Knowing what he knows—the pain, the painkillers, the alcohol, the addiction, the aftereffects—we asked Jake Plummer the question that is being posed to so many that are involved in football: Are you going to let your sons play football?
“Knowing what I know, my boys will be primed and ready to play football,” he said. “But seeing where the game is going and seeing what I see when I go watch high school or I go watch junior high or I even go watch eight-year-olds and stupid-ass parents are giving their eight-year-olds helmets, it’s insane.
“There’s no way my son is putting on a helmet when he’s eight years old. Football pads and helmets don’t teach you how to fall or be athletic and agile. The weight training going into football nowadays, the kids that are specializing at younger ages and they’re training for the game when they’re in the ninth grade? My son isn’t going to lift weights until he wants to. . . When I retired, my body went back to where it was in my early college days, about 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds. I kind of wish I played at that weight and not lifted a weight in my entire football career. I don’t think it would have mattered; I think I would have played longer, possibly.”
That is certainly not the case nowadays, if kids aren’t already lifting weights in middle school, they are put into a weight training program at their high school the minute they finish eighth grade.
“My son is going to be really tall and skinny like me,” Plummer said. “Quick and wiry and if he’s playing in junior high against a 250-pound linebacker that’s rock hard and has been training for years—I don’t want my kid playing football against kids like that, I don’t think it’s good for the game. I didn’t play against kids like that; nobody had trained for their football season. It’s getting way too intense.”
As you’ve seen throughout this series, Jake Plummer believes there needs to be a lot of reform in the NFL, but he truly believes change in the game needs to go all the way down to the pee-wee level. As the game of football has become unquestionably “America’s game,” leagues are putting kids in pads much earlier, teams are traveling earlier and seasons are lasting longer.
“Oh yeah, watch Friday Night Tykes or go down now—I was riding my bike last spring, I rode past a school, and the kids were running around, and the whistle is blowing,” Plummer remembered. “So I go over, I always like to see what’s going on, they’re playing flag football! In the spring! Springtime is baseball season or track season or cross country or tennis or golf, and they’re playing flag football, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is weird.'”
“Reform needs to go not only down to the pee-wee level, but the parent level and the coaches have to understand that this is a child’s only opportunity to play any sport they want while they can. As they get older, you’ll know where they want to go, let them get to that stage naturally, don’t force them into one sport; they’ll end up burning out.”
On top of that, if the goal is to play football at a high level, there’s evidence that building a well-balanced athlete from the beginning.
“Awesome stat on this one, Ryan,” he said. “The NFL Draft just a couple months ago, you can look it up, 224 out of the 253 kids drafted were multi-sport athletes in high school. There’s the best of the best right there so if you need any proof, pee-wee coaches, let them play all the sports.”
It’s not as if this is currently trending down, either, that 88.5-percent is the highest it’s been since 2013. In fact, twice as many athletes played three sports in high school than just played one.
“I would have been so tired of football,” Plummer explained. “I wouldn’t have ever played in the pros had I played football all year round when I was a kid, there’s no way in hell I would have kept playing football because I would have burnt out on it.”
So, as we sit here, it seems there’s a divide that can only be hurting the game—many parents afraid to let their kids play football at all, many parents putting the focus on football way too early.
As for Plummer, he’s not ready to make any final decisions just yet.
“I’d never say never,” he concluded. “We’ll cross that bridge when it gets there.”
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