Leigh Steinberg has been a sports agent for more than four decades and has represented eight No. 1 overall NFL picks.

If something has happened in the league, chances are he has seen it.

I had a chance to chat this week with Steinberg for the Daily Delivery podcast, getting his perspectives on a number of league subjects — including Aaron Rodgers, vaccines and the evolution of how the league is covered. Plus I got to ask him if he was truly the inspiration for Tom Cruise's character in "Jerry Maguire."

On the fallout from Aaron Rodgers' positive COVID test and the upshot of the NFL's protocols: First of all, let's be clear. The protocols and COVID policy was collectively bargained between the players' association and the owners. Everyone agreed this was the best set of protocols possible to allow as normal a season as could be. No one is telling players they have to be vaccinated. ... The system has really worked really well. It has nothing to do with "woke" or "cancel culture." It has nothing to do with major politics. The easiest thing for a player to do is get vaccinated. But if they have real objections or they have some problems, OK you put them in category two. And for the protection of other players and to create a situation where you aren't having mass infections ... these are just standard rules for everybody. ... It's a safety system divorced from the rhetoric and the anger going on in the rest of society.

On the biggest changes in player dynamics over the years: The first big change has been the evolution of social media. The fact of the matter is that players now on their own can go ahead and tweet or TikTok or Instagram and express themselves publicly. They don't think they have as much of a need to deal with contemporary press. But that's wrong because we wouldn't even know there was a football season going on if you weren't reading about it in a newspaper or the internet. This has been a major, major change.

On whether he was the inspiration for Tom Cruise's agent character in the 1996 film "Jerry Maguire": So Cameron Crowe called me up in 1993, and he was a writer/director, and asked if he could follow me as a fly on the wall and do research into a film that would feature a sports agent. He went with me in 1993 to the league meetings, where I was showing off a free agent named Tim McDonald. At times I would introduce him to people in that world and I would always tell him stories. And then we went to the NFL Draft in 1993 where Drew Bledsoe was the first pick in the first round and he got to watch and see all that. ... He came to a series of games with me. He came to Super Bowl parties and spent time in my office. Then he went off and wrote a script. I was the technical advisor (on the movie), so it was my job to vet the script. ... Then I worked with some of the actors. Cuba Gooding Jr., who played Rod Tidwell, I took to Arizona and he had to pretend he was a wide receiver and my client all week. So there's a lot of life up there on the screen. I haven't been out too many times in public either at an airport or at dinner where someone didn't run up to me and either ask me to say the four words or say the four words that start with "show me the ..."