By: Ben
Johnson
Ever since Robert Griffin put a burgundy hat on
his head and walked towards the 2012 draft podium to shake the NFL commissioner’s
hand, I’ve been wondering how the Washington team would screw this up. Griffin
was, at the time, and may yet still be someday, an electric football talent,
lightning in a bottle. He was a smiling, aw shucks kid with military parents, a
live arm, blazing speed, toughness, and a strong work ethic. The potential was
all there, stacked up in front of your eyeballs monumentally like a pyramid or
a great wall, not only on the football field, but off it. This guy was going to
be good, and he was heading to
Washington to become the face of the least good
franchise in major sports, the one with the racist nickname and owner whose
avariciousness is so severe and obvious as to set him apart from the
war-criminal like barony of other NFL team owners.
Either the team was going to ruin this, or
Griffin was going to be so good that even this swampy mess of an organization
would be transformed by it. As a longtime observer of the team, I knew there
was not enough goodness in the universe, no innocence pure enough to overcome
the evil that lurks in the hearts of men whose occupation involves having their
checks signed by Dan Snyder. I knew. The team was going to ruin this guy. I
just didn’t know how yet.
Now I know, and the answer is somehow even more
depressing than I thought it was going to be.
In Griffin’s tantalizing 2012 rookie season, it
was immediately apparent that the prolific read-option offense he piloted was
predicated on his abilities. The whole engine of that offense is to leave a key
defender unblocked and force that unblocked rusher to commit to something that
does not exist, creating an 11-on-10 advantage elsewhere on the field. Some hapless
defensive end takes a half step toward running back Alfred Morris, and Griffin
keeps the ball, either to run past the outstretched arms of a linebacker
crashing into the backfield or dump to a receiver slanting through unprotected
ground vacated by said linebacker in the short middle of the field. If the
defense is disciplined about containing the edge, Morris would plunge up the
middle like a knife through butter, exploiting large gaps. The offense when
working properly was a beauteous feat of coordinated daredevilry, a weird
machine of military tactics not seen since the game room in Ender’s Game,
when Ender Wiggins tied tension wire around the diminutive Bean and threw him
around the wide of a floating space cube for reconnaissance, exposed to enemy
fire, only to whip him back around again. But this being football and not some
weird science fiction fever dream concocted by a neo-fascist, at least not the wish-fulfillment
version, it was also a huge risk, and utterly dependent on Griffin’s ability to
elude gigantic and powerful men bearing down on him with malicious intent.
Every single play.
This, then, is how the team deployed its new toy.
It was mesmerizing. It was dangerous. It was wholly unsustainable. It was giddy
and fun the way it is giddy and fun to do the one thing most likely to break a
new toy within hours of its unboxing. Wow, cool, let’s see if it can fly over
the house.
For his part, and whether this is to his credit
or not will be forever unclear, Griffin was game. He smiled his way through
Subway commercials and concussive hits. He dove headfirst for no reason and the
got up and then danced into the end zone on the next play. After games where
the entire fan base sat gawking in horror, every touchdown celebration fueled with
extra enthusiasm by the added relief of having spent one more offensive series not
watching this kid die on a football field, every big hit coming with an instantly
and totally deflating feeling that “that could have be the one that will take
him away from us,” the burden of knowledge that such a one with this kid is possible,
likely, inevitable. After the games he’d try to say the right things about
protecting the ball and himself, and then next week he’d run right back out
onto the field and play in that offense, the one explicitly designed not to
protect him at all. We got twelve and half games of this until he hurt his
knee, and then three more on a bad leg, and then both his leg and career went
sideways, the way it’s not supposed to go.
If you are interested enough in football to
even be reading this, you’ve probably already heard more about Griffin than you’d
probably care to. He’s a lightning rod for hot sports takes. He’s been labelled
a “cornball brother,”
a selfish, petulant non-leader
of men, who “doesn’t
put in the time,” who is potentially a
douchebag, a market-researched
branding opportunist whose significant
other rides in limousines provided by his team’s owner while the rest of
the team’s significant others, presumably, do not. He might be those things,
for all I know. He’s also been, demonstrably, a guy whose confidence in himself
and his own abilities is such that he would demand to play on a broken leg. And
he is currently 24 years old. If you were 24 years old and somebody told you
they would pay you millions of dollars to design a logo based on your name and
put it on t-shirts for strangers to wear, what would you do?
Ultimately I do not care about the extent to
which Griffin is a douchebag. He plays football for a living. He’s a jock.
Jocks are douchebags, with only very few exceptions. They hang out in the
fucking gym all day. When was the last time you saw a dude who hangs out at the
gym all day and thought “I would like to strike up a conversation with that
person about the relevant news topics of the day”?
What’s interesting to me is the prosaic ways in
which the organization Griffin works for has turned his prodigious talent into
a career arc that was a foregone denouement the instant Roger Goodell said “with
the second pick in the 2012 NFL draft, the Washington…” and then his name. It
was not any one thing that went wrong. Griffin’s eventual failure was instead a
cumulative natural outcropping of the full litany of usual things that this
organization always does wrong. It turned out there was no “how are they going
to screw this up?” Instead it was “how will their latent screwed-upness
manifest itself in this particular situation?” Screwed up is the status quo in
Washington. They didn’t have to actually do
anything to ruin the RG3 experience. All they needed was to have RG3 at their
disposal in the first place.
But to the extent that somebody somewhere within
this team did do something in this case, I see the following blunders as
looming largest:
1. Burdening Griffin immediately with unreasonable
expectations, and taking zero steps to manage those expectations.
2. Trading away two future first round draft
picks to get him which could, theoretically, have been used on players who
would have made the team as a whole better, lessening the burden on Griffin.
3. Reshuffling their albatross player contracts
in the uncapped 2010 season in an effort to hastily erase a mountain
of personnel mistakes, which incurred the wrath of the NFL’s other owners
and resulted in an unprecedented
$36 million reduction in their available salary cap over the course of the
2012 and 2013 seasons. This ensured that the bottom half of the team’s roster
would be cheaper and therefore (near-historically)
worse than any other team in the league. This also increased the pressure on
Griffin.
4. Creating a workplace
environment without trust, which routinely causes an “every man for himself”
approach among managers and employees, leading to an organization-wide focus on
establishing internal political retrenchments and escaping blame with one’s
career intact rather than, you know, actually building a good football team.
This leads to decisions such as backstabbing
media leaks, and ensuing backtracking, of endlessly debatable credibility,
and bilious
explosions of multidirectional recriminations which may have been designed
to deflect attention from a family member’s possible shortcomings as an
offensive coordinator. It leads to decisions such as “let’s put the rookie in,
and let’s design a high octane offense around the idea that he’s difficult to
tackle even if there is no direct impediment to the act of tackling him.” It
leads to decisions such as “we have to fire our coach since he basically dared
us to.” The whole team culture is “cover your ass, because this is a goddamn circus
and we’re not going to win enough games to keep our jobs,” and that culture,
among its many other systematic impediments to success, is disruptive to the
normal course of developing and nurturing a young football player. Ideally such
a process would have some degree of continuity and adherence to long-term
goals, and tolerate a certain amount of failure as a short term price of growth.
5. Managing Griffin’s image and media presence
with the league’s, and maybe the world’s, single least tactful
and self-aware
public relations apparatus.
6. Being a part of a league which does
not care about the safety of its players but also going the extra mile to
not specifically care about the safety of this
particular player, which is totally mystifying given the importance placed
on him by the organization.
And so when looking at Robert Griffin’s tenure
in Washington, we have something like what we have now, a “what happened”
narrative so simultaneously complicated and boring it’s easiest just to say “he
got hurt and then he wasn’t good anymore” and then move on with our lives. This
amounts to an internalization of the sort of soul-deep oppressive C.Y.A. that
this team spills all over everybody it touches. The Redskins, (and they are
called that, “REDSKINS,” a racial epithet which the team hopes you will spend $50
on a t-shirt for the right to display on your chest) did not ruin RG3 so
much as they selected him to be their quarterback, and they will ruin you, too,
if you choose to root for their success on the football field or, especially,
off it.
Robert Griffin has by now proven a few things. He's proven that there is no such thing as a player so good he can overcome the handicap of being on this team. He's proven that the Redskins are not good enough for Robert Griffin, the concept of Robert Griffin, or any future Robert Griffin. He's proven that my instincts were right when I saw every highlight of his through a lens of dread. And he's proven that this is now something other than a football team, playing a sport other than football, employing men whose job is to have a job first and become a good football team a dim, distant, often invisible second.
Robert Griffin has by now proven a few things. He's proven that there is no such thing as a player so good he can overcome the handicap of being on this team. He's proven that the Redskins are not good enough for Robert Griffin, the concept of Robert Griffin, or any future Robert Griffin. He's proven that my instincts were right when I saw every highlight of his through a lens of dread. And he's proven that this is now something other than a football team, playing a sport other than football, employing men whose job is to have a job first and become a good football team a dim, distant, often invisible second.
