Jake Plummer is back in the football media world, even if he swore he never would be.<\/p>\n
The former Broncos quarterback is now co-hosting The Cold Tub alongside former Denver teammate Nate Jackson, giving him a regular media platform despite once wanting nothing to do with broadcasting after his playing days ended.<\/p>\n
That resolve only lasted so long.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you play as long as we did, 10 years in the NFL, you absorb all that, and you basically have a PHD in football,\u201d Plummer told Casino Guru<\/a>. \u201cI said never would I go (be an analyst), but I\u2019ve learned to never say never. When the time came to go do some work with the Pac-10, I tried out, and I got a gig doing studio work. I did that for a couple of years, and I even did a little bit of play-by-play on the radio. I did that a couple of times. That was fun being at Lambeau, doing play-by-play for a game. That was exciting, being close to the game without being in it. But after a while, it became repetitive.\u201d<\/p>\n But Plummer didn\u2019t just drift away from broadcasting because it got old. In fact, he has a pretty specific theory about why the traditional media model no longer appeals to him, and Cris Collinsworth<\/a> is his Exhibit A.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was saying the same things, basically,\u201d Plummer said. \u201cI tip my hat to the Cris Collinsworths that can go on two or three nights per week and regurgitate the same thing they said 30 years ago. There is really nothing he is saying that is different from what he said 30 years ago. Nothing at all. It\u2019s just a different name, a different number, a different date, a different score, and different teams.\u201d<\/p>\n Collinsworth has been a fixture on NFL broadcasts for decades, first with HBO\u2019s Inside the NFL, then CBS, and eventually settling in as NBC\u2019s Sunday Night Football analyst, a perch he\u2019s held since 2008. He\u2019s widely considered one of the better analysts in the business. He\u2019s also someone fans love to be angry at, regardless of which team they root for. \u201cWhy do you hate my team?<\/a>\u201d is apparently the most common question he fields in public.<\/p>\n But Plummer\u2019s critique isn\u2019t really about Collinsworth\u2019s quality. It\u2019s about the format itself. When you\u2019re doing between 18 and 21 games across a full season, year after year, the vocabulary eventually becomes finite. There are only so many ways to describe a coverage bust or a scramble drill. Collinsworth is good at what he does; Plummer is just saying he doesn\u2019t want to do it.<\/p>\n