NFL insider Peter King is retiring, and he used a portion of Monday's "Football Morning in America" column to reflect on his many years as one of the best in the business.
But also tucked into his retirement column is a preview of the 2024 Philadelphia Eagles and a two-word piece of advice for star quarterback Jalen Hurts.
The "nut graph'' of the column, for Eagles fans?
"I don’t have a good feeling about Philadelphia in 2024," King wrote. "But if the Eagles return to goodness, it’s got to be on the wings of Jalen Hurts. Lead, man."
Eagles fans are by now well-aware (sick of?) the assertions that Philadelphia's locker-room issues are the result of the often-quiet (classy?) Hurts needing to adopt "a more outward leadership style.''
Eagles fans are also well-aware of the team viewing itself as "miserable'' even when it was 10-1.
Eagles fans are also well-aware of how, in the mad scramble for answers, the late-season sideline absence of "Big Dom'' was credited with causing the tumbling of this house of cards.
These are some of the assertions, in many cases one more zany than the next. Does King have his bad "feeling'' about the future based on the past? On the facts? On the assertions?
What we don't want to do here is conflate fact with fiction, or conflate the reporting that King is famous for with whatever it is that shock jocks like FS1's Craig Carton are famous for, most recently with Carton announcing that the Eagles locker room has "a problem that would splinter any group of men" and that "cannot be fixed."
Carton's yelping is ridiculous because there is no such thing as an unfixable locker-room conflict. If such a conflict really exists to some drastic level - and we have our doubts - it can be repaired.
But King isn't yelping. His suggestion here is a subtle one. And while the Eagles can deny Carton's yellow-journalism approach to reporting on a locker room he surely knows little about ...
The Eagles shouldn't dismiss what King is saying. Truly, his stature and his information-gathering skills are such that what Howie Roseman and coach Nick Sirianni ought to do is ...
Ask Peter King exactly what it is that gives him his "not-good feeling.'' And then go about fixing that.
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