Jake Plummer tips cap to Cris Collinsworth for ‘regurgitating’ the same thing for 30 years

Jake Plummer is back in the football media world, even if he swore he never would be.

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.

That resolve only lasted so long.

“If you play as long as we did, 10 years in the NFL, you absorb all that, and you basically have a PHD in football,” Plummer told Casino Guru. “I said never would I go (be an analyst), but I’ve 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.”

But Plummer didn’t 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 is his Exhibit A.

“It was saying the same things, basically,” Plummer said. “I 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’s just a different name, a different number, a different date, a different score, and different teams.”

Collinsworth has been a fixture on NFL broadcasts for decades, first with HBO’s Inside the NFL, then CBS, and eventually settling in as NBC’s Sunday Night Football analyst, a perch he’s held since 2008. He’s widely considered one of the better analysts in the business. He’s also someone fans love to be angry at, regardless of which team they root for. “Why do you hate my team?” is apparently the most common question he fields in public.

But Plummer’s critique isn’t really about Collinsworth’s quality. It’s about the format itself. When you’re 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’t want to do it.

What Plummer wants instead is a more expansive conversation. He wants one that drifts from Bo Nix and Broncos football into health and wellness, bio-hacking, and longevity. He’s a functional mushroom advocate and talks openly about recovery and performance. So, for the Arizona State product, who spent the back half of his career reinventing himself — famously walking away from football to play handball — the idea of locking into a pattern and staying there for 30 years probably sounds like a different kind of retirement. 

The Cold Tub clearly fits more naturally with who he’s been since he left the game.