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The Lonely Swan Song of Robert Griffin III

Robert Griffin III's career is just about to wrap up for good.

A funny thing happened on highly-detailed renderings of NFL stadiums all over the country over the last few days. Washington Redskins fans, taking the 2015 version of their team on test drives on the latest Madden 16 NFL video game found something happening at a pace that could hardly be called accidental. Robert Griffin III was getting injured. A lot.

They say art imitates life and it’s obviously true in RG3’s case. He’s getting beaten up, thrown down and carted off the field in real life. Why not in his digital life too?

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Worse than that, when he’s healthy the Madden version of Griffin has the same passing accuracy troubles as the real Griffin.

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Is this any way to treat the “Best Quarterback in the NFL?”

It would be easy to paint RG3 as the architect of his own destruction, but that’s not entirely the case. Now, don’t get me wrong, he bears the lion’s share of the responsibility in how terrible he is at playing the position in sports he was drafted to play, but not all of it. When you look back at the implosion of Griffin’s career, there’ll be plenty of blame to go around.

So where do we start? With his first head coach Mike Shanahan.

Now, considering Griffin’s only good season was with Shanahan it might seem crazy to lay the blame at the two-time Super Bowl champion coach’s feet. And I’m not, but Shanahan’s coaching tenure with the Redskins was a huge detriment to Griffin’s development because, frankly, Shanahan should have never coached there to begin with. Shanahan had to know he would have issues with Redskins owner Dan Snyder because everyone has issues with Dan Snyder.

Granted, Snyder has a big wallet and doesn’t mind dipping into it and I’m sure there were millions of reasons for Shanahan to try to get along with Snyder, but Shanahan could have waited a little bit and coached pretty much anywhere. Shanahan, along with his son Kyle, devised an offense to survive a season with their rookie quarterback and it was too successful, not only getting Griffin tabbed rookie of the year, but also landing him a Pro Bowl spot and a playoff berth. It was a gadget-y, read-option offense and one no NFL expert or coach on the planet thought the Redskins could run long term. There was just one problem with that; Robert Griffin III and Daniel Snyder thought they could.

The very next season the Shanahans started expanding the offense, demanding more from Griffin as an NFL quarterback and the second-year player did nothing but whine about it to Snyder, who had become his biggest fan and advocate. Soon there was a rift between Shanahan, a guy that had taken teams quarterbacked by Brian Greise and Jake Plummer to winning records and playoff appearances and Griffin, who had a decent rookie season and Snyder, who has done nothing but run the Redskins into the ground the minute he bought the team.

A divorce was inevitable and this is where Snyder gets his share of the blame. By siding with his quarterback over his head coach, Snyder not only ran one of the best coaches in the NFL out of town, he effectively made RG3 think he was immune to criticism. Shanahan wasn’t critiquing bad performances by Griffin, he was being a “hater” like all the people who told him he sucked continually on twitter.

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Since no real coach wants to work with Snyder anymore, he had to hire a doofus and of the doofuses available none were bigger lunkheads than Jay Gruden, a man made famous on the coat-tails of his more-famous brother and that had accomplished roughly nothing since John was fired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2008.

Jay Gruden has somehow missed the memo describing him as a worthless sack of elephant dung and instead thinks of himself as a legitimate NFL-caliber coach. Because of that, he feels that he, the guy hand-picked by Snyder to toadie to RG3, is in fact more important than Griffin and has made it his duty to teach that fact to his quarterback, in lieu of actually teaching him how to play the position. It’s not worked out well.

In fact, Gruden’s arrogance nearly got Griffin killed in his last preseason game. Gruden wasn’t concerned about that, instead using his press conference this week to complain that a reporter called him “fat” and hurt his feelings.

Finally we come to Griffin, who is ultimately responsible for his own future unemployment. He obviously doesn’t think he’s been the problem. Not only that, he doesn’t think he’s even been part of the problem. His inability to grasp how an NFL offense works is based purely on his stubbornness. Griffin is too smart and too physically talented to play this poorly.

If Shanahan hadn’t devised a playground offense for him in his rookie season, maybe he wouldn’t be this willfully stupid. Maybe he would have gone through the beatings and learning curve that other NFL rookies have to face and discover the things inside himself that he must improve to succeed as a quarterback in professional football. But Griffin doesn’t see that 2012 as the abberation it was. He sees it as the norm. How NFL football is supposed to be. He’s going to be severely disappointed when he finds out he’s wrong.

And when the Redskins finally cut ties with him it won’t be his fault. It won’t be his fault when he bombs out in Cleveland or Buffalo or the New York Jets. Those teams and coaches will be the problem. Griffin will still be the best quarterback in the NFL as far as he’s concerned, with the only problem being he’ll no longer be in the NFL.

Written by Adam Greene

Adam Greene is a writer and photographer based out of East Tennessee. His work has appeared on Cracked.com, in USA Today, the Associated Press, the Chicago Cubs Vineline Magazine, AskMen.com and many other publications.

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