The way Scot McCloughan was unceremoniously shoved out the door as a so-called relapsed drunkard doesn’t fit the narrative told by Pierre Garcon, who played with the Washington Redskins during the time in which the general manager was in charge.
When asked if he ever saw McCloughan drunk in the locker room, which was what the organization alleged as a main reason he was fired, Garcon said he had not.
“No, I never really did,” Garςon said, speaking while on Pro Football Talk’s PFT Live. “Scot, he’s not a vocal guy. He’s a quiet guy, he kind of stays to himself but when he starts talking to you you can tell the passion and love he has, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him drunk. I’ve never seen him act any kind of way to make me even question that he was drunk.”
This account by Garcon fits what McCloughan himself has said, via proxy, as related by Michael Robinson of NFL Network. He told Robinson he hasn’t touched a drink in a while. In that same account, Robinson said Bruce Allen told the former general manager nobody liked him, among other things (more on that here).
This is not the way Garcon saw things.
“I know all the players did love Scot,” Garcon said. “Scot was a great guy, a football guy, all the players loved Scot and definitely (are) going to miss him. Hopefully, he’ll still be around football because he was a great guy. He was all about football. It didn’t matter who you were, where you were from, he was just happy that you were playing football for him and he was happy that he scouted you and for him to bring you to D.C.”
It’s understood at this point that Washington is a cesspool of dysfunction. The way the front office badmouthed McCloughan in such a public way using a newspaper as its mouthpiece was despicable enough.
Even if alcoholism was the key factor and a legitimate issue, it should not have been so cavalierly used as a battering ram to pound the man into dust as he left the building for good.
Perhaps even more frustrating for fans of the franchise is the fact that McCloughan actually had the team on the rise. His football moves were on point. Whether it was an alcohol problem or a power struggle that ended up being the cause of his departure is left for us to guess.
One thing we don’t have to guess at is that Garcon believes McCloughan was loved by the players in that locker room.