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When the Vikings beat the Cardinals on Sunday, the victory was especially important to one player in particular: Patrick Peterson. A 10-year veteran of Arizona’s secondary before joining Minnesota in 2021, the Pro Bowl cornerback was seen after the game hollering for Cardinals general manager Steve Keim, who didn’t re-sign Peterson two years earlier: “Stop running! You said you was gonna call me back!” Two days later, Peterson has detailed on CBS Sports’ “All Things Covered” podcast the bumpy relationship that fueled those comments and gave him extra motivation on game day.
“This is my last time talking about this,” Peterson told co-host Bryant McFadden. “I’m not bitter in any stretch of imagination toward the organization. I’m just laying out facts of what happened to me when I was a part of the organization. I feel like, being an all-time great, doing things that nobody’s done in that organization as far as going to eight straight Pro Bowls … I just felt like I shouldn’t have been treated in that manner.”
Peterson is referring to different incidents that led up to his departure from the Cardinals. In 2019, for example, he believes someone from Arizona’s front office was responsible for leaving critical fan mail at his locker after a practice.
“The letter was talking about how (this person) won’t be a fan anymore as long as I’m on the team, talking about I tackle like a girl, just all type of negative stuff,” Peterson said. “It was on my chair after a practice. … I’m like, ‘Man, why the f— am I reading this from a fan? Why am I getting this from somebody within the organization?”
The real disconnect, however, came in 2021, when Peterson approached free agency after 10 years with the Cardinals. The corner partook in a standard annual exit meeting, he said, where Keim clued him on the team’s eventual pursuit of J.J. Watt and went above and beyond to forecast a new deal for the veteran.
“(He said) ‘I want you to retire here, man, I love you to death, I won’t dare let you go anywhere … I promise you we’re gonna do everything we can to keep you around,’” Peterson said.
The weeks went by, however, and Peterson claims he tried multiple times to text or call Keim, only to be met with silence. The cornerback was “not trying to talk to any other teams,” preferring to stay in Arizona. But after he failed to touch base with the GM, even leaving a voicemail on the eve of free agency, he decided to make plans elsewhere.
“He just showed me they ain’t messing with me,” Peterson said. “I hadn’t heard from ’em in three months. … I told my agent to bump it; it is what it is. Then, as soon as I signed (with the Vikings), I get this long text message from none other than Steve Keim. I’m like, come on, bruh. To me, that’s where the disrespect just went, to me, (to) an all-time high. If you’re a GM, you see your phone every day, every second. And I know everybody’s busy … but just be like, ‘All right, P, we’re moving on.’ I’m fine with that. I’m a grown man. … Yeah, it’s been two years, but at the same time, I’m still waiting on that phone call.”
Peterson has no hard feelings toward the Cardinals as a whole, or their fans, he added.
“I’m just talking about my time that I had in that building,” he said.
As for Sunday’s game, when he helped Minnesota improve to 6-1 by beating Keim’s team? Peterson had no problem there, telling McFadden that he knew everything Arizona was doing from the “first play.”
“I practiced against them guys for — how many seasons was I with Kliff (Kingsbury)? Two years? He ran the same exact stuff that I’ve seen in camp, in practice, same stuff I saw on tape,” Peterson said. “From the first play, I knew I was in my zone. They were doing the same stuff.”
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