Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III’s NFL career isn’t quite going how he expected it. He had a stellar rookie season in 2012, one in which he threw for 3,200 yards, 20 touchdowns and five interceptions and rushed 120 times for 815 yards and seven scores, leading the league in both yards per rush and yards per pass. He was the Associated Press‘ Offensive Rookie of the Year and was voted to the Pro Bowl, a rare honor for any first-year player. But the two seasons that followed were nowhere near as impressive.
It all started in Week 14 of the 2012 season, when Griffin suffered a Grade 1 sprain of his lateral cruciate ligament (LCL). He missed Week 15, returned for Week 16 and closed out the season. Washington’s team doctor, the renowned sports surgeon Dr. James Andrews, did not clear Griffin for the team’s Wild Card playoff contest against the Seattle Seahawks. Against the wishes of the doctor, then-head coach Mike Shanahan put Griffin on the (torn up and damaged) FedEx Field; Griffin then further injured his knee in the game, fully tearing the LCL and also tearing his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).
Courtesy of USA Today Sports: RGIII’s injury halted his growth as a QB.
Griffin’s knee healed in time for the 2013 season, but his quarterback skills did not. Whether simply trepidatious about displaying his trademark mobility on a knee he did not feel fully confident in or a result of a mandate to keep the prized quarterback reined in order to prevent injury, the magic of 2012 seemed to have disappeared. His completion percentage dipped to 60.1 percent. His passing touchdowns dropped from 20 to 16, while his interceptions increased from five to 12. He only rushed 86 times, netting him 489 yards and no scores. He finished the final three games on the bench, with Shanahan citing a fear of another injury and not poor performance as the reason. Griffin spent the year a pawn in a sparring match between Shanahan and team owner Dan Snyder that ultimately resulted in Shanahan’s departure and a “heartbroken” Griffin having to start all over again.
The new man with a plan for Griffin’s future is head coach Jay Gruden, hired in 2014 after a stint as the Cincinnati Bengals’ offensive coordinator. Gruden’s goal was a simple one: Get Griffin back to being the starter, the franchise quarterback and the dynamic on-field presence he was as a rookie. But complications got in the way, in the forms of another injury to Griffin and further regression by the quarterback. Griffin suffered a dislocated ankle in Week 2 of the 2014 season, forcing him to the sidelines until Week 9. And once he came back, he looked even less ready to lead his offense than he was when he returned from his knee injury in the previous year.
Every week, former Washington tight end Chris Cooley breaks down the film from the team’s previous game as part of his radio program on ESPN 980. But after Week 10’s meeting with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cooley took a different approach: He focused on Griffin’s game play only, saying (in a transcript courtesy of Dan Steinberg of The Washington Post), “What we are going to do is we are going to give incomplete to the entire offense. Because I don’t know how to grade them….I can’t grade the pass game. Our quarterback does not allow a proper grading of the pass game.”
What continued was a scathing breakdown of Griffin’s on-field performance in the 27-7 loss, a loss that seemed to be a culmination of Griffin’s deterioration as a player over the previous year and a half. It was not a personal attack but rather a sobering look at a quarterback whose body and mind were not up to executing the game plan. Cooley continued:
There was a game plan initially installed, which was not run or operated in any way shape or form the way it should have been,” Cooley said. “There was a quarterback not reading the field when he should have been, there was a quarterback scrambling when he [shouldn’t have been]….You can’t grade anyone else around Robert because of the way Robert played.
The criticisms were many:
He’s short-arming the ball. He has bad technique, he’s not setting his feet right….He has the yips. He does have the yips, where the ball’s just not coming out of your hand right, so now you’ve aborted all technique, because you don’t have a feel for the ball coming out of your hand, and you’re getting this shot-put throw action. You’re aiming. He has the yips. He does. He just does.
Watch closely, you can see RGIII short-arm the ball here.
Cooley went on to detail all of Griffin’s problems, from not seeing wide open receivers, to having improper footwork and throwing technique to his propensity to look to scramble even when he would be able to throw. In the second half, according to Cooley’s perspective, “At this point in the game, our coaching staff came up with the conclusion, now we will run simple, Day-One offense. This is all we can do. We have eliminated the game plan. We’ve [gone] back to Day One of training camp install.”
Griffin’s 2014 wasn’t all bad. After a three-week benching due to poor performance, Griffin again returned to the starting lineup after backup Colt McCoy injured his neck and was placed on IR. Griffin averaged a completion percentage of 67.4 percent over those three games and threw for over 200 yards in each, including one with over 300 yards. Yes, Washington lost two of those three games, and yes, Griffin threw two touchdowns to three interceptions in that span, but he clearly became more comfortable as a passer.
Still, that didn’t end the controversy. Gruden’s first year in Washington was peppered with the coach making negative comments about the quarterback and the team was reticent to pick up the quarterback’s fifth-year option, which is worth over $16 million in 2016. They ultimately did so last month. Gruden’s tone about Griffin also seems to be tempering, with the coach saying in February that Griffin is the starting quarterback heading into offseason workouts and camps and expressing optimism on Monday that (via The Washington Post‘s Mike Jones) Griffin will have a better experience in his second season in Gruden’s system. Gruden said:
Going into Year 2 in this system should be a big jump, you know. You’re not really thinking about who’s where, what’s my footwork. Everything should come a lot more natural for you, and hopefully, we see that transition from year one to year two in this system with the terminology and knowing where to go with your footwork and anticipation of getting the ball out quicker. Hopefully, that comes.
Still, it’s hard to pin Griffin’s struggles simply on him having to learn a new system in 2014. He struggled even in 2013 while running an offense he had seemed to have mastered as a rookie. With the change in his style of play—scrambling so much is increasingly out of the question, given his already daunting injury history, how much Washington gave up to draft him at No. 2 overall and the value of his 2016 contract—seemed to come a complete unfamiliarity with how to approach even the basic act of dropping back to pass.
Courtesy of USA Today Sports: Despite a rocky relationship, Gruden will have to help rebuild RGIII’s confidence.
What Cooley saw is a quarterback needing to be rebuilt, both physically and mentally. A pair of ligament tears in the knee is a very difficult injury to come back from, not just in terms of physical health but also psychologically. It’s clear that Griffin had little trust in his knee in 2013 and that mistrust of his own body led to a domino effect that took down every aspect of Griffin as a quarterback. The effects lingered in 2014 and were not helped by the intense environment in Washington as the team transitioned from Shanahan to Gruden and were further intensified by Gruden’s public comments that tore the quarterback down in ways that coaches practically never do.
While Gruden may be optimistic about Griffin’s second year under his tutelage, that optimism is likely highly guarded. Given his injury history, Griffin may never again be the player he was in his rookie season; now, he has to figure out who he will be moving forward. It helps that Gruden is being encouraging and trying to get Griffin in the right state of mind rather than attempting the tough-love act that backfired in his face last season. But Griffin’s problems are complex ones to solve and ones that he may not be able to address himself until actually back in live-game situations, where he can rebuild his confidence.
All hope is that Griffin can rebound and be a franchise quarterback for Washington, whatever form that may take. Griffin’s NFL career thus far has been a case study of not only the psychology of injury but also the psychology of professional sports. It’s clear Griffin has already been through quite the meat grinder, an experience that should make him stronger. But will that make him a better quarterback?
Photo: USA Today Sports