FanHouse PeterKing

When Peter King agreed to write a weekly Monday Morning Quarterback column for the 1997 NFL season, he figured it'd be a few hundred words, a week's worth of stuff that didn't fit into the pages of Sports Illustrated. That's not the way it worked out.

As it turned out, MMQB became several thousand words a week on everything and anything that King felt like writing, whether about football or about his family or about coffee. Now, with Monday Morning Quarterback available in book form, King talked to FanHouse about how the column got to this point.

He also addressed accusations that he's too close to Brett Favre, why he likes Twitter, and what it meant to be the subject of the New York Times crossword puzzle. The full interview is below.

After declaring last week that his on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again retirement was back on again, Brett Favre acknowledged that his popularity has taken a hit. But Favre says that if you got sick of Favre the last two offseasons, that means you never really loved him.

Favre tells Peter King of SI.com that he knows he was a beloved figure after his great 2007 season in Green Bay, and that he's not so much anymore. But Favre says that just means the fans who said they loved him back then didn't really understand him:

With Peter King on vacation, this week's Monday Morning Quarterback column at SI.com was written by Redskins tight end Chris Cooley, who penned an entertaining read that doesn't get into coffee or girls' softball but does get inside the mind of one of the most engaging players in the NFL.

Norman Chad is a freelance sports writer whose syndicated column runs in several newspapers, including the Washington Post, as well as at SI.com. Chad (who is also well known for appearing on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption and as a commentator for the World Series of Poker) regularly pokes fun at media figures, and so it's no surprise that in his latest column, he took a jab at Peter King.

But it is a bit surprising that SI.com decided to edit out the portion of Chad's column that deals with King.

For all you chumps who enjoyed a Tom Brady-less 2008 New England Patriots team, I got some bad news for you: Dreamboat is back. And to hear Peter King write it (in between uncontrollable sobs of joy, surely), Tommy Terrific is better, faster, stronger, so on and so forth.

Last September, Brady's season ended after just 15 plays. The Chiefs' Bernard Pollard tackled him low and blew up his ACL in the process. Following knee surgery (and a couple subsequent procedures to deal with a staph infection), Brady spent the last seven months planning a marriage and plotting his comeback.

It's been six days since FanHouse last wrote about Brett Favre and, well, that just won't do. Last we heard, Favre may or may not have talked to Dr. James Andrews about arm surgery in preparation for one more NFL season.

Either way, Favre hasn't come out and said he's done, although no one would believe him if he did. So we wait. Unlike last year, though, when a handful of teams were interested in Favre after he fake retired -- and it became clear the Packers weren't going to give him the job -- this time around, only the Vikings are in the running for the ole gunslinger's services.

Jon Gruden made national headlines yesterday when he replaced Tony Kornheiser on ESPN's Monday Night Football. Kornheiser, of course, "stepped down" (as MDS, Ryan and I noted last night, that may or may not be extremely convenient) from his role in the booth with very little noise aside from the original announcement.

All in all, it was a pretty smooth transition. That is until SI's Peter King dropped a bombshell in his Tuesday morning version of Monday Morning Quarterback, teased via his Twitter account.

In February, the Vikings sent a fourth-round pick to the Texans, and in return, got quarterback Sage Rosenfels. He's penciled -- and I can't stress this enough -- in as the starter, what would be Minnesota's fifth in six years.

But like recent offseasons, there's talk that Brett Favre is mulling a comeback, even though, at this point, everybody just wants him to go away. (I mean, seriously, when Peter King writes in his MMQB column that "I know you're sick of this story. We all are...", it might be time for Favre to permanently retire to the ole fishin' pond.)

SI.com's Peter King, the distinguished longtime football writer and recent defector from the great state of New Jersey, does us the favor of emptying out his pre-draft notebook on this dreary Monday here in the northeast.

I, a short-time football writer and New Jersey loyalist, hereby do you the favor of picking through Peter's notes and offering my own thoughts on them, for what those thoughts are worth. (Insert nasty crack here.)

Peter introduces his notes "in no particular order," so we'll go ahead and do the same:

Last week, Sports Illustrated reported on its web site that B.J. Raji, a former Boston College defensive lineman who is expected to be a first-round NFL draft pick, had failed a drug test at the NFL's scouting combine. Raji and his agents said that report is false, and now the report no longer appears on Sports Illustrated's web site.

But if the editors at Sports Illustrated think the story will end there, then they're stunningly ignorant of the way the media works. A report that an athlete tested positive for drugs lives forever. Just because the URL where Sports Illustrated posted the story has gone dead (the story used to be located at this URL) doesn't mean people can't read the story, and it doesn't erase the fact that several newspapers picked up the SI report. How on earth can Sports Illustrated simply pull the story from its web site and think all will be forgotten?