College football’s tackle king from Las Vegas gets his due with Hall of Fame nod

By Case Keefer (contact)

Saturday, Dec. 24, 2022 | 2 a.m.

The holidays meant one thing above all else for Boomer Grigsby during his adolescence — an empty gym.

Grigsby’s mother, Paula, was the director of his hometown YMCA in Canton, Ill., so he quite literally had a proverbial “key to the gym,” one he didn’t let go to waste.

“I would work out all the time,” Grigsby recently reminisced. “I looked at that as a way to get ahead because I could be in the gym on days that other people couldn’t.”

An insatiable desire to improve in the weight room specifically “set the foundation” for a record-breaking football career as a linebacker at Illinois State University onto the NFL that continues to garner honors nearly 15 years after it concluded. The now 41-year-old Grigsby, who’s lived in Las Vegas since 2015, was recently among a group of 18 players inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2022.

The ring ceremony took place at Bellagio earlier this month with the class also heading to the Chick fil-A Peach Bowl on New Year’s Eve for more recognition. They’ll be honored during the College Football Playoff semifinal game between Georgia and Ohio State and see their presence in downtown Atlanta’s physical Hall of Fame building for the first time.

The National Football Foundation, which oversees the Hall of Fame, reports there have been 5.62 million players who have competed in college football since the first game was played in 1869. Only 1,056, or about .0002%, have been voted into the Hall of Fame. Grigsby enters alongside a star-studded group including Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck, Georgia cornerback Champ Bailey, Penn State linebacker LaVar Arrington and LSU running back Kevin Faulk.

“I think now as an older, wiser, more confident man I was less starstruck but I was still starstruck in my heart,” Grigsby said of partaking in the ceremony as part of the 2022 class. “When I’m looking around and hearing these guys’ stories, I’m still remembering the way my younger eyes would watch them play and how great it was and, realistically, most of them never watched me play.”

Grigsby might make self-effacing jokes about his time on the field and Hall of Fame nod, but there’s no doubt he achieved enough in the former to merit the latter. NFF Chairman Archie Manning, a Hall of Famer himself as a former Ole Miss quarterback, called Grigsby’s inclusion “widely supported” when it was first announced in January.

The video package that played during his induction referred to him as “the most decorated player in Illinois State history,” and that might have been underselling it. Yes, Grigsby was a four-time team MVP with the Redbirds but he also might be the most decorated player in the history of the Missouri Valley Conference (then known as the Gateway Football Conference).

He won the league’s Defensive Player of the Year award for three straight seasons from 2002 to 2004. He still holds the Football Championship Subdivision career records for both total tackles (550) and solo tackles (325).

Grigsby had more total tackles than anyone in the top two levels of college football until late this year when Troy’s Carlton Martial topped the record. But Martial did it in five years via the bonus COVID-19 eligibility season. Martial played in 59 games throughout his career; Grigsby appeared in 44.

“I feel like I played at a time when it was easier for me to make tackles because it was more run-based offenses,” Grigsby said. “It’s a team sport, but when you play middle linebacker, you don’t have to allow other people to make tackles. You can make every tackle. You just have to have the heart and desire to do it.”

Grigsby never lacked in heart and desire, which was the main reason he said he wound up at Illinois State in the first place. The university in Normal, Ill., is about an hour from Grigsby’s childhood home. He remembers a graduate assistant from the program in 1999 coming to a workout session at his high school to scout a friend and teammate with a more prototypical college football body.

But Grigsby caught the recruiter’s eye with his weightlifting prowess, and the Redbirds came back to Canton High School’s first game that fall. They offered Grigsby on the spot, and he accepted.

Grigsby drew no other college offers.

“I wanted something like that, but we had no confidence of anything like that,” he said. “We never had any expectations that I could go to college on scholarship. We were so blue-collar, humble people that we weren’t even sure if it was real. Every moment along this process has been an incredible, dream-type moment because we never had the expectations that it was deserved.”

The best part about sticking close to home in college was that it allowed Grigsby’s parents and grandparents to attend every one of his games. The same was true professionally after the Kansas City Chiefs — located a relatively short five-hour drive away from Canton — took him in the fifth round of the 2005 NFL Draft.

His whole family was also able to travel to Las Vegas for the Hall of Fame induction, which he cited as the best part of getting in during the early stages of his eligibility. Grigsby was first eligible to get into the Hall of Fame in 2014 but candidacy can last up to 50 years after a player’s final college game.

“You never really know if you’re going to get in or not,” Grigsby said. “A career can speak for itself in the way they look at it, but there’s always the humility and the understanding that when you play small-school football, it’s a lot more difficult. You don’t get the exposure the Power Five conferences do.”

Grigsby carried the same humble attitude into the NFL, which he said benefited him when he outworked the competition to “barely” make the Chiefs’ roster as a linebacker and special teams player in his first two years.

Before the 2007 season, Kansas City asked him to move from linebacker to fullback. HBO series Hard Knocks, which was returning from a five-year hiatus to document the team’s training camp, made Grigsby’s positional change one of the season’s predominant storylines.

“Let’s be serious: That was a great drama because the odds were high I was going to get fired and not make the team,” Grigsby said. “That’s what was going to make it a good story. At first, when they asked me to be a featured player, I was very unsure. I was like, ‘This could be very embarrassing.’”

Grigsby ultimately only agreed to the spotlight because he thought it was something his family could enjoy and look back on even if it didn’t work out. But Grigsby thrived, making the team and becoming a fan favorite with more notoriety around the league because of the television exposure.

“I’m probably more known for that than any single thing on the field,” Grigsby laughs when looking back on Hard Knocks. “I’m more of a character than I was a successful football player.”

He went on to play the start of the 2008 season for the Miami Dolphins, but then was cut and suffered an injury in training camp with the Houston Texans the next year. That ended his time in football, but eventually led to a career in medical-device sales that landed him in Las Vegas where he's now planted roots with his wife and two young sons.

Priorities are a bit different during the holidays nowadays with a family and, this year, one final Hall of Fame obligation but Grigsby’s never lost sight of the mindset that’s gotten him to this point.

“I fell in love with the weight room, and fortunately, the weight room was synergistic with football,” Grigsby said. “That sort of obsessive compulsion in the weight room led to a better performance in football, which then got me a college scholarship and changed my life.”

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or