Peter King is retiring & Headlines from Scouting Combine

Peter King (0:11)

Welcome to The Peter King Podcast.

And it's the last Peter King Podcast, Miles Simmons. I think we're both going to cry at the end of this one, but it's a pleasure to have you on from Indianapolis. I am in my home office in Brooklyn, my home studio, Brooklyn, New York. You're in Indianapolis to preview the combine. I am in Brooklyn to preview retirement.

So, let's tell everybody what we got on this podcast. No guest today. I'm the guest. How special is that?

We are going to talk about retirement in the first segment. And then in the back half, we're going to talk about what Miles has seen so far at the combine and what he is going to see at the combine. We're going to talk about the Chicago Brain Trust, Matt Eberfluss and Ryan Poles on the quarterbacks in this draft and on their own quarterback, Justin Fields, Sean Payton and George Payton, the coach and GM of the Denver Broncos, on the almost surely gone Russell Wilson, Brett Veach of the Kansas City Chiefs, the general manager on trying to keep his two big defensive stars, Chris Jones and Ligeria Snead, and a very interesting story, I think, and a good story. The Cleveland Browns are going to submit a rules proposal to move the trading deadline back and to make it possible for teams to get better later in the season than at mid season. And finally, I'm very interested in what a lot of these athletes are going to do at the scouting combine and what some of them may not do. We're going to talk about Marvin Harrison Jr. a bit, the top receiver in this draft, some would say, many would say, who's got a bit of an unorthodox way of doing his combine experience this year. Miles, welcome. How's life in Indianapolis? I hear it's unseasonably warm these days.

Miles Simmons (2:21)

Yeah, it is unseasonably warm, and I have this nice puffy vest, basically for no reason other than, I guess, my own comfort. It's like Linus' blue blanket. I expected to need to wear it, so now I'm just wearing it, and we'll see if it eventually comes off. But yeah, it's been 70 degrees the last two days, which is just a little bit unexpected for Indianapolis in late February, but hey, I'll take it. I think it's hotter here than it is in Santa Monica right now, which is just blowing my mind a little bit.

Peter King (2:52)

That is a little bit nutty. Well, anyway, you're looking very hawkin today. I'll just say that. Now, Miles, so in the first part of our program, I'm going to be selfish, and I'm going to discuss some of the things that happened over the last year that led me to make the decision to on Monday of this week to announce my retirement. And I must say my retirement with an asterisk, because I'm going to do something. I just don't know what it is right now.

I don't have any idea if it's going to be in the media, if it's going to be, I just don't know. This is a pretty new thing for me, so we'll figure it out as we go. But Monday was my last sort of regular column. Next Monday in football morning in America, I'm going to run far too many reactions to me retiring from all over the world. So anyway, that's where I am right now. And so, you know, I've been doing this podcast in one form or another for about seven years. I started it late in my career at Sports Illustrated, and I really enjoyed doing the podcast genre. It was really a lot of fun.

And over the years, it's become a little bit different, adding guests and having co-hosts and things like that.

So it has been a very, very enjoyable thing. And I know there are some of you who may not read the column, and so really don't know very much other than what you might have heard or seen or maybe haven't heard or seen anything at all. But I did, at age 66, announce my retirement on Monday of this week. And let's just go into that, and then I'm going to let Miles be Bob Costas and just ask me a few questions on this. Or maybe he'll be Mike Florio and ask me some questions that will really tick me off. But anyway, I'll just preface it by basically saying that, you know, a year or so ago, I was sitting in the winning coach's locker room in Arizona after the Kansas City Chiefs beat Philadelphia to win the Super Bowl. And I had arranged beforehand that if there was a special play in the game, that Andy Reid would explain it to me after the game on camera with my videographer, Andy Koblitz. So we were in his office, and he explains the play to me, corndog, and it's really good. And I then say to him, hey, there had been a lot of rumors and a lot of buzz all week. Could this be it for Andy Reid? And I just said, quite honestly, I said, hey, are you retiring?