Robert Griffin III had a terrific rookie season. Since then he has been of little value to his team in Washington. I realize he has been hurt and that has made his play be up and down….mostly down. But in a vacuum, he has been a disappointment, period. I can imagine he is pretty frustrated with the way his team is playing this year. But coming out after a bad loss to a lowly Tampa Bay team and crushing his teammates is pretty ignorant.
RG3 is a bright guy so he should know how criticizing his crew is going to play out in the media. You simply can’t throw your team under the bus. There are few occasions when it is OK to do so, but very few. It is even worse when the guy doing the complaining is not playing good at all. But if Griffin was going to say something dumb I guess he decided to go all in and compare himself to Aaron Rodgers and Peyton Manning. I hope he knows where he sits on the tiers of quarterbacks in this league. Rodgers is at the top and I mean the #1 spot. No one is better. Manning is close that spot in the top five and an all time great clearly. RG3 has been off the field as much as he has been on it lately. And when he has played, the team likely wishes he was elsewhere. He has been no better than his backups. That level of play doesn’t give him the right to speak about anyone else’s play.
Count me as one who loves it when an athlete speaks his mind. It makes my work more fun and a bit easier. I hate clichés, as they are the equivalent of not speaking at all. But a guy has to know when to keep quiet or use a cheap cliché. If RG3 was looking for the opportune moment for a meaningless phrase like, “we’ve got to work harder” or “we have to execute better as a team”, then he missed it.
Griffin’s comments were so out of place that his head coach was forced to wade into the muck with him. Jay Gruden had to address the issue in his post game press conference. And address it he did, as he dressed down his young signal caller. He pointed out all the ways RG3 screwed up in the Bucs game. I lost count at seven critiques which involved foot work, wrong drop back steps, and general mechanics. Gruden made it clear that Griffin had no room to say anything negative about the guys around him.
I feel like Robert Griffin III has a false confidence that comes from his outstanding Heisman performance in college. He is no longer that player. This is the NFL and he is not playing against the scrubs on Baylor’s schedule that allowed him to rack up big time stats. He is up against real defenses that have dynamic athletes and highly paid coordinators that know how to make a QB’s life miserable. RG3 is just that right now, miserable. And he decided to take it out on the wrong people after the Tampa Bay loss.
Maybe RG3 gets to an elite level someday. If so then he has a little room to criticize his team, but not much even then. It does no good to do so. If he reaches a Manning level or Rodgers level then he can say what he wants. He can even jump on the scoreboard operator like Peyton did earlier in the year. But you don’t get to talk about others’ bad play while you are exhibiting the exact same level of play.
