The Players That Made Me: Justin Simmons' favorite players and how they molded him

[Miles]

Elementary & middle school: Troy Polamalu


“I always grew up loving to watch the defensive side of the ball the most. And specifically, we talk about Brian Dawkins, Troy Polamalu. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the tenacity, the hard hitting, the play-making availability that they had, but I just loved [those guys]. …


“I started out [playing football] really young. Tackle, I don’t know if I can even put a number on it. But flag football, I started, like, super early. I want to say 8 or 9. We started pretty early. It was a lot of fun, though. …


“I always wanted to play professionally, but I wasn’t following a team all my life or the most diehard person for this or the most diehard person for that. Even in middle school, it was kind of like, if I flip on the TV and those guys were playing, I would watch and it’d be super cool. …


“Sundays during the NFL season were like party days. After church in the morning, we would go and bounce around to different houses, because all of our family lived in the same town. So we would change up where we would go from time to time. And we’d all go there and have games on. The biggest games that we watched were obviously the Dolphins, being in south Florida. … Being there, I had a lot of cousins that were my age and so, for us, it was more nostalgic in terms of we’d go and hang out and we’d want to play football ourselves, instead of watching it, or go out and do other kids stuff, when we were in middle school. …


“In high school and college is really when it picked up for me. …”