Peter King’s column: Aaron Rodgers gets serious with Jets

1. I think that interview with Jarrett Bell is one Sean Payton would like to have back.

2. I think that is the understatement of July. As one head coach told me over the phone as we wound our way from the Jets to Steelers, “That crosses the line. Sean broke the code.” It’s one thing to say to Russell Wilson: I’ve got your back. Me and you against the world, Russ. It’s another thing to lay waste to a good coach not ready to be a head coach, Nathaniel Hackett, and to football people still in the Denver building (“20 dirty hands”). Just way over the line. In some ways, Payton may have put more pressure on Wilson, because he totally, unequivocally absolved him of all blame in the disastrous 2022 season. Now, if Wilson doesn’t revert to top-QB form, Payton has set himself and Wilson up as punching bags—even after walking his comments back.

3. I think when you start hearing Joe Burrow could miss “multiple weeks” or “up to six weeks” because of the strained calf, two things come to mind.

• One: Rarely when word starts leaking that a guy can miss six weeks does he miss three or four—and if he does come back after three or four, there’s a good chance he won’t be in pristine health.
• Two: Six weeks takes the Bengals to the opening weekend of the season. How’d you feel, if you’re Zac Taylor, to be feeding Burrow to Myles Garrett in Burrow’s first live action on opening weekend? I know I wouldn’t feel very good about that.

4. I think I’m going to go down a scheduling rabbit hole here, but it’s stuck with me through my time off. Here goes. One potentially decisive scheduling factoid in the AFC North was lost in the mega-coverage of the schedule release in May, and that’s the major rest advantage for Baltimore down the stretch of the season … and the potential physical beatdown the Steelers could face at the same time.

The Ravens will play one game in a span of 23 days between Nov. 17 and Dec. 9, which could lead to significant healing for a stretch run with two noted physical foes—San Francisco in week 16, Pittsburgh in week 18.

The Steelers will play four games in that same span.

Baltimore plays Cincinnati at home on Thursday, Nov. 16, and will wake up in home beds on the 17^th with nine days off before facing the Chargers in L.A. on Sunday, Nov. 26. Then comes the week 13 bye, followed by a home game against the Rams on Sunday, Dec. 10.

Pittsburgh will play three straight Sundays starting Nov. 19 in Cleveland, and then at Cincinnati and then home with Arizona. The Steelers then play New England at home on Thursday night Dec. 7. So that’s actually four games in 19 days for the Steelers.

What’s interesting, to me, is that Ravens coach John Harbaugh could have a relatively luxurious decision or decisions to make in mid-November. Say a key player comes out of that Thursday night game on Nov. 16 with a strained calf or bum ankle. If Harbaugh is confident in his receiver and corner depth, he could give them 23 days to heal for the last five games. It’s the kind of decision coaches rarely have the chance to make in the health-crushing world of the NFL.

5. I think these are three things about the Bills’ new $1.4-billion stadium project, which broke ground in June, that I find interesting:

• The new stadium, scheduled to open in 2026, will have natural grass. This will be the first time the Bills have had a grass home field since 1972, so this will break a 53-year streak of Buffalo playing on fake fields.
• The team’s lease runs for 30 years, which, for media of a certain age, is surprising—because it means the Bills will have been a continuous franchise in AFL/NFL history for at least nine decades, assuming no loopholes are used by another market to snatch the team. I remember midway through my NFL-reporting career, every story about franchises that may move in the future led with Buffalo. No more.
• Do not, do not, do not underestimate the unique circumstances around the Bills staying long-term in western New York. The sitting governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, is from Buffalo, is a huge Bills fan and was intent on making a deal with the team—a deal that history will show as team-friendly. The sitting commissioner of the league spent the first 12 years of his life living in Jamestown, N.Y., an hour south of Orchard Park. He has a very soft spot in his heart for an NFL franchise in America’s 49^th-largest market.

6. I think happy trails are in order for the distinctive Norm Hitzges, who retired in June after 48 years on sports radio in Dallas. That’s a lifetime of Jerry Jones rants. As important as his talk shows, Hitzges, of The Ticket sports radio, has had a fundraiser each December, the Whataburger Normathon, that over two decades has raised more than $8 million for the Austin Street Center for the Homeless in Dallas. Hitzges, 78, has left footprints for so many in radio to follow—but what makes his legacy special is his enduring care for people struggling in life. Kudos on a professional life so well-lived to Hitzges.

7. I think I’ve got my quibbles with the “Quarterback” series on Netflix: Marcus Mariota added very little; nice guy, just not interesting and not a very good player. Too many talking heads getting airtime … It’s plodding at times, and probably could have been five tight shows instead of eight … Nothing against people who make their living talking about the NFL, but this series should have been all inside the lives of the three quarterbacks … But overall I liked it a lot, learned from it, and am glad it’ll be back for a second year. Pluses: Kirk Cousins provided some terrific moments, including mooning deep into the night about an overthrow against Detroit, moaning with injuries in games and meeting with the team psychologist. Really good … Patrick Mahomes F-bombing Andy Reid for taking him out when injured in the playoffs was classic Mahomes, as was some eye-rolling weariness about the demands on a franchise quarterback. I hold out hope for the next season to be even more inside. I asked the three directors of the individual quarterbacks for thoughts on what being embedded with the quarterbacks last season was like.

Tim Rumpff (Cousins)

As a director embarking on an unprecedented year-long journey to document a quarterback’s season, your biggest hope is that your subject buys into the project. Kirk Cousins made it clear from day one that he was an open book. The first time we met, after exchanging the typical awkward pleasantries, he proceeded to talk for over an hour about his weekly in-season schedule, breaking it down minute-by-minute. That introduction was lesson number one about playing the position: Time is a quarterback’s most valuable asset and every second of every day is accounted for trying to perfect the craft. Kirk allowed us to capture his process, which includes brain-training sessions, meetings with a team psychologist, painful body work and game planning meetings with coach Kevin O’Connell. When I asked him why he does all these things, he admitted that he knows his physical limitations and his mind is his edge.

Matt Dissinger (Mahomes)

“I’ll see you guys at the house!”

I was standing outside the Chiefs locker room after Kansas City’s 27-20 victory over the Jaguars in the divisional round of the playoffs. It was a game in which Patrick Mahomes suffered a high ankle sprain, lost his fight to stay on the field, and then returned to the game and threw the game-icing touchdown on one leg. Now, as he gingerly walked from the press room to his locker room to get an MRI, we anxiously awaited his response to whether we could film with him after such a dramatic win. We had our answer. The scene at the Mahomes house after that game told you everything you needed to know about the man Patrick is. The house was packed with family and friends that had done this very thing for years. Patrick’s college friends sat on the couch and his parents immediately greeted him when he walked in the door. Shortly, it was time for Sterling, his almost 2-year-old daughter, to go to bed. For a moment he wasn’t the NFL MVP, he was dad and it was time for bedtime stories. When he emerged, he sat down, his wife Brittany sat on his lap and regaled her with the story of how he tried to persuade Andy Reid to keep him in the game. (“If I said the F word to coach, you know I was upset!”) It was a scene unlike anything I had captured in my 20 years with NFL Films.

Shannon Furman (Mariota)

I always heard Marcus was a very private person. One of the very first things we shot with him and his wife Kiyomi was an ultrasound for their first child that would be born later that season. To see the joy and awe on his face during that moment added a lot of perspective on what this year meant to him. While it was a big year for him on the football field it was an even bigger year off it. He was going to be a father, and we were trusted to document these moments for their family. I was very grateful that this private couple let us into such an intimate moment in their lives and allowed us to continue documenting the birth of their first child throughout the series.

8. I think the $60-million fine levied on Daniel Snyder as he got good-riddanced out of the NFL is, on the surface, a decent pound of flesh for all his misdeeds. But let’s be real. Take the $60m away from the sale price of $6.05 billion and you’re left with $5.99 billion—which is 1 percent of the sale amount. More significantly, Snyder, even after the fine, earned the highest amount for an American sports franchise ever, beating the Broncos last year by $1.34 billion. So the fine might make the NFL feel good because the league’s all about money anyway. But it was a nick-cut on the neck of a man who is singularly responsible for taking a flagship NFL franchise and turning it into a tarnished national embarrassment. Oh, one other thing: Snyder’s exit statement led the league in tone-deafness. The second sentence in it: “We are proud to have built the most diverse leadership group of any NFL team, including having the highest representation of women, underrepresented groups, and the first full time black female coach in league history.” You built nothing, man, other than your investment portfolio.

9. I think watching the fans streaming into Washington training camp is reminiscent of the final moments in “Field of Dreams,” with the cars lined up in Dyersville, Iowa to recapture what they loved so much and what they thought was lost forever. Good luck to the Josh Harris group in making the team what I remember from the late eighties and early nineties. Games at RFK Stadium were almost religious revivals. The ground shook and the press box swayed with the game on the line in the fourth quarter of so many of those games. May it happen again.

10. I think these are my other thoughts of the week:

a. RIP to many over the past 11 weeks, including two memorable and very different people and voices: Tony Bennett and Sinead O’Connor. Been singing their songs to myself all month.

b. My favorite recent quote, from tech strategist Lou Paskalis to The New York Times, on Elon Musk laying waste to Twitter: “If there’s ever been a more self-destructive owner of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise who resents the very customers who determine the success of that enterprise, I am unaware of it.”

c. Indisputable.

d. My favorite recent letter to the editor, from The Wall Street Journal on June 16, as the PGA-LIV merger disgusted America, from Olaf Kroneman III of Birmingham, Mich.: “I always take a shower after playing golf. Now, I will need a shower after watching golf.”

e. Story of the Break: Kent Babb of The Washington Post with an emotional, wrenching piece on a nineties Harvard football team with two very notable players taking two very different paths after graduation.

f. One player, Chris Eitzmann, made the Patriots, roomed with Tom Brady as a rookie, and had his life ruined by CTE and alcoholism. He died in 2021, and his autopsy showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the progressive brain disease associated with repeated hits to the head.

g. Another player, Chris Nowinski, became a professional wrestler (“Chris Harvard”) before being concussed too often, then started on a path to wake up America about the dangers of football and head trauma. Now the head of the Boston-based Concussion Legacy Foundation, Nowinski has felt the sting of ostracization by many in the football community, and is clearly tormented by the life and death of his former teammate. Crucially important story, so well told by Babb, who is excellent.

h. Baseball Story of the Summer: Tyler Kepner of The New York Times on the last remaining Dodger from the Boys of Summer, Carl Erskine. Just superb.

i. Wrote Kepner:

His original postcareer plan had been to move to New York and work as an athletic wear representative for Van Heusen, the apparel company. But the family stayed in Anderson when Jimmy, the fourth Erskine child, was born with Down syndrome in April 1960, a time when many families struggled with society’s attitudes toward children with intellectual disabilities.

“The assumption right in the beginning was, of course, you’re going to take him to some institution,” Erskine said. “And Betty says, ‘No, no, he goes home with us.’ And that was it from the beginning, Day 1. So we never considered anything but Jimmy going with us.”

Erskine sold insurance, worked as a bank president and coached baseball at Anderson College. Jimmy went everywhere with the family — to dinner, to church, to his siblings’ athletic events. He attended public school in Anderson, where an elementary school was named in the family’s honor in 2004.

Jimmy, now living with a caretaker, retired recently after working 20 years at an Applebee’s restaurant in Anderson. He visits his parents’ home twice a week.

“He’s 63, and they had told us he’d live to be in his 30s,” Betty said. “We feel like we were given an angel.”

j. You read a fabulous story like that, and read people like Ken Belson and Jenny Vrentas and Juliet Macur, and you see The New York Times eliminating its sports section in favor of using stories from The Athletic, and you think: Do the people in charge of the place know a damn thing about sports and original sports reporting?

k. I watched a lot of baseball on my break. Three observations: Official scoring is laughably bad; there are no errors anymore. The Cubs play the Cardinals every day. True story. They’ve got 162 games against each other this year. And this Shohei Ohtani … Any argument that he’s the best player in American sports right now? Or in years?

l. I feel like his doubleheader in Detroit last week was vastly underplayed. He threw a one-hit complete-game shutout at the Tigers in game one, and hit two home runs in the nightcap. What is the best word to describe those six hours? “Absurd” is 18 percent of the real meaning.

m. Happy trails to one of the best local TV reporters I’ve ever encountered, Mark Berman of FOX 26 in Houston. A tenacious grinder, retiring after 37 years on the job.

n. I guess you file this in the That’s Baseball Suzyn Dept.: Lazing around at home one day in June, I turned on the Yankees-ChiSox game, and the starting outfield for the greatest baseball franchise of all time was, left to right, Jake Bauers, Billy McKinney and Willie Calhoun. And that wasn’t the only time it happened.

o. Great observation from David Cone, who started 419 big-league games and won a Cy Young with the Royals, watching Nick Pivetta pitching exclusively from the stretch in a Red Sox-Yankees game: “If I had it to do all over again, I’d pitch from the stretch full-time. Just feel like there’s less moving parts, less that can go wrong, hide your pitches better.” Cone’s really insightful.

p. Travel Story of the Summer: Joseph De Avila of The Wall Street Journal with a piece the summer of mega-air-travel has brought to the fore: “Can Airline Seating Get Any Worse? ‘A New Form of Torture Chamber.’”

q. Wrote De Avila:

Last year, the FAA sought public feedback on whether seat sizes posed safety issues, and it got an earful. More than 26,000 public comments poured in over a three-month stretch.

“Airplane seat sizes are appalling,” one commenter wrote. “They are built for people from the ’40s and ‘50s. They cannot remotely accommodate a person over 6 feet or 200 pounds. It’s literally painful to fly today.”

Liddy Cotter, 25, said carriers should put more effort into making seating more pleasant, even if they have to sacrifice some profits.

“I understand they’ve got to make money,” said Cotter, who lives in Manhattan. “But at the same time, where is the humanity?”

r. Got to think about the baseball All-Star Game a bit. Thoughts:

National TV rating of the baseball All-Star Game on FOX July 11: 3.9.

National TV rating of one of the sketchiest 2022 Thursday night NFL matchups, streaming on Amazon Prime, Jaguars-Jets on Dec. 22: 3.9. Much of America still has no idea where to find Amazon Prime, yet 8.26 million people found it to watch the 6-8 Jags and 7-7 Jets play. Everyone knows where to find FOX, yet 7.06 million watched the All-Star Game.

The cratering of baseball on TV is stunning. Viewership of the All-Star Game is down 81 percent since the 1980 game. Consider this: The biggest comedy on TV in 1980, M*A*S*H, averaged a 25.7 rating. The 1980 All-Star Game got a 26.8 rating. Now a decent college football draw in the noon Saturday window can beat it. Odd and precipitous.

s. So you think you can’t make a difference. You’re lying to yourself. You can. Bart Chezar is this week’s reason why.

t. Take three minutes and listen to the story about arborist and tree enthusiast Bart Chezar on WNYC radio in New York. He is singlehandedly trying (with some marked success) to return the American Chestnut Tree to one of America’s great parks (and my big walking park), Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

u. From a 15-inch sapling to a 40-feet tall tree, helping regenerate a species … in only nine years. The trees begin as chestnuts, donated to Bart by the American Chestnut Foundation in the fall. He provides needed TLC in his apartment in New York, making sure they get in months of needed cold storage so they’re good and strong when, in the spring, he can plant them in a quiet place in the park. “My wife gives me a little area of our fridge I can use,” he says.

v. So far he’s planted about 2,000 in this New York City park. Some die due to a blight that nearly eliminated the species. But many survive—because one man is dedicated to the survival of a mighty tree.

w. Stories like that, in our divided country, make me slightly optimistic about us.

x. So you want to know what I did on my summer vacay? Some highlights of my 11-week experience with not working:

• We went to Austria for my nephew Luke’s wedding. Salzburg—highly recommend, and not just for the beer.
• Spent long weekends in Berkeley (May) and Seattle (July) with grandchildren Freddy, Hazel and Peter and families … and celebrated daughter Laura’s graduation from grad school at Cal. (Proud Dad.)
• Napped (post-lunch and -crossword) almost every day for 11 weeks. And oh my Lord, do I miss those naps on the road now.
• Saw Nate Eovaldi throw a 2-hour, 13-minute complete game on a May night at PNC Park in Pittsburgh (Rangers 6, Bucs 1) while drinking two Iron City 24-ounce cans. What a night. How much more enjoyable baseball is when it’s played briskly.
• Watched “Jeopardy!” out the wazoo.
• Took a ferry to Block Island and toured that delightful piece of land in the Atlantic that’s approximately 14 miles from three states—New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut. (I guess you’ve got to be a Northeasterner to get that.)
• We saw our first movie in a theater in four years: “Oppenheimer.” Many comments. The acting was just superb. The story, I didn’t know. I took American history in high school and more history at Ohio University and well, I didn’t know those teachers glossed over the development and use of a nuclear bomb, but they did. So I appreciated the history lesson. Well worth three hours of your time.
• Read “The Road,” by the late Cormac McCarthy. I’d never read any of his books, and I’m sorry it took his death for me to pick one up. That was an eerie and page-turning read.
• Spent many days not reading a word about football.
• Got into walking Chuck the dog to Prospect Park and Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. My high week: 56 miles in early June. (Thanks to the pedometer feature on the iPhone.)
• Realized how much I enjoy my wife’s company. Oftentimes, just hanging.

y. Sincere thanks to NBC colleagues Kristen Coleman and Kelsey Bartels for their production and videography work on the first leg of my camp trip. They were unselfish and fast and great professionals in week one.

z. Anyway, very glad to be back, and very glad to be taking this trip. You’re going to get my best in my 40^th season covering the season, I can promise you that.

Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com