The list of quarterbacks Mike Shanahan has turned off or alienated is as long as his career wins list is. It’s absolutely astonishing that the man won so many games as a coach, albeit ruining almost every relationship he may have had with the quarterback on those teams.
Plummer walked away from football partly because of Mike Shanahan.
Plummer let loose on Shanahan during a recent USA Today Sports interview.
“It’s not a fun situation and I feel for RG3 — a great kid, a really, really great football player – he’ll bounce back, get healthy and persevere through this,” Plummer told USA TODAY Sports. “I see great things in his future. But I think it’s going to be with a new coach.
“Shanahan is trying to save his job, his reputation. I don’t think there will be a Shanahan future there. I think there will be a different head coach for this franchise quarterback who had a great year last year, and the knee injury played into this because I have not seen another quarterback this exciting, maybe other than Randall Cunningham.”
Plummer then said that he didn’t “know exactly what’s going down” in terms of the drama betweenthe 3-10 Redskins, but he knows enough.
“I just know from my experience sometimes Shanahan would ask too much of me,” he said. “I was pretty good. But I was no Peyton Manning. I had to fight every day.
“A similar situation happened with me, and it happened with Donovan McNabb (benched Dec. 17, 2010 by Shanahan) because we had our own styles, and it didn’t mesh with what Mike wanted. What I see happening there isn’t the same, but it is similar.
“Mike definitely rubbed me the wrong way in some ways. Also, he did some great things in resurrecting my career. Overall, I was grateful to be coached by him. But I was a square peg in a round hole. I didn’t fit what he really wanted me to be, and he moved on to somebody else.”