And Welcome to the Peter King Podcast, the pre-season edition of the podcast. So happy you can

join us. I'm going to be here with Paul Burmister for the first part of the

podcast, my friend from NBC, and then later on in the podcast I'm going to bring in one of my good friends in the business, Mike Sando of the athletic, been covering the NFL for three decades. He's going to bring some expertise on three teams in particular, the Colts, the Rams and the Seahawks, all of whom he is very familiar with and visited this year in training camp. So we will get to those with Mike Sando a little bit later.

Paul and I are going to go over our picks for the season and Super Bowl MVP otherwise and we're both going to talk about some of the

teams maybe we like a little bit more than everybody else and some of the teams we we don't like as much as as other people do but Paul anyway thanks so much for for joining me and it'll be fun to kick off the season with you.

Peter this is kind of a unique one because from here on out we're going to have

games to either review or preview and this is the last time that we were kind of looking forward to and all that mystery, all the wondering about who's going to be good and who's going to disappoint all those things. It's still out there for now and we'll get a real peak at it with the games coming up but I'm looking forward to the

predicting part of this but I know that there's a COVID part of it that we want to touch on and be on record with

before we get to the predicting about who's going to win, who's going to be the MVP and all that.

So I enjoyed the way you wrote about it in your article on Monday with the COVID and the way some of the coaches are thinking about it and some of the

concerns they have. I'd love to hear a little more about that before we kick it off.

Yeah, Paul, let me first frame this and I think you framed it exactly the right way.

I do not want to. I got a couple of letters saying, oh my got another COVID column.

And so I went and I added up the number of words I wrote about COVID this week and it was like

920 out of 10,900. But anyway, my whole point is that, and the thing that I try to tell people, look, I want this to be the fun and games of life.

I want it to be the toy department. I want that. But the problem is it wasn't that way last year and it's not going to be that way this year. And I just want you to know. I want you the

listeners, the readers, the viewers to know the rules of engagement. Okay? and to know what people in the NFL are thinking about.

And listen, I'm just telling you, I spent a lot more than oneenth of my time at training camps and coaches spent a lot more than one-tenth of their time with me in training camps talking about COVID and their concerns and their fears about the year.

And I quoted a one head coach in my column this week who said,

I think COVID might affect teams more this year than last year.

And so I'm, first of all, I just want everybody to know,

everybody has heard about this and all that.

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