or you beat the team's driver to the airport pickup. 00:27:41 Speaker 3: That's exactly what I did. 00:27:42 Speaker 1: Can somebody pull that off now? I don't think that's possible. 00:27:45 Speaker 3: No, come on, no. Because somebody from the NFL, somebody from the Cincinnati Bengals is not going to tell the beat guy, hey, what flight are they getting in on? And so that was a fortunate. 00:27:59 Speaker 1: All right, rapid fire story time with Peter. Combine, who went to a tanning bed and then did toilet pushups and toilet dips? 00:28:08 Speaker 3: Oh, that would have been Peyton Manning in the 1998 Scouting Combine. when he was trying to convince everybody before... At the Combine, you have to get your picture taken bare-chested, only gym shorts on, that's all you can wear, and they take your picture. And he didn't want to look like a skinny waif next to the formidable tree trunk known as Ryan Leaf. So he went to a tanning bed beforehand, and he went and did all these exercises to be kind of glistening when he did that. And He drank as much water as he could contain, so he'd hopefully have about four or five pounds of water weight when he stepped on the scale. And it all worked. 00:28:51 Speaker 1: That seems conflicting, that you're trying to get up the jack, but also bloating yourself. Does that stuff matter? 00:28:58 Speaker 3: I don't know. Ask Bill Polian. He's the one who drafted him. Look, Bill Polian was going to draft him anyway, but Manning just wasn't taking any chances. 00:29:08 Speaker 1: Peyton, even Peyton, at that point, he was... The most famous quarterback in college. 00:29:14 Speaker 3: Right, but just remember, just remember, just remember, in ESPN the magazine, that spring, there was a story out about if the writer who wrote the story had a choice, he would have taken Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning. So Ryan Leaf was not an insignificant part of that draft. 00:29:32 Speaker 1: Jason Garrett's pre-draft interview with Dak Prescott was a setup. 00:29:39 Speaker 2: Why? 00:29:39 Speaker 3: Because. that year, the quarterback coach of the Cowboys, Wade Wilson, Wade Sticks Wilson, and Jason Garrett, they did not want to take the quarterback who Jerry Jones and some of the So the guy they wanted to take was Dak Prescott. So what they said was, okay, Stix Wilson basically gave Dak Prescott all the answers to the test. He knew here's exactly what you're going to be asked by Jason Garrett.

And Garrett was wowed by how much Prescott knew. And he did not know about that the fix was in until years later when Prescott spilled the beans about it. But this is long after he had become, you know, the no doubt starter of the Cowboys. 00:30:42 Speaker 1: That is incredible faith in what you believed. from Wade Wilson has passed on, sadly. That's sound coaching in some way. He knew his job and he knew this was the right guy and I'm going to get it through and get it over the goal line. That's a fascinating story. I say goat farmer, you say who? 00:31:00 Speaker 3: Giovanni Carmazzi. 00:31:03 Speaker 1: Let me hear the romance in the word and in the story. He's a goat farmer now. 00:31:08 Speaker 3: Yeah, just remember in the year 2000, the San Francisco 49ers were looking for and had not been able to find the heir to Steve Young, who is the heir to Joe Montana. And so it had been a few years and Bill Walsh was scouting and they trusted Bill Walsh that year to essentially give them best advice on who they should pick as the quarterback. Giovanni Carmazzi, a mobile guy from Hofstra, was a guy who Bill Walsh loved. He thought he was going to be Kenny Anderson. And so therefore, when they had a workout with a local kid from the Bay Area who had been a quarterback at Michigan, Tom Brady, the fix was already in. They weren't taking Tom Brady. They were going to take Gio Carmazzi. And that is one of the reasons why Tom Brady to this day has a mad on about the San Francisco 49ers. He loved the Niners. And they picked Gio Carmazzi over him. And his whole career, he didn't love anything more other than probably winning Super Bowls. He did not love anything more than beating the 49ers. 00:32:28 Speaker 1: And Carmazzi has gone on to be a goat farmer, literal goat farmer in the book. 00:32:32 Speaker 3: Evidently so. That's what it says. 00:32:34 Speaker 1: And you somehow refrained. This is why I can't write the book. You somehow refrained from making a goat farmer, Carmazzi, goat, Tom Brady reference. You somehow was able to pull up before making the greatest of all time, Brady goat joke. Who was told we're trading you back to Buffalo? 00:32:53 Speaker 3: It was Marshawn Lynch. Marshawn Lynch, when the Seattle Seahawks traded for Marshawn Lynch, he was buried at the time in Buffalo. He hated it in Buffalo, and he wanted out. Seattle traded for Marshawn, which was great. And Marshawn, when he got the news of the trade, he thanked John Schneider, the GM of the team, very, very much. Said, man, thanks for getting me out of there. And so the next week, he scored the winning touchdown to beat the Chicago Bears. And he saw Schneider in the locker room and very angrily said, why did it take you so long to trade for me? He was angry. So Schneider said, what's wrong with this guy? So that week, they played a little trick on him. They gave him a phony... you know, boarding pass and everything. And they said, here's your travel arrangements. We're sending you back to Buffalo. And so he was aghast, shocked, whatever. And Schneider goes, hey, listen, just kidding. Yeah. But don't pull that crap again on me. 00:34:06 Speaker 1: And it set the line, brought him back in. And everything that happens afterwards allows him to be beast mode, as you know it. But he knew he couldn't take it further than that. That's an incredible story, Peter. That's great. 00:34:19 Speaker 3: Love that. 00:34:20 Speaker 1: What is your favorite story? 00:34:22 Speaker 3: Paul Tagliabue after 9-11. Tony, at the time, after they canceled the games, I was going to get some time with him late morning on Saturday. This has been five days after the towers fell in New York. He canceled the games. And I go in and meet him at the NFL office. New York City was a ghost town that day. But I went and met him. And in the course of our interview, Paul Tagliabue was not necessarily weepy, but he was crying at one point. Now, people know who Paul Tagliabue was. He was an absolute rock solid guy, a cold fish of a guy, not very personable. I was absolutely shocked, and I never knew to that moment why he started crying. And of course, it was an emotional time to be in New York, but I was still surprised. And So he told me, I was one of the last people to talk, interview him, and I asked him about that day. And he said, hey, when I got out of Georgetown Law School, I went to the Department of Defense as a lawyer and an analyst. And one of the big projects I worked on is how a foreign power, a foreign enemy could introduce a nuclear device into the United States. And he said, quite honestly, I learned it would be very easy. And so he said, that is one of the things that really worried me because I thought, he said, I wasn't alone, Mayor Giuliani. I mean, everybody was thinking, is something else coming after the fall of the World Trade Center? And I think a lot of people thought that something else was coming. Now, it didn't come But that's really what was worrying Paul Tagliabue at the time, the fact that we might have gotten attacked with a nuclear device. 00:36:20 Speaker 1: And you write in the book a detail there where he was still unsure which way he was going to go and literally wrote two different memos out to NFL owners. 00:36:33 Speaker 3: He had some very solid owners that wanted to play the games that weekend. to show America we will not be cowed or intimidated. One of the staunchest owners about playing was Jerry Richardson and the Carolina Panthers. So he wrote a long memo. And to the holdout owners, there were like four of them who didn't want to play. He wrote the same memo, except he said, we've decided we are going to play. But obviously, in the course of the memo, He wrote exactly what he was thinking, what was going through his mind, why this is more dangerous than Pearl Harbor for the United States, everything about that. And when he sent out the memo later that day, Jerry Richardson says, you can't play the games. And so that

Paul Tagliabue was thinking he wasn't going to play the games anyway. But he wanted the owners who wanted to play the games to come to their senses and about the fact that you really should not play the games this weekend. And they did. And so he ruled on late on that Wednesday that there won't be any football this weekend. 00:37:53 Speaker 1: Peter, you use a phrase in this book, And you use it more than once, I think. But there's a chapter called The Perfect Football Career. And you're speaking about one player. I'm not going to say who at this moment. But I want to play a game with you real quick. I want to see if we can get to The Perfect Football Career. And we can move these guys up and down the list. This is one of these ranking games, all right? So let's say we have five spots, all right? The Perfect Football Career. I throw out the name Peyton Manning. What in one, two, three, four, five are you going to put Peyton Manning? 00:38:23 Speaker 3: I would put him probably at three. I'd put Brady two, and I'd put Peyton Manning three. 00:38:29 Speaker 1: Okay, so then I was about to say Brady. Brady goes to two. Let's throw John Madden's name in there in a perfect football career. 00:38:35 Speaker 3: John Madden? 00:38:36 Speaker 1: Yes. 00:38:37 Speaker 3: I mean, he could be number one. He had an incredible football life in all ways. He had three football lives. He had the video game life. He had the announcer life. Probably the best football analyst in the history of the United States. And obviously, he's got the best winning percentage of any head coach in NFL history. I mean, how could you have a better life? 00:38:59 Speaker 1: All right, so you're making the case. There could be a perfect, it could be number one. Well, hold on that. The name you wrote the chapter about was Jerome Bettis, the perfect football career. Where do you put Jerome Bettis right now? 00:39:11 Speaker 3: Oh, I'd put him number one. 00:39:13 Speaker 1: You would? 00:39:13 Speaker 3: The reason his football career was the best is because he realized during his career that he knew who he was. Twice he had the opportunity to get traded or to sign with a team that was going to use him a lot more than he was going to be used in Pittsburgh. And he understood his body, and he had the relationship with Bill Cowher that Cowher is not going to drive him into the ground. And did he leave some money on the table? Absolutely. But that's okay. You know why? Because he got to walk out of football, a football stadium, for the last time as the winner of the Super Bowl in his hometown. 00:40:02 Speaker 1: That's a great case. It's a great case. He's your number one. 00:40:05 Speaker 3: And that's why. And the one other part of it is, I make a case in that chapter why players should think of a lot more factors than... making the most money before you sign a contract. Read that chapter. I wish young players would read that chapter. 00:40:24 Speaker 1: Jerome Bettis, your perfect football career, but over Kurt Warner, he's your next one. Does he crack your top five? 00:40:30 Speaker 3: I mean, Kurt Warner is fine at being number five, but he had so many hardships early on in his career where he gets exiled from Green Bay. He gets cut out of Green Bay and he has to go work in a grocery store. But there's a lesson in that. All good things come to those who work their asses off, which Kurt Warner did. 00:40:48 Speaker 1: Steve Sable, perfect football career. 00:40:51 Speaker 3: He's so fantastic. That was one of my favorite chapters to write. And the reason is no one has any idea. When you read this chapter, you will know that Steve Sable, more than any single person, helped create the legend that became Vince Lombardi. 00:41:10 Speaker 1: But look what he did for the NFL. And part of what you said, the biggest change in the NFL that is now 365, 24-7, that it is four to five to six times ahead of all the other sports. It's the mythology. It's the art. NFL Films has such a great place in all of our hearts. My age, to your age, to some of the young. I mean, it's perfection. So that's a lot of perfect football careers. That's all I'm saying, Peter. I'm not going to quibble with your rankings at all. If there was one player now who would put a case in, a current player who's making a bid to get into that list. 00:41:45 Speaker 3: It's got to be Mahomes. I mean, who wins three Super Bowls by age 30 and still has a chance to win three more. I mean, how about him and Andy Reid? It's just their marriages couldn't be better. 00:42:03 Speaker 1: Peter, I am so thankful for your time. I'm so thankful for the book. You're on your book tour right now. We're about to be leaving at this moment. If you do play Jacksonville Stadium and then go to Philadelphia, I hope Mick Jagger will acknowledge that as well somewhere around there. Every guest on this little show gets a little gift, Peter. 00:42:22 Speaker 3: I like. 00:42:24 Speaker 1: I like when people notice that my cell phone has a cover on it, and it's the face of Ray Liotta from Goodfellas. This happens to be my favorite movie. It's him laughing. So I like to give silly cases out so people can just stop somebody at one moment. Your case is, well, it's the Philly Philly, and that was 2.23 seconds. And you have taken the place of Doug Peterson and you have taken the place of Nick Foles in this one. We will send this to you. 00:42:50 Speaker 3: You don't have to put it on at any moment. 00:42:52 Speaker 1: But if somebody ever sees you in a hallway closing a deal with this phone, I will laugh. That's all. Thank you very much, Peter. 00:43:00 Speaker 3: Thank you, Tony. Really appreciate the conversation. This was fun. 00:43:03 Speaker 1: Peter King, everybody. Thank you very much. The game available wherever you get your books. One thing I forgot to tell Peter, but I need to say, compliments to the chef. This book feels amazing. It feels like a football. 00:43:14 Speaker 3: It feels amazing. 00:43:15 Speaker 1: Rubbery. Nothing better than story time with Peter King. Thanks, guys. We'll see you. I'm going for a walk. One thing I think I think, to steal one of Peter's lines, about stories and journalism is that it's about being in the right place at the right time. And it appears Peter was at the right place and right time every day for 40 years. Once or twice is luck. 40 years is something else. And I think I think I know what the something else is. It's trust. Every story in this book is the game revealing itself to Peter. Peter earned the trust of the game. Let him in. That's why he was in the right place at the right time. Trust was also Peter's answer to why Philly's special worked, because Peterson trusted trust. 00:44:02 Speaker 3: Foles. 00:44:02 Speaker 1: And then trust and surprise was the key elements of that play. And that's another mark of good journalism. 00:44:09 Speaker 2: Surprise. 00:44:10 Speaker 1: Peter is still telling us things we didn't know before, but I know something about Peter that Peter doesn't know. He's wrong about the pretty perfect football career because Bettis may be one and Brady and Madden and Manning might be on there too. High on the list, but I'm not sure I can rank anybody on the pretty perfect football career list. above Peter King, a real one. The game available wherever you get your books right now. Real deal available always. We'll see you next time.