While Jason Kelce has garnered plenty of speculation about whether he will return to play football, he has definitively refused to throw in the towel on another career. On Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, the NFL star shared his vision for the Backyard Football and Backyard Baseball games.
Apparently, the NFL stage is far from the first time Travis and Jason Kelce have hashed out a friendly sibling rivalry on the gridiron. When the Chiefs’ tight end, returning to compete in Super Bowl LVIII this year, nostalgically reminisced on playing Backyard Sports games on the duo’s popular New Heights podcast, he inadvertently provoked Jason Kelce into revealing his personal hopes for the childhood CD-ROM classics. “I’ve secretly been looking into seeing if anybody owns the rights to Backyard Football and Backyard Baseball, cause I want to buy it and get this thing going again,” Kelce reported on the podcast.
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The Kelce brothers weren’t the only two excited by the notion of reviving the Backyard Sports franchise, as evidenced by the outpouring of support this plan received on social media. Aside from the two games specifically mentioned by Kelce, other entries in the Backyard Sports universe include Backyard Soccer, Backyard Basketball, Backyard Hockey, and Backyard Skateboarding. The nostalgic aesthetic of the games, alongside its iconic characters – such as Pablo Sanchez, the greatest fictional athlete of all time – proved to strike a chord with fans.
Kelce specifically highlighted the simple mechanics involved in Backyard Football and Backyard Baseball‘s gameplay, positing they would make the series an intuitive choice to transition into a mobile game. Mobile versions of both Backyard Baseball and Backyard Basketball did arrive on iOS and Android in 2015 but never quite took off with the original fanbase of the games. However, for now, Kelce’s plans remain hypothetical as the athlete did not disclose any further details about enacting his plans to revitalize Backyard Sports.
