Two years ago, Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III took the NFL by storm with a combination of running and passing that kept defenses off balance and guessing all year long. Until he was injured while running.
Since then, an effort has been made to make Griffin more of a passer and less of a runner. And it hasn’t worked.
Now? Coach Jay Gruden sounds willing to consider having Griffin run some more as a last-ditch effort to make him more productive.
“It’s a production-based business,” Gruden told Albert Breer of NFL Media. “We haven’t won many games lately with him. We gotta figure out a way to get in the end zone. We just have to score. I don’t care how we do it. If it’s running the zone-read, I don’t care. Quarterback sneaks, I don’t give a damn. We gotta find a way to utilize him where we can get productive drives and stay away from negative plays and have some consistency.”
Consistency and the absence of negative plays could help Griffin rebuild his shattered confidence. Which Gruden may have further shattered while discussing Griffin’s shattered confidence on the record.
“His biggest thing, he’s been coddled for so long,” Gruden said of Griffin. “It’s not a negative, he’s just been so good, he just hasn’t had a lot of negative publicity. Everybody’s loved him. Some adversity is striking hard at him now, and how he reacts to that off the field, his mental state of mind, how it affects his confidence, hopefully it’s not in a negative way. I read Drew Brees said after a couple interceptions, ‘I’m never gonna lose confidence, I’m gonna come out firing all the time.’”
And then Gruden may have stomped the shattered pieces of confidence into powder.
“He’s auditioned long enough,” Gruden said of Griffin. “Clock’s ticking. He’s gotta play. We’ll see. . . . We want Robert to excel, we really do. But the last two games, it hasn’t been very good, anywhere. We gotta play better around him. And the biggest thing for us as playcallers, and for him, we just have to come together and jell with plays he’s comfortable with. That takes time. But we don’t have a lot of time.”
Griffin’s time could run out because of the backup who won two games before Griffin returned from injury.
“We have a guy behind him that played pretty well, and people are looking, ‘OK, he’s 2-0,’” Gruden said regarding Colt McCoy. “There’s always pressure on the quarterback to perform. And if you don’t perform, like any other position, somebody’s behind you pushing you.”
The way Gruden has been talking lately, maybe McCoy will end up pushing Griffin to the bench. Or maybe right out of town.
Unless Griffin pushes another head coach out of town first.