Welcome to the Peter King Podcast. It's the week before the draft Peter King podcast. Happy to be joined this week by Paul Burmeister.

My friend at NBC Sports, who's going to give us a good window into the new world of the USFL. he's one of NBC's announcers on the USFL

telecasts, so we'll get into that a little bit later. We're going to get into a lot of the draft obviously this week.

My guest later on in the show today will be Peter Shrager of Fox Sports and Good Morning Football who's just come out with his second mock draft.

We'll discuss that later in the show. Today we're going to talk about the mystery of Jacksonville at number one. We're going to talk about a lot of the mysteries in this draft.

Carolina being the first team in the draft, most likely, they could go quarterback at number six.

If they don't go quarterback at number six, quarterback's might fall a little bit in this draft.

We're going to discuss... quarterbacks might fall a little bit in this draft.

We're gonna discuss how the COVID year in college football in 2020 actually made the 2022 draft a lot better and I'll explain why. And you know this was just a little nugget I put my column this week in football morning in America that got a lot of response and reaction

and that is that if salary trends continue and I see no reason why they won't because the cap is going to be going up a lot more than it has been in the past few years. If salary trends continue, we are not far away from a 100 million dollar a year player in the National Football League.

And I think all of us just said, oh my God, what is this world coming to, but it's coming to this.

Anyway, Paul, how are you? You're back from Birmingham and we're going to discuss the USFL, but I take it.

You had a good time down there and are enjoying your early moments of the USFL.

It's been all kinds of fun, Peter, and obviously this was the first weekend of games,

but I've been down there now three weeks in a row,

really enjoying the access and the friendliness of all the coaches and

players and how willing they are to work with us and kind of to help make it a good

broadcast all spring and summer so I'm excited you want to you want to leave some time

for USFL at the end because I'm ready to go on all fronts there.

Yeah, I, you know, really, there's so much to talk about. There's, I'm going to ask you three questions about it, but I think the one takeaway I have about any new football league is don't give me any judgment right now about whether it's going to make it or whether it's not going to make it or well, you know Fox and NBC they got deep pockets so it's going to make it. I mean I remember hearing that with the

XFL two decades ago and didn't exactly ring true after four months. But I do

want to talk a little bit about the nitty gritty of it, so we'll get into that later. But Paul, let's start, you know, my column this week, one of the things I did was I talked to 12 people around the league, GM's personnel people, you know, I got a coach who's intimately involved in the process, shall we say.

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