In March, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones made some controversial statements about the NFL's concussion problem.
Namely, Jones doesn't believe there's a link between football and CTE, a degenerative brain disease that has been found in NFL players and other professional athletes.
"We want to continue to be safer and want to continue to support any type of research that would let us know what (the) consequences really are," Jones said at the NFL's annual meeting before adding, "In no way should we be basically making assumptions with no more data than we've got about the consequences of a head injury."
It's fair to say former Arizona State Sun Devils and Arizona Cardinals quarterback Jake Plummer doesn't see eye to eye with Jones. In an interview with BSNDenver.com, Plummer, who led ASU to the 1997 Rose Bowl and the Cardinals to the 1998 NFL playoffs, slammed Jones' comments.
"Shame on him for saying that, that billionaire a**hole. It's the worst thing in the world for a guy like that to say," he said.
"That's where we're sitting: Grown-ass men are asked to go out there for millions of dollars -- which, yeah, it's a lot of money -- bang themselves around and completely (expletive) their lives over for their 40s and 50s ... If you're a grown-ass man, you should be allowed to make grown-ass decisions."
Plummer has been a long-time advocate of CBD, a compound found in cannabis that is non-addictive and non-psychoactive. It has been shown to have successfully protected the brain from CTE and other degenerative diseases.
"(NFL players) should be able to say, 'I'm going to have some CBD and puff on this fatty, relax after a football game and take the pain away,'" Plummer told BSNDenver.com.
"It's really hard to explain to the outside because it's like having a job and there's constantly people coming to take your job. If you're in pain, and you can't perform or if you're not healthy, then someone is going to take your job."
Plummer, who uses CBD on a daily basis, said fans simply don't understand the circumstances that current and past NFL players have dealt with, pain-wise.
"I have a hard time with it because everybody says, 'Oh, poor NFL millionaires. Of you poor people.' They don't understand," he said. "Maybe they should have a little more to say about the owners that are billionaires."
