Gentlemen,
They are filiming a movie right next to my work in the South End of Boston. I took out my camera and went for a walk to try to get a glimpse of Cameron Diaz etc because it's rare we get actual celebrities around here. As I am walking back to my office I see Peter King talking fitness with one of the Boston Sports Clubs Physical Trainers. I usually see him at the coffee shop around the corner stuffing his face, but looks like he's gotten off his ass and tried to lose some of that cake that is pasted to the inside of his colon. Eat your heart out Drew! You fat bastard.

(Thanks Dave M. for the pic and email.)

Now, talk to Peter.

For example, Jon Gruden begins every sentence with the words, "THIS GUY". Every one of them. Give a listen next time around, or go ahead and gut out your inner ear with a fishhook. Mark Schlereth (and plenty of others) begins every sentence by saying. "When I look at the (team name here)." You may also substitute the word YOU in there if you like. "I tell you what" is also a big one. What will you tell me, guy? Why not just get right to the what immediately, and spare me the needless clause upfront?

And then, of course, you know about pervasive use of the words NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE instead of the simpler NFL acronym. This is usually preceded by something along the lines of, "To be a (position here) in the NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE," These guys, when I look at them, I tell you what, they might just be fucking retarded.

And then there's Peter King, who of course has entire library of clichés all to himself. Lofty clichés. They define gay. Anyway, here's King this week on Texans QB Matt Schaub:

It's possible that Matt Schaub leads the NFL in normalcy. Nice guy. Not impressed with himself.

Yes, that's right. Normalcy. Matt Schaub defines normal.

This comes on the heels of King and Gruden declaring that various quarterbacks lead the league in intangible categories that really can't be measured. Gruden said Jake Delhomme leads the league in grit, an opinion that is somehow both meaningless and breathtakingly incorrect. King said Tony Romo leads the league in smiles. Indeed, in the hands of Gruden and King, it seems there is no pointless metaphorical category into which you cannot throw an NFL quarterback. So let's go ahead and do that now.

Brett Favre, as you may have guessed, leads the league in fun. He's the fun baron. Mark Sanchez leads the league in poise. OR DOES CHAD HENNE? Let's go through the rest:

Quarterback: Jay Cutler
Leads the league in: Frowns

Quarterback: Matt Stafford
Leads the league in: Spunk (can be employed literally if you like)

Quarterback: Aaron Rodgers
Leads the league in: Perseverance

Quarterback: Eli Manning
Leads the league in: Innocence

Quarterback: Donovan McNabb
Leads the league in: Resolve

Quarterback: Jason Campbell
Leads the league in: Passivity

Quarterback: Matt Ryan
Leads the league in: Upside

Quarterback: Drew Brees
Leads the league in: Underappreciation

Quarterback: Josh Johnson
Leads the league in: Wildcardedness

Quarterback: Kurt Warner
Leads the league in: Grizzliness

Quarterback: Matt Hasselbeck
Leads the league in: Toughness

Quarterback: Shaun Hill
Leads the league in: Guttiness

Quarterback: Marc Bulger
Leads the league in: Patience (he gets sacked a lot)

Quarterback: Ben Roethlisberger
Leads the league in: JUST MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

Quarterback: Derek Anderson
Leads the league in: Fearlessness

Quarterback: Joe Flacco
Leads the league in: Unrattledness

Quarterback: Carson Palmer
Leads the league in: Fortitude

Quarterback: Tom Brady
Leads the league in: REAL poise. Let me show you what real poise looks like right here.

Quarterback: Trent Edwards
Leads the league in: Fortitude

Quarterback: Peyton Manning
Leads the league in: Passion

Quarterback: Kerry Collins
Leads the league in: Adversity

Quarterback: David Garrard
Leads the league in: Quietness

Quarterback: Matt Cassel
Leads the league in: Mysteriousness

Quarterback: JaMarcus Russell
Leads the league in: Girth

Quarterback: Kyle Orton
Leads the league in: Game management

Quarterback: Philip Rivers
Leads the league in: Touch, douchiness

As you can see, every quarterback in the league has a special, unique character quality only they could possibly lead the league in. You can apply this to experts, too! For example, Peter King leads the league in being a fucking shithead.

This is really an incredible passage, from today's Monday Morning Quarterback. King begins by sharing the revelation that Tillman wasn't happy in the military and that he considered asking for an early release and playing for the Seahawks. That's certainly interesting, but it leads to a bit of mock clairvoyance in which King wonders, with Whickerlike myopia, where Tillman would've signed as a free agent in 2005 — you know, had he not been shot three times in the head on a hill in Afghanistan.

So what would have happened if Tillman hadn't been killed? He'd have been 28 at the time of his scheduled discharge. McGinnis was fired by the Cardinals after the 2003 season, and Ferguson canned after the 2004 season in Seattle. Imagine Tillman being on the free-agent market in 2005. St. Louis pushed hard for him in 2002, before he enlisted, and likely would have been involved. Tom Coughlin was coming off a rocky 6-10 rookie season with the Giants; he loves all things military. I bet he and then-GM Ernie Accorsi would have bid for Tillman. McGinnis, the linebacker coach in Tennessee, would have tried to sell him to Jeff Fisher, as would Ferguson with his new employers, the Colts.

I don't know what team would have signed him. But the Patriots, even with Rodney Harrison, then 32, ensconced at strong safety, were not deep on the back end, with only one other solid NFL player, Eugene Wilson (let go two years later). After the Belichick letter, I bet Tillman would have walked to Foxboro and taken any role Belichick would have offered.

Why stop there? What if, say, Vince Lombardi had never died? It seems just as reasonable to think zombie Tillman might've opted instead to play for zombie Lombardi. Lombardi loved all things military, too, right? The mind boggles at the sports and war counterfactuals. How might've All-America balloting looked in the latter half of the 1910s had it not been for the Battle of the Somme? What if Rocky Bleier's platoon had never gone anywhere near Chu Lai? Would he have made the Pro Bowl in 1976? These are all vitally important questions, and the answers can only be found in the quantum singularity of Peter King's mind. Congratulations, Peter. You've left the yard!

Monday Morning Quarterback [Sports Illustrated]

This is a cruel fate for anyone, not least for a communicator on the order of Dr. Z (né Paul Zimmerman), who cracked the game wide open for his readers in much the same way that John Madden did for his viewers. Even in King's sunny telling, the benefit, which raised more than $150,000 to help offset the considerable costs of Dr. Z's treatment, nevertheless begins to sound a great deal more like a wake:

Where to begin?

How about when Coughlin approached Paul Zimmerman — who looked fantastic, resplendent in a dark suit, goateed, trimmer than I'd seen him in years — at the start of the night and said, "Missed you at the league meetings this year. You didn't chew me out about anything.''

Yogi Berra and Dick Ebersol sat next to each other at the NBC table. When I introduced Yogi as the greatest living baseball player in the United States, everyone began clapping, and Ebersol stood, and then everyone stood. Standing O for Yogi at the Zim function. Only in America.

Rex Ryan, who is going to be good at the story-telling part of the job, believe me, spun a good yarn about Zim — the New York Jets' beat man for the Post when Rex was a kid and his dad, Buddy, an assistant to Weeb Ewbank — telling the ball boys in camp how to cheat on the pinball machine without making it tilt. "Now those are the important things!'' Ryan said.

SI group editor Terry McDonell and SI.com senior producer Dom Bonvissuto eloquently feted Zim, Terry intro-ing a Brooklyn Decker welcome from afar on DVD (Brooklyn and Dr. Z had that Z Said, She Said online game-picking thing going a couple of years ago) and Dom reading some get-well-soon-you-old-curmudgeon e-mails from all of you out there.

Coughlin: "Oh, I've had my ass ripped by Dr. Z, and I'm in good company.''

It's nice to see all corners of the sports world emerge to pay tribute to Dr. Z, especially his bosses at Sports Illustrated, who, last we checked, were all but pushing Zimmerman's stretcher out the door. At the very least, it's a reminder of the vastness of his influence, which reached across eras and genres and the whole sports landscape. Steve Sabol attended the benefit on Monday, and so did Football Outsiders' Aaron Schatz. The distance between the two men is precisely the distance the culture of football has traveled in the past half-century, and Dr. Z was around for the whole ride.

Most of you probably think of him now as the cranky, self-styled eccentric who timed national anthems, littered his columns with doggerel and offered atrocious football betting advice, all of which he did, in spades. But he was also very much a product of the sport's age of enlightenment (or maybe it's the other way around), which changed football in the 1970s just as surely as Bill James and sabermetrics changed baseball, many years later. As he wrote in 1970 in his indispensable Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football:

The fan is being lifted to new levels of awareness. He can see it surrealistically, in the art galleries, or artistically in the beautifully packaged Sabol Productions' "NFL Football" TV shows every week. Television, with its instant replay and stop action, has tried to unlock some of football's inner mysteries. And the fan who once played the game is astute enough to realize that the precise, destructive operation he now watches bears little resemblance to the sport he knew back at Old Nassau.

Reading the book now, you're amazed not just at how well it holds up, but at how progressive it would seem if it came out today. He wasn't much of a stylist, but Zimmerman had an offensive lineman's instinctive empathy for the overlooked and underapperciated (he played on the o-line in semi-pro ball in New Jersey), and as much as anything the book is an exercise in elevating the anonymous, the thoughtful eccentrics, the violent technicians who gave their best years and a knee or two to football.

The final chapter, "Strictly Personal: The Greatest Player," about Marion Motley, should be required reading in this current culture of disposability (to crib a phrase from Stefan Fatsis), one in which Bill Belichick is regarded as a cum laude genius for treating his players like so many replaceable cogs and sprockets. I read the chapter again last night, and this paragraph, which conveys so much of the fragility of the game, seems almost unbearably sad now:

I watched Motley right up until his last, hopeless days when he tried a comeback with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1955, and if there is a better football player who ever snapped on a helmet, I would like to know his name. There's a statistical table at the end of this chapter, detailing the numbers that made up Motley's professional chapter, but it's a kind of meaningless way of evaluating this remarkable player. It would be like trying to describe a waterfall in terms of gallons per second, or a sunset in terms of light units.

Monday Morning Quarterback — Tuesday [SI.com]

King talked with the league's President, Michael Huyghue, who had this to say:

He said the chances of a UFL team signing Michael Vick to play the 2009 season are "98 percent.'' Strange percentage, but that's what he said.

"Michael's not going to be able to walk right back into the NFL,'' Huyghue said. "He's going to need some kind of buffer before he signs in the NFL, and we'll be able to provide that for him.''

Vick is scheduled to be released from prison in July of 2009. Just in time for the proposed start of the UFL season in September of 2009. Vick would be banned from playing in the CFL so long as he's banned from the NFL. This rule was implemented by the CFL in August of 2007. CFL teams also have small salaries with a team cap of around $4 million. Why is that significant? The UFL is planning on teams having a $20 million dollar salary cap and quarterbacks could make between $1 and $4 million a year. Most importantly, a bankrupt Mike Vick would be free to play as soon he's released from jail since the NFL suspension rule doesn't apply to the UFL.

So the UFL could then package Vick and their new league to television networks. The UFL would have a marketable star (albeit a hugely controversial one) and television would have a reason for people to tune in. This is where it gets interesting. Who would be interested in televising the UFL? The NFL now has deals with ABC/ESPN, NBC, CBS, and Fox. Would the NFL be okay with these networks (and their many subsidiaries) giving any air-time to an upstart league that kicks off on Friday nights? Generally not. At least not in the past with competing leagues.

But, what if the UFL gives a fig leaf to the NFL's new personal conduct policy? They can kick guys out of the NFL without having to worry about their ill-defined policy being challenged by the NFLPA in court. Plus, they don't have to worry about the monopoly charge because they can point to the UFL. The NFL can then ship their vagabond players out of the league with year-long suspensions, allow them to rehabilitate their images elsewhere, and then bring them back when their "sins" have been cleansed. Which would be perfect for a player like Vick. As if all this weren't enough, the UFL could serve as a farm-league of sorts now that the NFL's European football experiment has given up the ghost. Something to keep in mind as America's most famous prisoner continues to serve his time.

Vick could play pro football in 2009 [SI.com]
Peter King: Vick could play in 2009 [SportsbyBrooks]

Peter is just the sweetest guy, and he can just indulge his id at any point. ... So the food comes. And this is PK: He said, "I really need to talk to an African-American assistant coach. A guy who really should be a coach in this league, to talk about the percentage of black head coaches in the league. I need to talk to somebody like Ted Cottrell."

His phone rang 30 seconds later and it was Ted Cottrell, and he takes the phone call, and as he takes the phone call, the food arrives. And Flem had gone outside to talk to his wife on the phone, so Peter sees Flem's pizza, and you can see him thinking, "How do I ask the question so Ted will speak for a long time?" So he reaches over, and he grabs two whole pieces of Flem's pizza, eats them in two bites. It was the most staggering thing I had ever seen.

So PK stuffs his face while conducting phone interviews. Makes you wonder what he's swallowing when he's chatting up Brett Favre.

Josh Elliott Calls Morning SportsCenter ESPN's Acknowledgment of the Blogosphere [FanHouse]

I think in the interest of full disclosure, I want to report that my daughter, Mary Beth King, has taken a PR internship with the Seattle Seahawks for the season. It's going to sound hollow to say I had nothing to do with it, but I didn't. She applied without telling me. New family rule: Mary Beth does not share conversations with Matt Hasselbeck or Mike Holmgren with her father.

That's refreshing that King didn't have anything to do with landing his daughter a job but isn't there a conflict of interest, at some level, still there? And does a "new family rule" precluding any Seahawk talk around the King family dinner table really eliminate it?

What's left out of this column is what exactly Mary Beth will be doing in the PR department. If she's refilling water jugs and doing other mindless work, it's probably not a big deal. But if she's mailing out press releases or involved in promotional events directly related to the Seahawks organization, it's a bit slippery, especially given that Mary Beth is central figure in many of King's columns. Granted, King will be smart enough not to slyly sneak in a little blurb about Lofa Totupu's Adopt-A-Kitten drive or whatever, but, in some ways, it'd probably be best to keep Mary Beth's daily activities out of MMQB until after she's completed her internship.

Peter King: MMQB [SI]

As we're all too painfully aware, Brett Favre asked for his release from the Pack yesterday and, as happens anytime Favre so much as flosses his butthole, PK has an update on the situation up within minutes, even though it's basically recapitulating al that he assumed would happen before.

Favre's first choice is the Vikes, because his former quarterback coach and current pally Darren Bevell has the unenviable task of being the offensive coordinator under Brad Childress in Minny. But we know the real reason is that he wants to haunt Big Fatty Drew.

Update: The Pack have told Favre he's welcome to come back as a backup, but they're not releasing him. Peter King immediately starts bounty on Aaron Rodgers.

As we've mentioned, Peter King has been an outstanding NFL reporter for a long time, but it wasn't until he started writing regularly for the Web that he became such a big star. We have to respect him for losing weight for the occasion.

And look: We almost made it through a whole Peter King post without mentioning Brett Favre. So close.

So: Do you like the Peter King? Do you not like the Peter King? Let us know.

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Others have pointed out the resemblance of King's MMQB ramblings to Larry King's old USA Today column, but we'd never noticed, until Food Court Lunch pointed it out to us, that he more closely resembles The Onion society columnist Jackie Harvey.

Here's a King and a Harvey, side-by-side.

Awesomeness, Billy Joel's
[At the Superbowl]: "Great combo of anthem (Billy Joel) and flyover. The four fighter jets appeared to be about 20 yards over the top of the stadium. Amazing. Prince, Schmince."

"Congratulations to piano man Billy Joel for his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Billy, with such classic records as The Nylon Curtain, Storm Front and River Of Dreams under your belt, when it comes to rocking and rolling, you're far from an 'innocent man.'"

They've got a lot more examples; it's really quite striking.

Peter King Is Jackie Harvey [Food Court Lunch]