Book Review: Peter King's MMQB

If you're anything like me then your Monday Mornings start with getting some work done reading Monday Morning Quarterback, Peter King's column on SI.com.  It's the only "must-read" column for me every week because the information is either necessary for a football fan or interesting for a freakishly-obsessed football fan like myself.

He gets a lot of big interviews, all of his information is trust-worthy and he always clearly defines what he is reporting as fact and what he's reporting as his opinion (which, I've learned, quite a few writers don't do).

Lucky for us, Peter King and Sports Illustrated have released a new book, available now: Monday Morning Quarterback: A fully caffeinated guide to everything you need to know about the NFL.

SI sent me a copy of the book a few weeks back and, I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I stayed up until about 1:00 AM the day I got it and finished the whole thing.  There's just SO many little tidbits of information that I find fascinating.

For example, here's a quick comment on a coach we're all familiar with:

I think Gunther Cunningham's ripping of the San Diego press corps because they weren't giving him enough stuff to read about the Chargers on the Internet is one of the wackiest things I've ever read.  "You can't get any good information out of San Diego," Cunningham, then coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, said in October 1999.  "When you have a media outlet like San Diego, you might as well go to Tijuana.  San Diego stinks."  I love it!  Coach rips the media because they won't spy for him.  It's a beautiful dotcom society we live in.

And that's just one of the sidebar comments that come on every page.

It's really a good read, for those that have the time, and an interest in football.  The chapters are broken up into MMQB columns, with some stuff added along the way, so it makes for great bathroom reading material.

This week I'm going to be picking out some of the interesting stuff on the Chiefs from this book and sharing it.  And if anyone is interested in reading the book, say so, and we can probably work something out.

After the jump, I included one interesting passage that Mr. King wrote on February 4th, 2002.  He was detailing the Patriots first Super Bowl victory of this decade.  I think you'll all feel that the beginning sounds very familiar with an ending we hope to replicate.

By the 17 low-cost free agents, I meant the Larry Izzos and Terrell Buckleys and Mike Comptons and Otis Smtihs and Mike Vrabels, veteran middle-of-the-roster guys, each of whom cost less than $700,000 to sign during last year's free agent rummage sale.  And he recalled what his old personnel man from the Cleveland days had told him after the Wal-Mart spree that Belichick and his underrated director of player personnel, Scott Pioli, went on last spring.  "Mike Lombardi [now an Oakland scout] called me after we signed all those guys," Belihcick said, "and he told me what a good job he thought we'd done.  He told me, 'You'll be successful and other teams are gonna look at this and build teams like you did.'"

It didn't look that way early.  I saw Michael Strahan on Sunday morning and he told me he remembered going to scrimmage the Patriots in August with his Giants.  "They were terrible, an awful football team," he said.  Then they were at 0-2, and at 1-3, coming off a 20-point loss at Miami.  No one was thinking of modeling anything after these Patriots then, except maybe how to have rumors start about the coach getting fired after two bad years.  But there was certainly nothing Super Bowlish in the air in October.