National Football League

Ex-NFL quarterback Jake Plummer rolls out 'Rosetta Stone' for football playbooks

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 2:29 p.m. ET

Sports Illustrated, Mark J. Burns/Sports Illustrated

Read about the latest sports tech news, innovations, ideas and products that impact players, fans and the sports industry at SportTechie.com.

Former NFL quarterback Jake Plummer is rolling out the “Rosetta Stone” for football playbooks, as he and his co-founder of ReadyList PRO like to describe their new digital software.

“There had to be a better way to digest a four-inch playbook,” Plummer said of football players having to study hundreds of plays through the old pen-and-paper model, sometimes in a matter of a few days if they were traded and added to a NFL roster last minute or had to make an emergency start at the college level.

Subscribe to the
SportTechie NewsletterSubscribe

Even players who had a high football IQ struggled to digest dozens of plays in a limited amount of time. Enter ReadyList PRO, a cloud-based, subscription resource is the brainchild of Chad Friehauf, former standout quarterback at Colorado School of Mines and top NCAA Division II player in 2004.

About three years ago, Friehauf started the digital playbook concept. Through pooling together some cash with Plummer and close family friends, they now have a patent-pending software that they’re introducing into the marketplace with NFL teams, college programs and even some elite high schools.

The software acts as both an offensive football playbook but also a testing tool for coaches to quiz players’ understanding of the plays. When a player leaves a practice facility following a coach’s chalk talk session, he’ll have the playbook in tow, as ReadyList PRO is compatible with any device including tablets, iPads, smartphones and desktops. Coaches can upload highlights of practices and games into the cloud for players to review along with recorded film studies, too.

This past season, a handful of college teams such as Arizona State, Montana and Colorado School of Mines,“dabbled” with the software, according to Plummer, but didn’t fully integrate it into the entire coaching and film strategy.

For this season, Plummer and Friehauf — who are currently going through a capital raise — are hoping some of the colleges utilize the software more during spring ball and realize how beneficial the product could be for them, leading to “better performance, less mental errors and more wins.” Additionally, they’re still in the market to land their first NFL client, too.