(Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company)
(Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company)
Peter King may be retired, but he’s still writing about football.
The longtime NFL reporter and insider’s new book, The Game, is coming out Oct. 13. In it, he reveals previously untold details from his time covering the league, including stories about some of the biggest stars. King takes you behind the scenes with Reggie White, Deion Sanders, Steve Young, Peyton Manning, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Walsh, and others.
We recently caught up with King to discuss his new book, now available for pre-order.
Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Why write this book?
Peter King: “I didn’t want to write a book to replay my greatest hits. ‘Hey, I went to a cabin in Montana with Tom Brady after he had the Super Bowl comeback. Hey, I took a bus ride across the United States with John Madden. Hey, I was with an officiating crew in their houses during the week of a big game.’ All that stuff was really fun, and I loved it. But I wanted to go back and re-report a lot of those stories. And I just thought I’d do it at my own time and on my own pace, as it turned out, over about a year and a half.”
How did you approach it?
“Go to the Florida Keys and spend a day with Jimmy Johnson. Go visit Peyton Manning on a set where he was filming a commercial in Los Angeles. Go back and see many of the people I had written about over the years and ask them, ‘Let’s go back and do the inside story.’ ‘How did Reggie White end up in Green Bay? Is that where he wanted to be?’ As it turned out, the answer was probably not. But I don’t think he was unhappy that that’s where he went. And what happened in Bill Walsh’s last year in 1988 is a really eye-opening story in this book. Sean Payton talking about being a replacement team, a scab-team quarterback for Mike Ditka in 1987. Paul Tagliabue, before he died, talking about 25 years ago, how he navigated 9/11 and other issues. I just wanted to find out more. And that’s really what this book is about.”
My new book, The Game, is a memoir of my 40 years covering the NFL. It comes out Oct. 13 and is available to pre-order here: https://t.co/8YcQdVgaV4 pic.twitter.com/hxErcbadbG
— Peter King (@peter_king) September 4, 2026
How would you persuade someone to buy your book?
“If you love football and want to hear some great tales about the modern history of football, going back to the time when ESPN, in Mel Kiper’s first year, paid him $400 for the complete draft season to be their draft expert, to a time when a World Series game vastly out-rated Dallas vs. Washington, in the doubleheader window on a Sunday afternoon, to a time when baseball and football were in a virtual dead heat in American popularity, to today, when football is four times as popular as baseball and twice as popular as baseball and the NBA combined. How did the NFL come to own the sports calendar?…
“In my opinion, education is about holding people’s interest. A good teacher holds your interest and makes learning interesting. If you want to know the real story of how the NFL came to dominate world sport, in essence, or at least American sport, you’re going to know it, and you’re going to be entertained at the same time. You’re going to hear great stories you haven’t heard before.”
What else would you say about this book?
“There are a lot of people who are going to look at a 500-plus-page book and say, ‘Oh, I don’t have time for that.’ This is 40 little books. This is 40 stories. You can open the book and go to the Dallas Cowboys draft story, dying to draft Paxton Lynch in 2016. And it’s independent from what I wrote about in 2015 and 2017. You can pick and choose what you want to read.”
What would you consider the most interesting detail in The Game ?
“I would say the details about Reggie White’s free agency will surprise people. I believe Reggie White wanted to be a 49er. And when he got into the home stretch of thinking about it, I think that if the offers were fairly equal, he would have gone to the 49ers. And that whole fairy tale about going to Green Bay would never have happened. You’ll learn how Bill Walsh, in his last year as coach, was really mentally distressed and stressed to the point that he was crying that season. You’ll find out what really worried Paul Tagliabue after the World Trade Towers went down. Paul Tagliabue, when he got out of law school, had his first job with the Department of Defense. He studied for a long time the feasibility of someone plotting a terrorist attack on the United States. He thought there was a real possibility it wasn’t over on 9/11. He was legitimately worried and scared in the days that followed because he thought that potentially a bigger attack could be coming.”
SEATTLE—Football is back, baby! What a great environment for the season opener. pic.twitter.com/QOio8dmcVt
— Peter King (@peter_king) September 10, 2026
Could you tell us what you learned about Nick Foles?
“I still find it so hard to believe that Nick Foles, in his, I think, 52nd NFL game, totally kicked Bill Belichick’s ass in that game. The Philadelphia Eagles put up 41 points on the great Patriots. And remember, that was the game where Tom Brady threw for more than 500 yards and lost by eight points. How did Nick Foles do this? The stuff about his mindset that he told me is so vivid and so interesting to me about how he controlled his mind, and he was not going to let the outside world influence him.
“To this point, he could have made $150,000 from Disney. Disney comes to the quarterbacks before the (Super Bowl) and says, if you sign this, you agree to do the Disney commercial after the game. And if your team loses, you still get $150,000. All you have to do is sign this document. Nick Foles told his agent, I’m not signing that. I’m not doing anything to occupy my brain space that would take away one tenth of a second in having me concentrate solely on this game. I don’t care about the money. I gained so much respect for Nick Foles.”
Did you talk to anyone outside of the NFL?
“I went to see Ann McKee, the CTE doctor who began sounding the alarm 16 years ago, when people like James Harrison were poo-pooing head trauma, head hits, and CTE. I think you’re going to get an education about how and why the NFL shouldn’t expand the schedule. To me, it is absolutely, totally irresponsible to expand the schedule from a player’s health standpoint. So I spent some time doing that. I believe this book is for all fans and for people who have become football skeptics over the years because of CTE and all that. And I totally respect their view. I think we should have great respect for, and quite frankly, a great fear of, head trauma, and we should be treating it with a lot more seriousness than I believe we are.”
Do you have any takeaways from the Patriots vs. Seahawks game?
“No. 1, Seattle’s defense will keep the Seahawks in the pennant race for as long as Sam Darnold is down. No. 2, Drake Maye has issues. You can’t call anyone a top five, six, or eight quarterback in football who makes the throw he made at the end of that game. You can’t do it. So he’s got some growing to do. I think he can and will grow into a more mature, better decision-making quarterback. The fourth quarter, to me, was alarming for Drake Maye.”
What about the 49ers vs. Rams game?
“I think sometimes we look at distractions and say, ‘Oh boy, man, that’s going to be bad.’ We looked at the 49ers, Kyle Shanahan’s car accident, Jed York’s thing, Brandon Aiyuk torching the 49ers throughout the offseason, the injuries, and the Rams loading up. And I will maintain two things. Kyle Shanahan is one of the great coaches in any sport on this planet. Brock Purdy is one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, and he still does not get his due.
“The final bullet point: do not throw a funeral for the Los Angeles Rams. One game is one game, 16 to go. It was clear watching that game that the San Francisco 49ers were totally intent on Myles Garrett not wrecking the game. Now, other teams will have different game plans, and they don’t have the institutional knowledge of both the Rams’ defense and their history of playing each other. So I think the Rams will be fine. I picked them to get to the Super Bowl.”
You’ve been traveling a lot since retiring. Where have you been lately?
“My wife and I, in August, we picked kind of the wrong time because of the heat, but our favorite place in the world is Italy. We spent a lot of time in Tuscany. Look, I love cities. I live in one. But there’s something about how pastoral, peaceful, beautiful, and wonderful the winding roads of Tuscany are. And we’ve been there several times. I know what happens when you fall in love with a place and think, ‘Boy, I could really live here.'”