His Year: Robert Griffin III 2012

Drafted into a pressure cooker, the mental and physical strain eventually got to Robert Griffin III, but not before he gave us an unforgettable rookie season.

Our story begins with Jim Everett.

Fans of this publication may think bringing up the name Jim Everett is some kind of joke for the in-crowd, but there is no joke here. The story of Robert Griffin III’s electric 2012 goes all the way back to when the Los Angeles Rams traded two first round draft picks plus some Pro Bowl players to the Houston Oilers in 1986, for the privilege of selecting QB Jim Everett third overall.

The Jim Everett trade worked out fantastically for the Rams, if the goal was strictly to find a great QB. Jim was that and then some. I’ve made arguments before that he should be in the Hall of Fame. However, the price of acquiring his services was onerous. The Rams got their QB position set for the next decade, but this trade cost them heavily at most other positions on the field.

Giving away multiple starting NFL players, plus multiple draft picks (two of them being first rounders) that could’ve been used to replace those departing starters, meant the Rams were saddled with weak rosters for most of Jim’s time there. This is why such an elite QB as Jim Everett finishes his Rams tenure with a 46-59 record, and this trade is largely viewed as a bust among Rams fans, despite the QB himself not being a bust at all.

Jim Everett had four seasons in the top five in xEPA/Play, while leading a top twelve team passing offence seven times in his career. That’s more top twelve passing offences than John Elway was a part of, but everything that the Rams sent away to get him just weighed the franchise down too much. LA was able to make one conference championship game in 1989, but that’s all the success that Jim Everett and the Rams had together.

This one trade set the precedent for 25 years in the NFL. Do not trade the whole house for a quarterback at the draft. Even if that QB turns out to be fantastic, he’s still only one player. It will be difficult to win when you trade away so much starting level NFL talent. Just ask Jim Everett and the Los Angeles Rams.

As a result of the Jim Everett experiment, the going rate for QBs went dramatically down in the years ahead. At the 1998 draft, the San Diego Chargers had to pay a first and a second to trade up to select Ryan Leaf. This did not work out well, but imagine if they’d had to pay two firsts plus two starting level NFL players, like the Rams did a decade earlier.

At the 2001 draft, when the Falcons traded up to select Michael Vick, they traded a second, third, and mediocre WR Tim Dwight to move from fifth to first in the draft. Once all the dust had settled on Eli Manning in 2004, the Giants had traded a first, third, and fifth to move up from number four to number one after the fact. I can list off trades all day, but you get what I’m driving at here.

The Jim Everett experience of the QB selected being a rousing success, but the trade as a whole being a brutal failure, destroyed the market value of rookie QBs. Teams just were not willing to pay as much as they used to be willing to pay to get a young QB in the door.

This brings us to the 2012 offseason.

By all accounts, there are two QBs worthy of being taken number one overall. The man who is going to go number one overall is named Andrew Luck, who in my estimation is the final QB at the draft to get such an absurd amount of hype, in the era before the statistical understanding around the QB position changed. Andrew is thought of in his time as a can’t miss, John Elway style prospect.

However, if he came out of college today, in 2025, I sincerely doubt he would’ve been picked number one overall.

In the modern era of understanding how the QB position works, now that we understand that college passing accuracy is the thing that translates the very best to the NFL, it would be hard to deny Robert Griffin III the number one spot. In terms of my college football CPOE model (which dates back only to 2003), Robert has Andrew beat 10.5 to 7.5, and in terms of athleticism, there is no contest between the two.

In the modern era, where teams care less about nebulous concepts like size, arm strength, and ability to be a pocket passer, I seriously doubt any team would be able to pass up a 10.5 college CPOE arm with the first overall pick in the draft, even if the alternative is Andrew Luck.

I say all this because Robert as the years have gone by has for some reason become remembered primarily for his athleticism, and I don’t think his passing accuracy gets remembered enough. Coming out of college, his passing accuracy is the draw. His passing accuracy always was the draw, but what truly takes him to the top of the draft boards even more than the football player that Robert Griffin III represents, is the man. Teams want Robert Griffin III the man in their building.

Born to two military parents stationed in Okinawa, Japan, Robert did not have a permanent home until he was seven years old, spending his childhood making short stops in places like Fort Hood, New Orleans, and even Seoul, South Korea. Eventually, his family finally settled in Texas, where the young man’s first love (like that of many men before him) was to play basketball.

Robert was born when everybody wanted to be like Mike, but young Robert Griffin III did not have the temperament to do things like Michael Jordan did. Instead, the young man was born with the politician’s touch. He was good with people. If his football career failed to work out, there were several around him who believed he had a legitimate future in politics. Robert’s personal goal was to be a lawyer, but all of these things have the same flavour. He seemed destined to live a life dealing with people.

However, the football culture inherent in growing up in Texas has an effect on young athletic men like Robert. His father, Robert Griffin, Jr., had played QB in high school, and regularly told his son stories of his idols, Ken Stabler and Fran Tarkenton, both of whom were smaller QBs, like Robert Jr..

Robert Jr’s son Robert the third was nothing special himself in terms of size. He did not get a chance to start in high school until his junior year, and even that was only after he won a QB competition. This is not the four (or at least three) year high school starter story that you see out of most future NFL QBs. In fact, football was not even Robert’s main sport.

This gets said about a lot of NFL players in jest, or in a hyperbolic tone, but Robert Griffin III was legitimately an Olympic level runner. He graduated from high school early in an effort to prepare for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He did not make the Olympic team that year. At just 17 years old at the time of this failure, the feeling was he would be a shoe-in for the next US Olympic team, going to London in 2012, but as we all know, he would have other things on his plate by then.

This led Robert into being recruited to colleges to play football. Having more rushing yards than passing yards in his final high school season, a lot of pro style teams were not interested in a player who played this way. There were several meetings, most of which were coaches trying to convince the young man to play safety, but Robert did not want to play safety. He knew he could do it at QB, which led him into the arms of coach Art Briles.

When Art gets hired to be the head coach of the Baylor Bears, one of his first recruits on the job is QB Robert Griffin III, and the rest is history. The two combine to turn around a Baylor program that’d been dead for a long time. Robert starts as a true freshman, winning Big 12 Freshman of the year awards, while also being an All-American track and field runner. This was looking like the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between player and school, but in the beginning of the 2009 college season, it all comes crashing down.

Robert tears his ACL.

When everybody talks about Robert Griffin III and torn ACLs, the one he suffers at Baylor in 2009 is typically not the one they’re bringing up, but I have to bring it up, just to let everybody know that this one did not derail him at all. Keep this fact in mind for later. He comes back for the beginning of the 2010 season, right back on the same course to turn the Baylor program around that he’d been on before he went down.

In 2010, the Baylor Bears finished with a 7-6 record, the program’s first winning record since moving to the Big 12, and in 2011 they bettered that with a 10-3 record, led by Robert’s 10.5 CPOE season, and a 13th place national ranking at season’s end.

At this point, Robert Griffin III must say goodbye to the Baylor Bears and say hello to the National Football League. If this were 2025, I’m confident that he would be a lock to go first. Since it’s 2012, he’s a lock to go second, but to whom?

The St Louis Rams currently are in possession of the second overall draft pick, but they do not want to use it. They’re satisfied with their QB situation, having drafted Sam Bradford first overall just a couple years ago, so they make it known to the world that Robert Griffin III is available, if any team can name the right price.

There are lots of teams bidding for this second overall selection, but the team very furthest from the minds of most is the Washington Redskins. If you could put betting odds on which team is going to trade for this pick, most people have Washington at either the very longest or in the top five longest.

There’s no way they’re going to be trading for a QB, because they are the favourites to land Peyton Manning.

Peyton has just been let go by the Indianapolis Colts, who have had Andrew Luck fall into their laps after a horrendous 2011 season while their franchise QB was out with a neck injury. This leaves the QB of the 2000s out there, for anybody to sign, and the scuttlebutt around the NFL is that Peyton’s preference is to go to Washington to play for head coach Mike and offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan.

Who can blame him for that? If you were a QB free agent, wouldn’t you want to go play for Mike and Kyle Shanahan? Of course you would. This father-son duo have made careers out of making good QBs look even better than they are. Steve Young, John Elway, Matt Ryan, Brian Griese, Jay Cutler, and etcetera. I could name more. All those guys had their best results under the Shanahan offensive umbrella, and could you imagine Peyton Manning in the Shanahan offence?

That horrifying proposition got within an eyelash of happening in the Spring of 2012. It’s been confirmed by John Elway himself that Peyton’s preferred destination was not Denver. It was Washington, and if not for Washington’s organisational incompetence, it’s very likely he would’ve ended up here, and Robert Griffin III would’ve ended up someplace else.

Chew on that one for a while Washington fans.

The courtship of Peyton was by no means a done deal, but the Skins were out in the lead. There was still more work to be done to secure Peyton’s services, but instead of doing that, we get the biggest QB draft trade since Jim Everett.

While their head coach was busy trying to secure Peyton Manning, the Washington front office was busy working a deal to trade two first round draft picks and a second round draft pick to the St Louis Rams to move up from number six to number two. This is still not the Jim Everett haul of two first round picks, a fifth round pick, plus some starters, but it’s painfully close.

This trade resets the market immediately and irreversibly for what it costs to trade up for a QB. Also, it immediately makes clear that Peyton Manning will not be coming to Washington, although he still goes to an already scheduled meeting, indicating that his level of interest in the Skins had shrunk in the wake of this trade, but had not shrunk to nothing.

Sidebar. Could you imagine if the Washington Redskins traded two firsts and a second to the Rams, only to end up signing Peyton Manning as a free agent?

Only in Washington.

The possibility of that happening raises some red flags. The timing of this trade raises some red flags too. We knew at the time and we know to this day that Redskins owner Dan Snyder loves RG3, and is willing to do anything to have him on his football team. Is it possible that he instructed his front office to way overpay for this second overall draft pick, strictly to prevent Peyton Manning from coming to town?

None of this has ever come out publicly, but there’s a non-zero chance of that being the case.

This last second overpay of a trade to get RG3 onto the Washington Redskins instead of Peyton Manning is one of the seminal ‘butterfly effect’ moments in all of NFL history. This could’ve been one of the great eras in the history of this team. Instead, this trade is the jumping off point of a brewing power struggle between coach Mike Shanahan and owner Dan Snyder.

Dan wins this round, as Peyton Manning does sign with Denver, and on draft night, the commissioner does announce Robert Griffin III as the second overall pick to the Washington Redskins, and now we’re a part of this.

The Washington Redskins at one time were one of the NFL’s blue blood franchises. With three Super Bowl championships and five Super Bowl appearances, all prior to 1992, Washington at one time had an argument for being the very best franchise in the history of the NFL. This was before the Patriots had six championships. Before the Cowboys had five championships. Before the 49ers had five.

Then, the NFL implemented a salary cap.

This cap killed the Washington Redskins. Two years after having a legitimate argument for being the best team in NFL history in 1991, the Skins were a doormat in 1993, the team hurt the very most by the shiny new salary cap. They had to tear everything down, leaving basically nothing behind, and in the 20 years since then, this franchise has not been able to build it back up. They’ve made the playoffs just three times in that 20 year period.

A lot of this starts at the QB position, where Washington has tried everything, and failed at everything. They’ve tried selecting QBs in the first round (Heath Shuler, Jason Campbell), and failed at that. They’ve tried giving late round guys their first NFL break (Gus Frerotte, Trent Green), but they both got away to other teams when Washington could not find a way to resign them. They’ve tried retreading veterans (Mark Brunell, Donovan McNabb), and failed at that too. It seems as if whatever Washington does at the QB position, it fails.

That’s the problem that Robert Griffin III is being brought in to fix.

At the QB position, there is nothing except him on this Washington team. The path has been completely cleared. No competition for the starting job. Not even a veteran backup. Perhaps knowing that an old school coach like Mike Shanahan would start any QB option other than a rookie, if given the chance, Mike is not given that chance going into the 2012 season. His options are second overall pick Robert Griffin III, or fourth round pick Kirk Cousins.

This really is no choice at all. The front office has politically outmanoeuvred Mike Shanahan into starting a rookie QB in week one, for the first time in his NFL career.

You may be beginning to wonder at this point why I’m choosing to frame the story this way, because at this point I’ve said very little about Robert at the NFL level. He’s merely a device for power games between the ownership and the head coach, but that’s the point. That is the RG3 story. I will get into it further as we go along, but the fact that Robert is getting caught up in power games in the organisation is the driving force behind a lot of what happens in this rookie season.

We know how power struggles normally go in the NFL. Typically, they ruin everything for everybody, as it gets everybody into the mindset of being in it for themselves, which tends to relegate team goals to secondary status. However, Robert throws off a lot of this calculus by being a ridiculously good football player, who holds this together far better than any other rookie in NFL history would have, in my opinion.

With a head coach who doesn’t really want him, no veteran leadership in his QB room, plus the fact that rookie QBs are almost exclusively bad to begin with, Robert should be a prime candidate to have a really bad rookie year. Instead, he goes out and wins NFC Offensive Player of the week in his very first game.

Week one is against the New Orleans Saints, who in 2012 are not going to turn out to be a good team, finishing the year with just 7.89 Expected Wins, and seven real ones. However, this is a New Orleans team who over the last three years have won 13, 11, and 13 games, plus a Super Bowl championship, so to say that the hype train gets rolling when Robert goes out there and generates 0.52 EPA/Play as we blow out that team would be an understatement.

When I talked about the hype around Dak Prescott a couple weeks ago, I talked about how it took a while to build, but not with Robert. It’s instant, and it deserves to be instant. This is a Saints team that has been favourites to win the Super Bowl every year since 2009, and Robert has just blown them out in his very first game as an NFL player. The final score finishes as 40-32 due to a New Orleans garbage time touchdown, but the total EPA margin of 19.89 points is much more indicative of the way this game truly went.

This does not happen. Ever. Needless to say, this is the only time anybody ever blew out a prime Drew Brees in their first career NFL start. It’s the only time any QB ever won the NFC Offensive Player of the Week award in their first career start. It’s the first time anybody ever generated as good as 0.52 EPA/Play in their first career start as a true rookie.

Once again, the 2012 Saints are not going to wind up being what they were expected to be. They’re a middling team in the 2012 NFC. We’re not the only team that’s going to finish this season with a blowout win over them, but we’re the ones that broke the aura, and more specifically, taking into account that the rushing offence was successful only 28 percent of the time in this game, Robert Griffin III singlehandedly broke that aura.

Some revisionists like to call this a glory game against a bad defence, which in technical terms it was, but we were ten point underdogs in this game, largely because of everything I told you about this organisation. It was completely rational for the betting public to expect our offence to be really bad. This game is one of the widest spreads overcome to win outright of the entire 2012 season, and it snaps the public into recognition instantly. These Washington Redskins are a team you need to pay attention to, as is their rookie QB.

Combine this with the fact that Andrew Luck struggles immensely in his debut game, and the hype is off the chain. People wait with drawn breath to see what he can do in week two.

I must say that what we get in week two is a little bit more realistic.

Instead of the 30th ranked defence of the New Orleans Saints, we draw the 11th ranked defence of the St Louis Rams, and although the hope and expectation is that we can make them pay for allowing Robert onto our roster, we just can’t do it. RG3 plays fine individually. Better than fine actually, generating 0.19 EPA/Play as we do take a 21-6 lead at one point in the game, but from there, everything conspires against us.

There are turnovers to give the Rams a short field, a blocked punt to give the Rams a short field, and several failed offensive drives. So much goes wrong that the Rams have made up this deficit and taken a 31-28 lead before the fourth quarter even starts, and with not one, not two, not three, but four chances to make up this three point deficit in the fourth quarter, our offence cannot get it done, as a game with a 31-28 score through three quarters somehow holds that 31-28 score as the final, and we get one possession game lucked out of week two.

Once again, the total EPA battle, which we win by 6.54 points, is much more indicative of how this game went than the actual final score, which we lost by three points, but it does lay out clearly the common problem of a rookie QB struggling a little bit in one possession games.

We see this again in week three, where for the third week in a row we get a quality opponent, if not necessarily a top of the league opponent, in the Cincinnati Bengals, who have a top ten defence and are going to make the playoffs at the end of this season. There’s no other way to say what happens than to say Robert plays like a rookie in this one, as he generates negative EPA/Play and we lose to a pretty good Bengals team 38-31.

Once again, this lays the problem out for all to see. We entered the fourth quarter of this game tied at 24, and before we could blink we were down 38-24, in need of a garbage time touchdown for the score to be as narrow as it was.

It’s already becoming clear what kind of team we’re going to be. This is the game we’re going to find ourselves in a lot, isn’t it? We’re not quite good enough to just stomp these good teams out, and once we get into these one possession game scenarios, it’s tough for our rookie QB to get us out of them.

This is a tough spot to be in. It can only happen so many times before the fans’ confidence in the team begins to waver, especially when it’s a team like Washington, who have spent 20 years finding ways to lose football games.

That takes me to week four on the road in Tampa Bay. The game where this all comes to a head.

For the fourth game in a row, we jump out to an early lead. 21-3 in the second quarter this time, but for the third game in a row, we score no points after that. I cannot blame the offence this time around, as kicker Billy Cundiff misses three field goals, all of which could’ve put this lead out of reach, which puts us into a matchup against fourth quarter Josh Freeman.

His Year: Josh Freeman 2010

This is not 2010 anymore, but if any of you read my Josh Freeman article, you know that fourth quarter Josh Freeman is not a player to be messed with. However, refusing to put this game away, and scoring no points after we took a 21-3 lead, is akin to poking the bear. Entering the fourth still clutching a 21-13 lead, Josh quickly scores a touchdown to narrow the score to 21-19, and when we do nothing in response he gets his team right back down the field for a FG that makes the score 22-21.

This is what happens when you mess with fourth quarter Freeman. It’s better just not to do it if you can avoid it, no matter who you are, but when you’re a team like us, that’s had troubles being able to put our foot back on the gas pedal offensively once we get these leads, this is a horrifying thing.

We’ve now put ourselves in the position to be behind 22-21, with 1:42 left to go in the fourth quarter. When you combine all of Robert’s chances in his short NFL career so far to take a lead in a close fourth quarter, he is 0 for five, failing four times against St Louis and once against Cincinnati, and in this game there has been three missed FGs, but there has also been the five other chances since we got the 21-3 lead where we did not even get close enough to the end zone trot Billy Cundiff onto the field.

It’s slowly beginning to look like the same old Skins all over again. This is a fanbase that loses hope easily. If we’ve found yet another way to lose, it’s going to begin to feel like yet another wasted season in a Shanahan era that’s so far offered nothing but wasted seasons in Washington.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We still have 1:42 to erase this all, with the ball on our own 20 yard line. With Billy Cundiff’s struggles today, I’m not sure anybody is comfortable trotting him out there to attempt a 50 yard plus kick, so we’re going to have to play this drive like it’s the 1980s, needing to get all the way to the opposing 25, or perhaps further, for realistic FG range.

This is a long way to go in 1:42, with just one timeout, but Robert sets about his job, and on this drive he does not look like a rookie at all. He finds an open Santana Moss for a 15 yard catch and run. He exploits a busted coverage when nobody covers Fred Davis for another 20 yards, and when the Buccaneers lose contain, electing to pin their ears back and rush at Robert, he chops them up for a 15 yard scramble.

He elects to take the hit on the end of this run instead of sliding, a common RG3 problem, but these three plays by themselves are enough. He does not need to play any more. With the ball all the way to the Tampa Bay 24, Mike Shanahan feels comfortable sending Cundiff back out there, and he barely sneaks the ball inside the left upright, but barely is enough, and we win this game 24-22.

That folks, is how you win the total EPA battle by 18.6 points, and win the football game by two. This is becoming far too common. These should not be one possession games at all, but at least we were able to pull out the win this time. It’s an important one for this Washington team. If we were to lose this, it not only would’ve been a third loss in four games, but a second conference loss, which is brutal for a team that looks to be on the fringes of the playoff picture in a stacked NFC like we are.

Playoff tiebreakers are mostly based on NFC conference record, so it’s important to win games against weaker conference opponents like Tampa Bay. This is still not a weak opponent in general. The Bucs are going to finish this season with 8.4 Expected Wins of their own, but by 2012 NFC standards, that’s a relatively weak opponent, and an important win to get.

There is no rest for the weary either. Not in this conference, as week five takes us back home, but brings us another almighty opponent. This time, it’s the Atlanta Falcons, who bring a 4-0 record with them currently, and are going to finish 2012 with a 13-3 record.

If you expect a rookie to stand up to the might of this team, I don’t think your expectations are very realistic. A His Year article is no place for logic to win, but in this case, logic does win. Even a rookie that’s clearly circumventing the bounds of what rookies are supposed to be able to do, like RG3, is not able to stand up to this. He plays quite badly, generating negative EPA/Play, and when he’s relieved in favour of Kirk Cousins, Kirk plays just as badly.

These Atlanta Falcons are just too much for either of our rookie QBs to handle, and in the third quarter, Robert allows himself to take another almighty hit. He kind of slides, but also kind of doesn’t. It all happens too slowly, and he gets a shoulder to the head as his reward.

This is the story of RG3’s Year, and truthfully his career in the NFL. Despite being an Olympic level track and field runner, he is very slow. Slow in a football sense. He’s slow to slide, slow to peel out of bounds, slow to read a defence. In this way, he reminds me of Lamar Jackson in the modern game, who is also usually very slow to realise what’s happening in front of him.

What makes guys like RG3 and Lamar Jackson special is that once they finally see what’s happening, their immense physical gifts can cover the gaps. Would it have been great to get it all done sooner? Of course, but there are multiple different ways to do things, and when you are a physical specimen like Lamar Jackson or Robert Griffin III, you can afford to be a bit slow on the mental uptake.

However, in a situation like this, being slow to realise where the pressure is coming from hurts. Literally. Robert does slide to the ground, but he doesn’t slide quickly enough. The defender has already launched by the time the slide is made, and Robert gets a shoulder to the side of the head. No flag is thrown. The hit is not illegal, but it’s ugly. It looks a lot like the Trent Green hit, which was also not illegal, for those of you who are well versed in what that looks like. The only difference here is that Robert’s head as it swings backwards, misses the ground.

Thank goodness for that, as while he misses the rest of this game, and we never really come close to winning it, he is not concussed, and will at least be back to play next week, but remember this Atlanta game. It’s RG3’s first real injury at the NFL level. It will become important to the story later.

From this point, we go through some more rookie ups and downs. Next week against Minnesota, who represent yet another playoff team on our immensely difficult schedule, Robert bounces back from the injury in the Atlanta game to generate 0.5 EPA/Play in a blowout victory over a good Vikings team.

Our stock had fallen so far since the excitement of the week one win over New Orleans that we came into the Minnesota game as home underdogs. This is against a Minnesota team that’s barely going to sneak into the playoffs at the end of the year. They are not bona fides. The hype had simply died down for Robert, and for our whole team.

This in understandable, but with modern statistical understanding, I don’t think it’s correct. EPA was not a very commonly used statistic in 2012. NFLFastR did not yet exist, so we get fundamentally different perceptions of this season in 2012, compared to my perception of how this is going. If this exact same season were happening in 2025, everybody would be talking about how much of a sleeping giant the Redskins are, as our net EPA this season is 38.93 through just six games (positive 6.49 per game), but in the real world of 2012, everybody sees our real point differential of just positive five, our record of 3-3, and concludes that we’re not a team to be feared.

I believe the true story is more along the lines of us being one of the unluckiest teams in NFL history through six games to turn an EPA differential of 38.93 into a real point differential of just five, but with the way the next three games go, the people out there who espouse the EPA statistic as being not worth its salt would have an excuse to call themselves correct.

Robert Griffin III individually plays quite well, generating 0.24 EPA/Play on the road against the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants, and 0.09 on the road against a top ten Pittsburgh Steelers defence, but we lose both of these games by a combined score of 54-35.

It’s beginning to look like the critics are correct. It was a fun story in week one in New Orleans, but with a 3-5 record through eight games, it’s looking like the Washington Redskins, and our rookie QB, just cannot handle this. If we could’ve turned the one possession losses in either St Louis or Cincinnati to wins, we could be having a different conversation right now, but with a 3-5 record it’s going to be really tough to come back.

However, we do have an ace up our sleeve.

Our schedule has been ludicrously difficult. We are now eight games into the season, and just two of them have been against teams with less than eight Expected Wins. Those two games are New Orleans (7.89) in week one, and St Louis (7.66) in week two. These are not easy opponents, and (rightfully so) were not perceived as easy opponents, but on our schedule, that’s been the easy part.

Since those two games, we have played Cincinnati (playoff team, 9.54 Expected Wins), Tampa Bay (8.4), Atlanta, (playoff team, 11.06), Minnesota (playoff team, 8.43), New York Giants (9.34), and Pittsburgh (8.94).

This difficult schedule is not unique to us. In terms of top to bottom talent, the 2012 NFC is a contender for the best conference in NFL history. Simply by virtue of playing in this conference, we were always going to have an extremely difficult schedule, but being eight games into the season without a single cupcake matchup is extreme, even for this conference.

It does not stop in week nine either, where we play the 9.49 Expected Win Carolina Panthers, and the bottom falls out. We’re finally favourites again, for the first time in well over a month, but the offence lays an egg. The rushing offence is bad. The passing offence is bad. Robert generates negative EPA for just the third time in his career, as we fall behind so early that we’re forced to drop him back to pass 53 times.

I’m here to be partial to RG3, and unapologetically pump him up every chance I get, but even I can’t say it’s a good idea to drop him back to pass 53 times. Carolina is on the lower end of NFL defence, but as we commonly see with rookies, the quality of opposition defence does not truly matter very much. The off week is going to come when the off week is going to come. A bad defensive opponent will not save them, and this game from Robert demonstrates that perfectly.

This Carolina team is one of the worst defences we’ve faced all season, but excluding the Atlanta game that he could not finish, it gave us Robert’s worst performance as a pro, and this is the note we go into the bye week on.

We finally get a chance for some rest, and a break from our gauntlet of a schedule, but we do not get this rest until we’ve fallen all the way to a 3-6 record. Some would call this regression to the mean, but even with the horror show that has been our last three games, our net EPA on the season has only dropped to 1.56, compared to our real point differential, which has dropped to -22. It’s going to take a lot more regression than this to get to our mean.

What I mean by this is that we are absolutely positively not a 3-6 calibre team. Even our real point differential of -22 through nine games (not even -2.5 per game) should not beget a 3-6 record, and our EPA differential of basically zero indicates that we should likely be around .500 somewhere.

None of this has been the fault of Robert Griffin III. In the first nine games of his NFL career, he has generated 0.188 EPA/Play, on a CPOE of 3.1. These are fantastic numbers, not just amongst rookies, but amongst the entire NFL. By no means if all luck were equal would he be doing this on the second worst team in the NFC, but alas. Here we are.

As we sit through our week ten bye, we must marinate in the fact that we are that bad. We’re not that bad by real point differential, where we are better than four NFC teams. We’re not that bad by EPA differential, where we are still in the top half, but by record, our measly 3-6 means only the 2-7 Carolina Panthers are worse than we are, and even they have a head to head win over us.

There is also the 3-5-1 St Louis Rams, who also have a head to head win over us. What I’m telling you is that, despite one of the best five QBs in the NFL right out of the gate, there is a serious argument that we’re the worst team in the entire NFC. There are currently five teams in the AFC with a record as bad or worse than ours, but we don’t have the good fortune of being in the AFC, so we’re right at the bottom.

This is partly a testament to just how stacked the 2012 NFC is, partly a testament to how bad our luck has been, partly a testament to just how difficult our schedule has been, and partly a testament to the fact that it’s just hard for a rookie QB to carry along a bad defence.

Our defence has not held a single opponent to negative EPA/Play yet, and we’ve played QBs like Sam Bradford, Josh Freeman, and Christian Ponder. I’ll let them off the hook for fourth quarter Freeman, but to have a 0.188 EPA/Play QB and a 3-6 record is a damning statement to how poorly a defence is playing. It forces Robert into end of game situations all the time, and he’s a rookie, who (like all rookies) is not fantastic in two minute drill situations.

This must improve in the second half of the year to give our man a real chance, but here are some things we have going for us.

First, if you have to pick a division in the 2012 NFC to be a part of, the NFC East is the way to go. The New York Giants are currently leading it, with a 6-4 record, plus a head to head win over us. That puts us an effective three games behind them, which is a horrible position to be in, but if we were in any other division our odds would be even longer. That’s the first good thing.

The second good thing is that stacking a lot our difficult matchups into our first nine games grants privileges in the final seven. After nine games in a row of not a single opponent who will finish 2012 with less than seven Expected Wins, five of our final seven games are going to be coming against this softer level of competition. Our toughest game remaining is our second chance at the New York Giants, which we must win in order to have any chance at the playoffs, but if we can win that one, it’s a realistic proposition that we will be the favourites in every other game we play.

Plus, the lead I’ve been burying this whole time is that we’ve got Robert Griffin III, who’s generating 0.188 EPA/Play, on a 3.1 CPOE so far. We’ve got two games against Tony Romo remaining, but other than those two Cowboy games, I’m confident that we’re going to have the best QB in any game we play, and at a point in the NFL’s history after the rule changes of 2004 and 2011, you just can’t overstate how important that is.

Nevertheless, we are still trying to dig ourselves out of a 3-6 deficit and make it into the playoffs. That means from here we can maybe afford one loss, depending on who the loss is against, and absolutely no losses to any NFC opponents. We are going to be the favourites in most games we play, but favourites lose games all the time. We can’t afford to lose at all against NFC opposition, lest we be completely out of the running in any tie break discussion, and as a team with a 3-6 record, it’s exceedingly likely that a tie break is going to be our only way into the playoffs.

That lays forth the mission quite clearly. We have seven games remaining. The level of competition in those games is quite weak in general, but we cannot afford to take a single week off, because a loss to any NFC opponent will end our season immediately. A loss to an AFC opponent will not end our season immediately, but will put a serious dent in our chances. It would be better to avoid that also.

We must do this as a team with a very poor defence, meaning the offence is going to have to do most of the heavy lifting. We do have an elite rushing offence, led by rookie RB Alfred Morris, but this still puts a lot on the shoulders of rookie QB Robert Griffin III. Quite frankly though, we have no choice. We either win all these games to make the playoffs, or we’re the same old Skins we’ve been for 20 years, in the eyes of our fans. Another team that found a way to take a lot of talent, and underachieve with it. Fans in Washington know that story too well.

Nobody wants to become another chapter in that book, least of all Robert Griffin III, who has already, fairly or not, been put in the position of being a franchise icon. Not just because the owner has basically mandated that be the case, but also because Washington has not had a QB of this calibre, ever. EPA/Play can’t be measured further back than 1999, but xEPA/Play can be, and in terms of xEPA/Play, only two Washington QB seasons in history can match Robert’s 0.188 EPA/Play that we’re seeing right now. Sonny Jurgensen in 1970, and Mark Rypien in 1991. Each only happened once. Neither were true rookies.

This is something that Washington fans have never experienced before, and we’re still sitting here with a 3-6 record.

Should we be? No, but are we? Yes.

Same old Skins.

The only way we can avoid this common refrain continuing for yet another offseason is to win at least six of our remaining seven games, and the only way to do that is to win the first one, but thankfully, our gauntlet gets to begin with one of the easier opponents, even for our soft remaining schedule. Week 11 is against the 3.87 Expected Win Philadelphia Eagles, and we show them no mercy on our home field.

We come into this game as just 3.5 point home favourites against such a poor team, which is quite indicative of the general opinion surrounding our team, but we get to work changing that perception by blowing out the poor overmatched Eagles 31-6, behind a 0.74 EPA/Play performance from our man RG3, a game that will remain the best he ever plays, by this particular metric.

For a team desperately in need of a winning streak, there are few better ways to get it started than this. Blowout wins over division rivals are always that little bit extra sweet, and with the Giants finally taking their bye in week 11, this pulls us within two games of their lead in the NFC East. However, before we can worry about them, we have to worry about the Cowboys.

These Cowboys are not a great football team. They’re just 5-5 right now, and although they do have a lot of the pieces that will make the Cowboys one of the NFL’s very best teams from 2014-2023, a lot of the offensive linemen crucial to that success have not been drafted yet, and in a conference as ruthless as the 2012 NFC, it’s not coming together for them.

Regardless of what they will become in any eventuality, any football team featuring Tony Romo throwing passes to three top 40 receivers in the NFL (Dez Bryant, Jason Witten, Miles Austin) should never be taken lightly. If you plan to face a team with this much talent at the offensive skill positions, you had better bring your offence along to be able to compete with them, and in this week 12 must-win matchup on the road in Dallas, that’s exactly what we do.

Despite coming into this game as four point road underdogs, the rushing offence and the passing offence are both firing on all cylinders. We do go three and out on our first drive, and a sack of RG3 kills our second, but from there, we see just two third downs for the remainder of the first half, as our next four drives go touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, and we go into the halftime break with a 28-3 lead.

Oh my.

I told you we cannot take the Cowboys lightly, and we absolutely have not done that. Our QB just had a 0.74 EPA/Play game last week, and our offence looks even more electric this time around. It’s got us sitting in the locker room at halftime with a four possession lead, and we’ve got to be feeling pretty hood about ourselves. Perhaps some of our guys even begin allowing themselves to look forward to next week, which is both our most difficult game remaining and the most important game of our entire season, against the New York Giants on Monday Night Football. There’s even a chance with the Giants playing a tough opponent in the Green Bay Packers tonight on Sunday Night Football that we may be able to take the lead in the division if we win that game.

You may say hold your horses, we have an entire half of football to play against the Dallas Cowboys, but come on. Do you really think they can overcome a 28-3 deficit? When they use the first seven minutes of the second half only narrowing the deficit to 28-6, we even reach the mythical 100 percent chance of victory, according to NFLFastR.

Oh no.

You guys may be wondering how that can possibly be a bad thing, but those of you who have been around long enough know what it means when I bring up a 100 percent estimated chance of victory on this publication. Nothing good ever comes of it.

Dallas finally manages to stop our offence, so they get the ball with the score 28-6 with five minutes left to play in the third quarter, and Tony Romo… throws an INT. We get the ball back, and go right back to a 100 percent estimated chance to win, but this is not a simple gotcha moment. We can do nothing but go three and out on our try, and this Cowboy possession is a one play 85 yard TD to Dez Bryant, making the score 28-13 before the third quarter ends.

This is beginning to get a bit nerve wracking. It’s not panic time when we’re up 28-13 with 16 minutes to go, but this is still Tony Romo we’re talking about. If he can get hot, that’s not a man you want to mess with. We have to score, and as our offence trots back onto the field, it looks like it did in the first half. No passes hit the ground. We see just one third down en route to an easy TD that widens our margin to 35-13, and at this point I begin feeling comfortable.

Even as the Cowboys march down the field for an eight point TD that narrows the score to 35-21, it takes all the way to the ten minute mark to get that done, and with our elite rushing offence in the hands of either Alfred Morris or Robert Griffin III, I have faith in our ability to use up time. It’s actually one of the things we’re very best at as a team. This time should be no different, but it is different.

Very different.

At the very first time he touches the ball, RG3 drops back and throws the ball into the hands of Safety Charles Peprah. Bedlam ensues. The Cowboys score an immediate touchdown to narrow the score to 35-28, now with plenty of time remaining as 8:24 is more than enough to make up a one possession deficit. Jerry world is going bananas, and all of a sudden we’re back into a position where we have to score.

At this point, I must remind you of the circumstances we’re facing. If we lose this game, the season is over immediately, and if we blow a 28-3 lead in order to lose a divisional game, a loss which would immediately kill all playoff hopes, the city of DC might just disown us. Same old Skins would not be the proper phrase for it. There would be universal outrage, and a lot of it would fall at the feet of poor RG3. How can you possibly turn the ball over when all we needed was to run off some clock?

RG3 is not a player that turns the ball over. This is his first turnover in over a month, and one of only seven times he will turn the ball over all season, but he picked a horrendous time to make this mistake. He was under heavy pressure from DeMarcus Ware, and under that heavy pressure, he threw the ball where it should’ve never been thrown. I would call this a simple rookie mistake, but that would be demeaning to rookies. Plenty of veterans have made this same mistake. DeMarcus Ware got himself into the Hall of Fame doing this to people.

It’s okay for a rookie to wilt under this pressure, but given the timing, given the circumstances, given the fact that this team has blown multiple touchdown leads multiple times earlier this season already, all of a sudden it becomes an outrage. It becomes unacceptable, and because he’s the man that made the mistake in the key moment, this loss becomes all his fault, in a narrative sense.

There’s only one way we can prevent that from happening. We have to go out there, we have to overcome our one possession game gremlins, and we have to score. We can’t let this be like St Louis earlier in the year, like Cincinnati, like Tampa Bay, all games where we built healthy first half leads, only for the offence to go completely silent after that. This time, our offence has to respond in the big moment, because Tony Romo is white hot on the opposing sideline, and I don’t think anybody has any doubts that he will score on our beleaguered defence again, at which point our season will be perilously close to being over.

We have one chance to keep ourselves out of that situation. We need a clutch fourth quarter scoring drive.

Welcome to RG3’s Year.

When it begins with an Alfred Morris rush that goes backwards, the prospects of this drive are looking a little scary. Our only choice is to drop RG3 back to pass again, hoping he does not compound his earlier mistake. Most rookie QBs would comound their problems, trying to get it all back on one play, but our man is not most rookies. He calmly finds Santana Moss open over the middle for a 23 yard gain, one that takes a lot of the energy out of a Dallas crowd that’d become very loud again over the course of this comeback.

When two further Alfred Morris rushes leave us on third and one, RG3 again calmly finds Santana Moss for a first down, and on his final completed pass of this game, he finds a twelve yard completion to Leonard Hankerson that sets us up in FG range, and as that ball sails through the uprights, we’ve not just taken a two possession lead again, with the scoreboard now reading 38-28, we’ve also taken five and a half minutes to do it. It’s the perfect drive. Exactly what we needed given the circumstances we were in, and at last it puts this game to bed.

Dallas does score again on their one possession remaining, but we do not leave them enough time to score twice, so in the end this goes down as a 38-31 win.

We’ve again had to win the total EPA battle by 14.75 points to win the real football game by just seven points, and we really need to stop doing that, but this time we’ve come out of it with a win. A win that was much closer than it should’ve been, but a win nonetheless.

What a whirlwind this game was for RG3. Instead of being the scapegoat that everybody blames for the loss because he turned the ball over for the first time in a month, now he gets to be the QB that generated 0.519 EPA/Play in a crucial divisional game, handily outplayed Tony Romo, and came up clutch on a drive in the fourth quarter that was essential to keep our hopes alive.

From the brink of disaster, we are now riding high heading into the most important game of the year, but so are the New York Giants. Far from the help that we hoped we might get from the Green Bay Packers on Sunday Night Football, the Giants instead won that game by 28 points, 38-10, leaving them at 7-4 with their own heads held plenty high as they come into our stadium for a Monday Night Football matchup.

This game has more on the line for us than it does for them. With six losses already, our only realistic path into the playoffs is through the NFC East. With the Giants only having four, they can even take a loss in this game and still remain in the fight for a wild card position. They are not really in the fight for a first round bye at 7-4 in this conference, so this game is not meaningless to them, but the only thing they are truly playing for is the right not to worry about us anymore.

Don’t underestimate the importance of not having to worry about a division rival anymore, especially one with a 0.229 EPA/Play, 5.3 CPOE QB through 11 games like we have in RG3, but that’s still not pressure for them like it’s pressure for us. Some would say that gives us the advantage. Some would say that gives New York the advantage, but when I do the vibe check based on the spread of this game, it’s three points in favour of the Giants, even though the game is being played on our home field.

That’s better than last time we played the Giants, where we were seven point underdogs, and we did not embarrass ourselves that day. RG3 generated 0.23 EPA/Play and we lost by just four points, but that will not do this time around. This time, in his first true primetime game, Robert must lead his team onto the field and defeat the New York Giants. Nothing less than that will suffice.

The Giants take six minutes to open this game with a 3-0 lead, but we take just two minutes to overtake that lead, on one of the oddest plays you will ever see. It’s a designed rush for RG3, but as he’s sliding to the ground he drops the ball. It bounces directly to Josh Morgan, who runs into the end zone for a TD, and a 7-3 Washington lead. It plays like a perfectly executed speed option play, even though it was 100 percent unintentional.

That play was explosive, but by and large, this game is played very close to the ground. It takes the Giants another six minutes to score no points when they get the ball back, which takes us all the way into the second quarter, but continuing with the pattern, it only takes us three minutes to punt the ball back, not getting into Giant territory. The game will continue in roughly this fashion for the rest of the half.

New York uses up seven minutes this time to score a touchdown, taking a 10-7 lead as we cross the two minute warning. RG3 and Pierre Garcon account for every single one of our 50 yards in the two minute drill, which is enough to even the score at ten, but we do leave 46 seconds on the clock, which is enough for Eli Manning to get his team a FG in response, so we go into halftime behind 13-10.

Football games are scored based on points, not based upon how much you touch the ball, but in that first half we had possession of the ball for just eight and a half minutes. The other 21 and a half all went to New York. In terms of offensive plays, it’s 42-21 in favour of the Giants. They’ve doubled up on us, making this one of the worst halves of football in terms of time of possession that I’ve ever seen a team play in the Shanahan offence.

Regardless, it is still good offence, so in terms of points, we are behind by just three, but we’re supposed to be the team that controls the clock and wins the TOP battle. It’s what we’ve been doing all year, but to say the Giants are beating us at our own game would be an understatement. By the time they get the ball coming out for the second half, and take five full minutes to score no points due to starting inside their own ten following a very poor kickoff return, they are outdoing us 50 to 21 in terms of offensive plays.

That’s not only tiring our defence out systematically, it’s also giving them many more chances to score. They have not converted on those chances, but we have to quit giving them so many, or they are going to burn us eventually, and our season is going to be over.

However, on this day, we are just incapable of going slowly.

Our offence is much too good for that. This time it’s a 46 yard designed run for RG3, without the need for any fumble luck, that gets us all the way down into the red zone, but an Alfred Morris fumble on a first and ten rush means that again we’ve taken just three minutes to score no points. We’ve added only six to our tally of offensive plays, and the ball is going right back to the Giants again, giving them another chance to add onto their lead.

Thankfully, due to them finally finding an explosive play of their own, they only take three minutes to score a FG and widen their lead to 16-10. It is extremely odd that we enter the fourth quarter with so few points on the scoreboard despite how well both offences are playing, but when one side is doing such an efficient job of playing keep away, this kind of thing can happen.

You can’t keep the ball out of our offence’s hands forever though, and now that our defence has again been on the field for nine out of the previous 12 minutes of game time, the message is clear. Scoring is the number one priority, but if we could do it slowly, that would be ideal.

Luckily for us, the Giants have had no luck all night stopping the combined rushing attack of Alfred Morris and RG3. The fact that they’ve had such little luck doing that is what has caused all of our offensive drives to move so quickly. We get all the way to midfield without having to complete a single pass, and even once our man does complete one pass, we get all the way to the New York 22 without completing another one.

Once we get into the red zone though, it’s RG3’s time to shine. It only takes two drop backs. One completion to Leonard Hankerson. One completion to Pierre Garcon, and a 17-16 lead for the Redskins after six and a half straight minutes of pounding the rock.

This is exactly what our tired defence needed, as the Giants are held to a three and out for the first time all day, which lets our offence back onto the field to burn some more time. We are able to get just one first down though, which does leave New York with another chance. A one point deficit with six minutes to go leaves their whole playbook open to use, and they get to work using it. They make it all the way to our 46, but in the end they stall just outside of FG range, and have to punt the ball back to us with four minutes left to play.

They never see the ball again.

Another clutch completion to Pierre Garcon on second and long to keep the ball in our hands is the clincher. From that point, the Giants cannot keep the lid on Alfred Morris, and we run off all four remaining minutes of game time, winning the most important game of our season 17-16.

We did a lot of work in this fourth quarter to turn the time of possession metrics around. In the end, the totals are only 33:13 to 26:47 in terms of time, and 66 to 53 in terms of offensive plays, but we all know what the story of this game was. The Giants were walking all over us for almost the entire duration. Our offence played great when we got the chance to touch the ball, but those chances were few and far between. It cannot be denied that it was very lucky for us to escape from this game with a win.

For once this season, one possession game luck turned things in our favour, with the Giants winning the total EPA battle with their keep away offence 15.18 to 11.44, but losing the football game by one point. This is just the second time all season that we have managed to overperform our total EPA differential in any game (funnily enough, both Giants games), and lady luck could not have picked a better time to finally be in our corner.

None of this is RG3’s fault though. Don’t let any of this distract you from the fact that he’s just generated better than .500 EPA/Play in a crucial game for the third week in a row, stopping at 0.504 this time. An epic performance when his team needed it most, in no small part due to his 7.1 total EPA on just four designed runs in this game.

We have just played three crucial divisional games in a row, in two of which we were the underdogs, and all of which would’ve meant an immediate dead season had we lost. In the most important three game stretch of football the Washington Redskins have had in half a decade, rookie QB RG3 generated an absurd 0.583 EPA/Play combined. This is not just the best three game stretch any rookie has ever had, it’s one of the best three game stretches anybody has ever had, and because we’re the 2012 Washington Redskins, we still had to play two one possession games, one of which we were extremely lucky to win.

I want to put a lot of emphasis on this otherworldly three game stretch of play, because quite soon I’m going to have to bury all of Robert’s great play under the weight of all the behind the scenes stuff going on in Washington, just like the football world at large has done. I just want to make clear that through twelve games, his first twelve games in the NFL, Robert Griffin III is a 0.235 EPA/Play, 5.1 CPOE guy.

There are seasons in the post-2004 rules era where those numbers would make him the MVP of the league. 2012 is not one of them, because Peyton Manning is tearing up the league in Denver (and not Washington), but Robert is playing so well that it’s hard to call massively overpaying for RG3 to prevent Peyton from coming to town a mistake at this point. If he can keep up this pace, Robert is a lock to be the best rookie QB of all time, and the best QB not named Sonny Jurgensen in Redskins history, all of this in just year one.

We all know that he will not be able to keep this pace, and we all know why, but we’ve got to get there first.

The beginning of the end comes in the form of a matchup against the Baltimore Ravens. In a couple months’ time, this is the team that’s going to be holding the Lombardi trophy, but in a regular season game, they are not especially intimidating opponents. They’re a good team, but not as good as the Giants were last week. This is true both in terms of my fancy numbers (9.34 Expected Wins at season’s end for the Giants, 8.47 for the Ravens), and in terms of the contemporary vibe check (three point underdogs last week, one point favourites this week).

The way things have transpired, even if I thought we may be able to afford a loss in this game a few weeks ago, I don’t think that’s the truth now. Our recent run of form has brought us back up to 6-6, but that’s still a full game out of the lead in the division, and a game and a half out of a wild card position, as due to the four NFC conference losses we’ve already taken, we’re going to have a hard time winning any tie break with the Seattle Seahawks, who currently occupy the final wild card position at 7-5.

We will likely win a tie break with the New York Giants if we get into one, as that will all but require a 5-1 NFC East record, but losing this game would drop us back to two games behind them, with three to play. Never say never, but that’s a bad spot to be in. Therefore, this game is just as must-win as all the others. We’ve just not gotten any help from anybody, so we have to keep controlling our own destiny the best we can.

However, as this game against Baltimore will teach us, there’s only so much of one’s own destiny that they can control.

Our first two plays strike like lightning bolts, getting us all the way to the Baltimore 30 before even one minute has passed. We take five full minutes to score from there, as there’s far too much Alfred Morris for my tastes, but when we finally allow Robert to air the ball out, we do punch the ball into the end zone for a quick 7-0 lead. The Ravens respond in kind, making the score 7-7, but we once again punch back, with Robert accounting for 81 of the 83 yards needed to get from our own 17 yard line into the end zone, doing it in just four minutes. It looks so easy, and we’ve built another solid first quarter advantage, but you and I have watched this movie before, and the ending does not change this time either.

Once again, for what feels like the eighth time this year, after looking stellar in the first quarter, our offence goes entirely silent, only the reason is different this time. Most of the time, it’s been the rookie QB inconsistency that’s caused our offence to be a bit wishy washy in most games this year. This time, it’s a bad Alfred Morris game that’s killing us. Robert is doing his best to carry the team, and got it done on each of the first two drives, but he’s not equipped to do it over and over again. He is still a rookie after all. This team is just not built to withstand bad Alfred Morris games.

As a result, our offence gets just seven first downs, and scores just six points, both FGs more a result of Baltimore turnovers than anything our offence did, between those electric first two drives and the time we get the ball facing an eight point deficit with just four and a half minutes remaining in the game. In the interceding 40 minutes of game time, the score has gone from 14-7 in our favour to 28-20 in favour of Baltimore, and there’s just been nothing that our offence has been able to do about it. RG3 has tried, with a 51 percent personal success rate so far, but this team cannot deal with a -0.23 EPA/Play rushing offence.

Our estimated WP has dropped all the way to 12 percent. We do have one more chance, behind by eight points with 4:39 to go, but everyone can feel the season slipping away. 2012 is one of the worst Baltimore defences you will ever run into, but even in that case, would you want to put a rookie into a gotta have it situation against the Baltimore Ravens? Never in a million years would you want your season hanging on this outcome, but that’s the situation we find ourselves in now, and the consequences are both miraculous and disastrous.

The start of this drive is a little rocky, with an Alfred Morris touch that goes nowhere, a four yard read option that sees Robert getting obliterated as he goes out of bounds, a hit that absolutely would’ve been a 15 yard penalty in the modern game, but goes unpenalized in 2012, and then a hook route to Leonard Hankerson on third and six that gets to the sticks and not one inch further. A first down is better than nothing, but this sequence uses up a minute and a half to go just ten yards. This is much too slow, and our WP falls below ten percent as a result.

We use a further full minute to go 11 yards on our next set of downs, leaving us at the two minute warning facing first and ten on our own 36. This didn’t have to be a two minute drill, but with how slow we’ve started, it’s become one, and on this first down play, Robert cannot get rid of the ball, getting sacked at the worst imaginable time, dropping us to second and 19 from our own 27.

For how elite our man has been all season, this is the one issue that he’s never been able to improve. His pocket presence is shaky on good days, and verging on untenable on bad ones, and this is before the infamous second and 19 play that I’m about to discuss. He will get sacked a lot trying to make things happen. It’s a common rookie problem, but there are times like this, where it really hurts.

This leaves us in second and 19, on our own 26, with two minutes to go. The season is on the line, and a touchdown is our only option to keep it alive. This perhaps explains the actions of the young QB, who has a defender in his face before he can even finish his drop. His only option is to escape outside and rush, which he does, but what happens at the beginning of this play is not staggering. It’s what happens at the end, where Robert elects to dive headfirst and get crushed by Haloti Ngata, instead of simply sliding feet first, that causes people in Washington to wonder what might have been.

On the hit, Robert’s knee goes out, and he cannot get up. His teammates commit the cardinal sin of pulling him to his feet anyway, but he cannot walk, and immediately collapses again. He tries to get up and go back to the huddle, but it’s taken too long, and officials call injury timeout. This crucial third and six snap is going to have to be taken by backup QB Kirk Cousins, and at this point, the stories of events in the crucial next minute diverge.

According to Mike Shanahan and the Washington Redskins organisation, Robert is given the okay by world renowned Dr. James Andrews (on the Washington sideline as the team doctor for this game) to go back in. Dr. Andrews categorically denies ever even being the chance to look at Robert, and the television broadcast of this game reveals exactly which side of this story you should believe.

If you watch this clip, the man in the Redskins toque, Redskins tie, and trench coat waiting front and centre to meet Robert as he leaves the field is Dr. James Andrews. You can see for yourself the events happen, in this order.

1. RG3 tells his coach that he’s good to go back in the game.

2. Robert and James have a brief exchange. It’s he said-he said as to exactly what is said here, but the tone of the conversation is revealed by each man’s actions in the immediate aftermath.

3. James turns to follow Robert, as if we’re going to do a closer examination on the bench, but…

4. Robert speed walks as fast as he can with what turns out to be a partially torn LCL in the opposite direction, and goes immediately back into the game.

In the mean time, Kirk Cousins has converted one of the most crucial third downs of the season, but it’s almost an afterthought compared to the soap opera happening on the Washington sideline. It’s tough to decide what to believe in a lot of the narrative surrounding RG3’s 2012, but you can believe this. Robert Griffin III cleared himself to come back into this game. He did not allow the team doctor to look at his knee first, and nobody forced him to allow the team doctor to look at it.

I don’t care what Mike Shanahan said, he absolutely did not get an all clear from Dr. James Andrews, because James Andrews goes on record in the years ahead, calling this very game one of the most nerve wracking experiences of his life as a sports surgeon.

This is the moment where the handling of this young superstar QB begins to be seriously questioned. If you’d like, you can bring up a personal agency argument. Yes, Robert should have allowed a doctor to look at his knee. This is supposition on my part, but as a man who’s torn an ACL before, I suspect Robert knows what a torn knee ligament feels like, and knows that if he gets a doctor’s opinion, he would not be allowed to return to the most important drive the Washington Redskins franchise has seen in half a decade. That would provide a credible reason he would not let the team doctor anywhere near him.

However, this is still the team’s fault. It’s Mike Shanahan’s fault. It’s the training staff’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault. Somebody has to be the adult on this sideline, and save this brash young football player from himself, but nobody does. More important than his long term health is to have our 0.235 EPA/Play QB back for this crucial drive, I suppose. RG3 takes just one play to recover from a partially torn LCL, and goes right back in the game.

Unbelievably, he looks fantastic.

On his first play back, he finds a wide open Santana Moss over the middle for a 14 yard catch and run, and on his third, he decides to test Ed Reed. Not something many have done in a key situation and lived to tell the tale, but in this case we get away with it. It’s a 22 yard completion to Pierre Garcon, and all of a sudden we’re in the red zone.

The bad part is that over these three plays, Robert has looked like Philip Rivers in the 2007 AFC Championship. He’s looked like Tom Brady at any time after he blew his knee up in 2008. He can step into a throw, but that’s the only step he can take. He is finishing his drops and standing stock still as he looks for open men. To his credit, he’s finding those open men, but on first and ten from the 16, at last we come to our senses.

The first down snap is bobbled, and instead of taking off running (like he would normally do), Robert winds up and throws the ball into the fifth row. It’s the most obvious intentional grounding penalty in the world, and Robert collapses again. This time, James Andrews walks out to meet Robert on the field, and does not leave his side until he is laying on the table for analysis. There will be no duping him a second time.

This leaves one of the most iconic and clutch moments in the history of the Washington Redskins in the hands of fourth round rookie backup QB Kirk Cousins, who unbelievably overcomes Robert’s second and 20 from the penalty, gets us into the end zone, converts the two point try, and wins the game in overtime. This win moves us to 7-6, and keeps our season alive, but what a disaster.

Robert will have to sit out one week. Thankfully, it’s against Cleveland. We actually go on the road to face the Browns as four point road underdogs with a fourth round rookie QB in there, but we know with hindsight that Kirk Cousins is not the typical fourth round QB. We blow them out by 17 points with Kirk at the helm, 38-21, but in the locker room after the game, something odd happens.

Dan Snyder comes into the locker room after the game, and heads over to the QB lockers. People believe he’s going to congratulate Kirk Cousins, and thank him for coming off the bench and so convincingly winning a football game that we desperately needed to win, but in one of the most bizarre intentional showings of disrespect that has ever reached my ears, he instead holds a private discussion with Robert Griffin III, backs turned to Kirk Cousins.

Way to make the man of the hour feel like a complete afterthought, and this did not go unnoticed by anybody. This kind of thing had been going on for months. From the time he pulled the string to get Robert instead of Peyton Manning in the building, Dan has been doing nothing but empowering the young man, encouraging him to feel bigger than his team, and bigger than his teammates.

Dan has sent his personal security to accompany Robert out into DC. He’s decreed that RG3’s fiancée be allowed into places that even players’ wives are not allowed to be present. At every step of the way, Dan Snyder has very much treated this like a solo act. RG3 is not a natural Roger Waters figure. He’s always preferred being part of a team, but he’s also an impressionable young man, and if you tell a 22 year old man enough times that he’s bigger and more important than everybody else, he will begin to believe you.

This disgusts head coach Mike Shanahan, who has seen winning football before, and knows that this is not it. The Redskins are winning right now, because our talent is immense, including the QB who is getting more and more big headed by the day, but Mike knows this will not continue. In the wake of this Kirk Cousins locker room snub incident, he internally quits his job as coach of the Redskins.

He does not tell anybody, but he does not want to be part of this anymore. A QB that he did not want to begin with being perpetually coddled and told that he is the franchise is not what he’s in this for. Mike would rather retire than be a part of it. He will go through the end of the season, but it would be a stretch to say Mike’s heart is still in it from here.

This is what we’re stuck with then. A rookie QB, with a partially torn LCL, a head coach who did not want that rookie QB, and an owner who wanted that rookie QB so much that he was willing to deliberately throw away Peyton Manning plus three high round draft picks in order to get him, whose blatant favouritism has caused that head coach to quit on his own team, and this new carefree head coach is likely a key cause of a lot of what comes next.

The Redskins put the hurry up on the RG3 injury timeline, rushing him back in just two weeks’ time. This does not seem entirely out of the ordinary, as the injury was only reported as an LCL sprain. It would not come out until later that it was actually a mild LCL tear Robert suffered, which is actually the second time that the Skins get caught lying about Robert’s injuries just in 2012.

Remember the helmet to the head Robert took against Atlanta, and how I said we could be grateful that he wasn’t concussed?

I lied to you, just like the Washington Redskins lied to us all. Robert was concussed that day. The NFL would later uncover this information, and slap the Redskins with a hefty fine for lying on the injury report, a big no-no in this league, but that’s not the point. What about the long term health of the player? With the benefit of this new information, there’s no way Robert should have been playing in week six against Minnesota either, likely playing through a concussion, and once the season ends, it will come to light that Robert has torn meniscus in his knee, to go along with everything else, that he suffered God knows when.

This is just the lying on the injury report that we know about. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether there is anything else going on here.

Nevertheless, despite all this nonsense, we have crawled all the way back. With our fifth consecutive win on the road in Cleveland, we have climbed all the way to an 8-6 record, and into a three way tie for the NFC East lead, with both the Giants and Cowboys. Our final two games are both divisional, which means we control our own destiny to a 5-1 division record, which would give us the win in any tie break, two or three way, which means we are officially back in the driver’s seat again, for basically the first time since the electric win over New Orleans all the way back in week one.

Controlling your destiny means nothing unless you can win the games. We take care of our second game against 3.87 Expected Win Philadelphia in week 16 easily enough, which leaves us with one final game between us and being all the way back. We have to go at it one more time with Tony Romo, Dez Bryant, Jason Witten, Miles Austin, and the Dallas Cowboys, in a win and in playoff game for both sides.

9-7 will not be anywhere near a wild card spot in the loaded 2012 NFC, so the message is clear to all. You must win, or you will go home. Remember what happened last time against Dallas. We came uncomfortably close to blowing a 28-3 lead, in a game that would’ve ended our season had we lost it. This time, we come into the game as favourites over the Cowboys, but I wonder if we still would’ve been favourites if the public knew that our QB was playing with a partially torn LCL plus some torn meniscus in his knee, instead of the reported ‘mild LCL strain.’

For everything that everyone can say about whether or not RG3 should’ve been playing in this Dallas game, what I can say is that he looks like himself. Granted, he looks like himself playing quite badly, so I’m not saying the knee isn’t hindering him, but he does not look like an entirely different person, like he did in those four post-injury snaps in the Baltimore game.

There are snaps in the pistol. There are read options. There are designed runs. It’s not as fluent or solid as normal, but it is the Redskins. I’m not trying to defend putting the fast track on his recovery like the team did, but I do feel they get just a little bit too much scrutiny, because playing the most important game of the year for the seventh week in a row, his knee is at least healthy enough to where Robert looks like Robert.

Paradoxically, following a bad looking knee injury and some would say botched rehab process, Robert becomes much more reliant on his skills as a runner, because in this Dallas game, he desperately struggles to complete passes. He does not complete a pass to somebody other than RB Alfred Morris until 12 minutes into the game, and does not complete a pass to a WR until later than that.

For a man with a CPOE better than five on the year so far, this erratic passing accuracy is extremely out of character, and a dead giveaway that he is far below 100 percent. When I said Robert looks like Robert, I strictly meant in terms of playstyle. In terms of quality of play, it’s not the same guy. He’s trying the same types of throws he always tries, but a lot more of them are hitting the ground.

Both teams are walking in quicksand until Dallas finally opens the scoring with eight minutes left in the second quarter, taking a 7-0 lead. On our ensuing drive, we drop back to pass twice. Robert can complete only one, but with designed runs for him, in conjunction with plenty of designed runs for Alfred Morris, we’re able to score a TD in response, tying the game at seven with the benefit of just one completed pass. This drive does leave time for a Tony Romo two minute drill, but he fails, so we go into the break following an extraordinarily dull first half tied at seven.

Of all phrases I thought I would use to describe Robert Griffin III, I never thought ‘extraordinarily dull’ would make it into the article, but there’s nothing here. He can’t complete a pass. It’s as simple as that. He’s still in the positives in terms of EPA/Play in the first half, because RG3 on designed or undesigned runs is very intimidating, but the knee injury has taken his patented passing accuracy away.

Injuries affect players in unique ways. You would think that a debilitating knee injury would sap Robert’s skills as a rusher, not a passer, but that is not how the effects are manifesting on the football field. This reminds me a lot of Brian Griese, who in 2000 separated his shoulder, and after that point was never able to avoid a sack again, which ruined his promising career. You would not think a separated shoulder would impact that skill, just like you’d think a partial tear of the LCL would not impact passing accuracy to this extent, but that is how the effects of this particular injury are manifesting.

Just like in the first half, it takes Robert ten full minutes into this half to complete a pass, but it is a nice one to an open Pierre Garcon for 18 yards down the middle. The play after that is a nifty 13 yard RPO pass to Pierre again, and the following play is a read option that sees Robert walk into the end zone for a touchdown.

This sequence of plays is beautiful for demonstrating the difference between looking hobbled and being hobbled. Robert looks hobbled as a runner, with a very obvious limp, but he’s truly hobbled as a passer, where he struggles immensely with his plant leg. Nevertheless, the player as a whole, even with his injuries, is still able to provide solid value to his team, even when obviously so far below 100 percent.

The Cowboys narrow the score to 14-10 as the fourth quarter begins, and we go right back to killing them on the ground. The drive begins with a one yard rush for Alfred Morris, but on second and nine we go read option again, and Robert limps his way to a 17 yard gain. He’s still not trusted to do what he used to be able to do through the air, but anybody can throw checkdowns to Santana Moss and Pierre Garcon, which Robert does for 11 and 13 yards, respectively, before Alfred handles the rest. We score another TD to move the score to 21-10, and for all intents and purposes, this division is ours from here.

By the time this game ends, we have won the total EPA battle by 16.12 points, and won the football game by the comparatively narrow margin of 28-18. As has been our hallmark all season, we underperform the talent gap between the two teams, but as has been our hallmark in this second half surge, we win the game anyways.

For one final time, I want to emphasize that the Skins looked like the Skins in this game. The Skins with a conspicuously bad passing attack, but ourselves nonetheless. Revisionists like to look at Robert Griffin III after the Baltimore game, but before the playoff game, like a dead man walking, and while his passing accuracy is completely gone, nothing is stopping him from generating 6.1 total EPA on the ground to supplement the rather lame 0.9 total EPA through the air.

In total, this contribution (seven total EPA in just 26 total touches) makes him a 0.27 EPA/Play player, in a win and in playoff game for the NFC East, as a rookie. There’s no other word to use to describe a performance with those numbers other than fantastic. You can argue for his long term health whether he should’ve been out there or not, but you cannot argue that, as a football player, he deserved to be playing.

If you can generate 0.27 EPA/Play in a win and in playoff game, you’re obviously good enough to get it done, and deserve to be playing in a football sense. It’s as simple as that. This is week 17 of the season, well past the point where people consistently argue he should’ve been benched for good, and Robert is still good enough not just to play like himself, but to have a pretty good game while he was at it, in spite of the fact that he completed just 50 percent of his passes. He had just 100 yards passing, but none of that matters, because he played well anyway.

Robert’s personal success rate in this game was 54 percent. His EPA/Play was 0.27. This was not a bad football game, and Robert Griffin III after the first LCL injury is not a bad football player. You do not have the right to pretend either of these things are not true.

With hindsight, perhaps it’s to his own detriment that Robert is still producing so well, in spite of his injuries. If only he had stunk up the show, perhaps it could’ve prevented what’s coming next.

The problem is that nobody is thinking about that now. People in the moment are far from wondering about whether or not Robert should be playing. Most are caught in the euphoria from the fact that we have completed our seemingly impossible quest, from 3-6 at our bye to the playoffs. We’ve done it despite naked favouritism from the owner. We’ve done it despite a growing locker room rift as a result of that favouritism. We’ve done it despite a coach who’s quit on us because of that favouritism, and Robert personally has done it despite coming back way too soon from what could’ve been a six week injury under different circumstances.

Our reward for completing the impossible quest is a 100 mph trip head-on into a brick wall.

Of all the things we need right at this moment, a matchup against the Legion of Boom in their prime in a playoff environment is actually not as bad as it sounds. Nobody knows yet what these Seahawks are going to become, but everybody knows that this is a top ten defence in 2012, and one that excels at stopping the pass, but there’s our angle.

That’s how we can win this game.

With RG3 in his current state, we were always going to suck at passing the ball anyways. This makes the Legion of Boom’s elite abilities to stop the pass feel almost surplus to requirements, when our pass game got completely shut down last week by Dallas’s nondescript defence. This means we get to completely focus on the Legion of Boom’s much weaker half.

Seattle is just the league’s 17th ranked rushing defence in 2012, and if we are going to win this playoff game, we must exploit that. If we do not find a way to exploit this weakness, we will lose and lose badly. Everybody knows it, which is why the Seahawks are favourites coming into our home field, but this is a Washington team that knows too well about being a home underdog. We’ve been home underdogs in half of our home games this year. One more time is not going to intimidate us.

With all we’ve been through fighting against ourselves, nothing can intimidate us.

At the beginning of this game, everything looks glorious. On our first drive, we see no third downs, making the Legion of Boom look like Swiss cheese as we dice them up, walking down the field for a quick 7-0 lead, and when they go three and out on the other side, we do it to them again.

The second time is much less easy than the first, but with 25 yards passing from Robert, nine well placed yards rushing from Robert, and 15 yards rushing from Alfred Morris, we’re able to get into the end zone again for a 14-0 lead, and people are throwing their babies in the air in Washington.

When you’re winning, there’s nothing more fun than being the underdog. +3 spread at home for what? It certainly seems to me like we’re not going to need three extra points to beat the Seahawks. At its highest, our estimated WP reaches 76 percent. It truly looks like we’re going to wash the Legion of Boom out of our stadium, and move on to play the Atlanta Falcons in round two. We got within seven points of that team in week five, and that was with a concussed RG3. You never know how things might go there.

But as it turns out, for the 2012 Redskins in general or RG3 in specific, it will never get better than this.

This first quarter was always too good to be true. For such a wildly erratic QB as RG3 has become through the air to complete six of nine first quarter passes against the Legion of Boom does not feel sustainable, either in the moment or looking back on it to write this article. It wouldn’t have felt unsustainable last month, but it feels unsustainable now, and this feeling ultimately turns out to be correct.

RG3 does not complete another pass until the second half, and while we do begin that half with a 14-13 lead, and even begin the fourth quarter with that same lead, Robert has been taking a horrendous beating through this entire game. There are talks about bringing Kirk Cousins into the game, but RG3 begs his coach to let him keep continuing.

A coach with the proper incentives would’ve likely said no to this request. The health of RG3 is more important than one playoff game, but Mike Shanahan does not have the proper incentives to be the man to make this decision. He has already quit this job. He cares none for the long term future of the Washington Redskins, so he says okay, and the true colours of what this offence is now have finally come out. By the time the Seahawks finally take our lead away, at 7:20 of the fourth quarter, Robert has completed four passes for 16 yards total since those two electric first half drives.

He’s trying. He’s trying his heart out, but it’s becoming clear that, even with all he’s done for us this year, this is not a mountain he’s going to be able to climb. He’s been limping all day long, and the simple matter is that, while still an effective runner, he cannot complete a pass. He cannot throw the ball accurately, because he cannot properly plant or follow through on his right leg. This has left us playing college offence most of the game, which against the Legion of Boom just doesn’t work. Nevertheless, he resolves to go out there one more time, with seven minutes left in the fourth quarter, to try to save our season one final time.

We know what’s coming on this drive, but I need to pause just one more time to reflect on how we’ve gotten to this point.

There are plenty of forces that could’ve stopped this. If we hadn’t pressured Robert to come back from the first LCL injury so quickly, he may not be playing this game at all. If we had a coach who did not plan on this being his final game coaching the Skins, Robert likely would’ve been out of this game by now. If we did not have Daniel Snyder as owner, Mike Shanahan could’ve been that coach, and if all of this was happening in a city that wasn’t Washington, famous for having the worst turf in the NFL, perhaps Robert could’ve never injured his knee in the first place. If any of these factors had gone another way, everything could’ve changed, but this is the real timeline, and it leads us to this moment.

On first and ten, Robert holds the ball way too long, hoping for something to happen that truthfully never had a chance of happening. Common rookie mistake, but badly timed. It leaves us at second and 22, where the career of Robert Griffin III will change forever.

The snap does not get up high enough. It gets past Robert, and when he plants his right leg to turn to go get the ball, he finds there’s nothing underneath him. He hears the all too familiar sound of a broomstick snapping, and collapses to the turf, motionless.

In the aftermath of this game, Washington will report this as the partial LCL tear that he suffered in the Baltimore game, but we know differently. On this play, Robert Griffin III completely tears both his LCL and ACL.

What a way for His Year to end.

It’s a shame for Robert that things had to end this way, not just because of what it does to his future career prospects. I’ll get to that in a second, but this knee stuff also does a good job burying what he did even in 2012, because nobody wants to talk about the elite football player.

Everybody wants to talk about the final four weeks, but nobody wants to talk about the circumstances. Nobody wants to talk about how this Washington team was intent to underplay their talent level, as we did as well as our EPA performance expected us to do just twice in an entire season. Nobody wants to talk about how this rookie QB was staring down the gauntlet of having to win each of his next seven games to make the playoffs, and responded with 0.319 EPA/Play, and 6.1 CPOE in those games, two of which (plus four plays) were played with a partially torn LCL.

Adding this remarkable stretch onto his first nine starts (which were not shabby in their own right) puts Robert Griffin III at 0.238 EPA/Play (third amongst QBs with at least 180 plays in 2012), 4.1 CPOE (7th), and 7.47 ANY/A (4th). His 0.216 xEPA/Play in this season ranks him first all time amongst rookies, giving this an argument for the greatest rookie season of all time, whilst also indicating that this level of performance was going to be repeatable into the years ahead. It was not just a wild string of results that was never going to happen twice, but we never got the chance to see if Robert was going to be able to repeat these results, because in the final play of His Year, he tore the LCL and ACL ligaments completely off his right knee, and entered the offseason requiring total knee reconstruction.

This is where most people choose to end the story, drawing a direct line from the knee reconstruction into the poor player Robert would be for the remainder of his career, but I’m not comfortable with that. There is more to the story. In actuality, Robert Griffin III’s Year is not over yet. This saga continues throughout the 2013 offseason.

Many believe that these LCL and ACL tears alone ended Robert’s career as a productive NFL player, but I’m not sure I can agree with that, because I have the unique perspective of having a nearly finished book written about the NFL career of Trent Green, a man who completely wrecked his right knee, just like Robert did. Trent was able to come back and be a top five QB in the league still, even after a horrifying knee injury (worse than Robert’s) that should’ve ended his career, meanwhile Robert was not. Why is this?

I believe the day Robert’s tenure as a productive NFL player ended was not the Seattle playoff game. It’s actually roughly a month later, on February 5, 2013. Mike Shanahan, in the wake of Robert’s injuries, had awkwardly changed his mind about staying with the Skins, weary about the impact leaving the team on such terms would have on his legacy as a coach, so on this date, the young QB demands a meeting with the coach who is suddenly staying, and the contents of that meeting are this.

Robert is completely out of character, demanding that he be given more of a voice in the team, and begins dictating to Mike Shanahan what kinds of plays the offence is going to run and isn’t going to run.

By the way, the version I’m retelling to you of this meeting is entirely Mike Shanahan’s account. There is much he said-he said about this meeting also, but it’s only in the way Mike tells it that this story makes any sense. In his retelling, all he’s trying to get across to Robert is that he does not need to reinvent the wheel, that he need not become a West Coast QB to avoid getting reinjured. He did take a brutal beating in 2012, but all he needs to do is get that little bit faster in deciding when to slide, deciding when to throw the ball away, and the hits will take care of themselves.

I believe Mike’s version of events, because it’s exactly what I would’ve said if I were Mike Shanahan, and it’s exactly what Mike Shanahan would say in this situation.

For all the convincing Mike tries to do that Robert does not need to fundamentally change playstyles, it’s no use, as Mike knows in his heart that he’s talking to a brick wall anyways. These demands are coming through the mouth of Robert Griffin III, but they are not truly coming from Robert. They’re coming from Dan Snyder, who’s wanted Robert in a standard, drop back pass offence this entire time.

However, over the course of spending hours and days and weeks and years of my life devoting myself to the study of patterns in football games, I have come to the realisation that there is almost nothing worse you can do for a QB career than stick a player who does not belong in a West Coast offence into a West Coast offence. The Redskins’ offence in 2012 generally follows West Coast principles, but it is not a true West Coast offence, because RG3 cannot operate one. What Robert is demanding is to move to a much more pure West Coast formulation. One that he is without the tools to operate.

There is no worse career move that could’ve been made.

We have studied this pattern in detail with Trent Green, but there are other examples. Look at the careers of a lot of QBs. Oftentimes you will see one or two unexplainable off years. If there are no injury concerns, it’s a solid bet those years will be explained by trying to jam a player unsuited for a West Coast offence into one. There are players built to play in the West Coast (Ken Anderson, Joe Montana in the old game, Tua Tagovailoa, Dak Prescott in the new game), and there are players who are not (Ken Stabler, Roger Staubach in the old game, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson in the new game).

If you jam Lamar Jackson into a West Coast offence, he will be either a negative EPA/Play player or close to it. In this I am very confident, but this is what RG3 demands of Mike Shanahan in the 2013 offseason. He demands to be that guy jammed into a pure West Coast offence.

There must be a small part of him that knows this is career suicide, that knows the simple reality that he cannot see things fast enough to play in the West Coast, that knows jamming any shape of peg except an exactly round one into the round-shaped West Coast offence hole tends to end in disasters of epic proportions, but he demands it anyway, because this good kid from Texas has been corrupted by the influence of Dan Snyder.

In my opinion, it’s not the knee injuries that end RG3 as we know him. It’s this demand.

There are plenty of players who went down with gruesome knee injuries, and got up just as good or better than before. I already mentioned Trent Green, but there is also Carson Palmer, Philip Rivers, Tom Brady, Kyler Murray, and more, all just in the modern game. Most players in the modern game of the level such that they can finish third in the NFL in EPA/Play (which Robert did in 2012) get up to play elite football again. Only Robert did not. None of these guys went down with injury and got up with a post-injury career sk%+ of 69. Only Robert Griffin III did, which tells me that it cannot just be the knee injuries that ended his time as a productive player.

It’s only my opinion, but stubbornly insisting that he spend his whole career after 2012 as a square shaped peg in a round shaped hole hurt him just as much as any knee injury did, and from this point forward, he found himself stuck with the reputation of being a prima donna who would dictate to the coach which offence he was going to run, and very quickly found himself a diva that nobody wanted.

Far from being the future of the franchise, even Dan Snyder would eventually give up on his golden boy, as the Redskins would not even pick up the fifth year option on the end of Robert’s rookie contract. When all is said and done, he has only four qualifying seasons in the NFL, the lowest number ever for a player who was able to soar to the heights Robert did (0.216 xEPA/Play in 2012).

In this sense, Robert Griffin III is the ultimate His Year example, in all of NFL history. He soared to heights that no rookie had ever soared before him, and it took everything to stop him. An uncommitted coach, a divided locker room, and an owner who would not have it any other way all combined to just put too much stress on this young man, in both body and mind.

Whether it’s the knee injuries that stopped him or the insistence on being a traditional drop back passer that stopped him, I’m convinced that the Redskins are to blame for this. If not for their bickering owner and coach, none of this would’ve had to happen, which leaves the door open to a very simple what if. What if the Skins had just signed Peyton Manning, and allowed Robert to go play for perhaps Buffalo, or perhaps some other team that could’ve gotten in on the bidding for the number two pick without Washington’s absurd overpay?

Robert had already torn his right ACL at Baylor. Was that knee a ticking time bomb, or could the trouble truly have been avoided in a place with less organisational strife? It’s hard to tell, and the reason it’s tough to tell is that Robert Griffin III was so effective at overcoming all this organisational turmoil. As I said at the very top, this 2012 season should have been absolutely horrendous, but it wasn’t. There’s no way all this stuff going on in the organisation failed to hinder Robert, but he finished third in the NFL in EPA/Play anyway.

I have my doubts as to whether there’s any other QB in NFL history who could’ve been more effective as a rookie on the 2012 Washington Redskins than Robert was. This was a situation tailor made to turn a promising QB prospect into a bust, and I suppose it did do that in the end, but not before we got Robert’s miraculous 2012 season out of it.

In a manner of speaking, I have to be glad Robert was drafted to Washington, because if it weren’t Washington, we would’ve never gotten this unforgettable story out of it. Perhaps he would’ve been a successful NFL QB for 15 years in Buffalo, remaining there as their starter as we speak, but perhaps his surgically repaired knee combined with his lack of skill for avoiding hits (even at his best) was a ticking time bomb after all.

We will never know the answers to these questions, so our only choice with regard to RG3 is to be glad we ever got to see him at all. It was only 15 starts in just one season, but in these 15 starts, Robert Griffin III burned memories into our heads that we’ll never forget.

I’ll know I’ll never forget 2012.

I’ll never forget Robert Griffin III’s Year

Thanks so much for reading.