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.
The thing I always think of with RG3 is if Cousins doesn’t step in to win that mid season game, then they don’t make the playoffs, he isn’t pressured into playing on a terrible field with a bad knee, doesn’t get injured and potentially his whole career is different
This is where I quibble just a little bit. It depends if Dan Snyder still gets spooked and mandates the shift to a more pure West Coast offence.
If Kirk Cousins cannot overcome the second and 20 that RG3 left him in, and the Skins lose that Baltimore game, it's true they don't make the playoffs, but Robert would still be left with small tears in his LCL and meniscus, in addition to already having torn the ACL in that same knee a few years beforehand. Would this have been enough to spook everybody into doing what they did in real life, or was that only because he ended up needing total knee reconstruction?
I actually tend to lean the other way. I'm not sure how much the knee injuries end up mattering in the end, because of I have a lot of faith in the West Coast offence to kill the career of a QB not suited to run it. What we have in the career of RG3 is two cooperating forces, both working in tandem to kill his career. We have a shift to an offence that was not a fit for him, and we have him tearing the ACL in the same knee twice, which is always harder to come back from than tearing it once.
I like the way you've phrased it Lee. Potentially, losing that Baltimore game could've changed everything, but I'm not convinced it would've changed anything. It all depends how insistent Dan Snyder planned to be in the 2013 offseason before the total knee reconstruction, and we don't know the answer to that. What I know for sure is that the knee injuries get way too much credit for ending things, and the demands made in the 2013 offseason do not get anywhere near enough. They're often brought up as part of the story, but to me, they're not just part of the story. They're the co-headliner.
Also, there's the possibility that even if he didn't get injured in 2012, his already surgically repaired right knee, combined with his bad habit of just taking hits instead of avoiding them or sliding, in conjunction with the horrendous Washington turf, was a time bomb anyways, just looking for a place to go off. If it didn't go off at the end of 2012, perhaps it was going to go off in the 2013 offseason, or at some point during the 2013 season proper on that awful turf. We would've gotten a bit more elite RG3 out of it, but in this circumstance, it wouldn't have substantially changed anything.
This is the problem with reflecting on RG3. You have to nest your what-ifs within each other, because his career was killed in two different, interacting, ways.
If to do accept my hypothetical (a big ‘If’. we both agree) and RG3 doesn’t have that playoff game, doesn’t get hurt and has 2 years plus as an effective starter, does that put Kirk in career backup bucket?
If it does, then that 20 minutes he played to win that game are arguably the most lucrative 20 minutes of sport ever played when you consider the contracts they led too
Remember, the Redskins were intent not to give Robert anybody as a backup that could even think about providing competition. This is how we end up with a QB room of two rookies in the first place, but Kirk had some mightily important people watching him in those practices. Shanahan, McVay, Jay Gruden, Bill Callahan etc.. Those were loaded Washington coaching staffs, and as those guys eventually all spread their wings and flew away from Washington, somebody was going to remember how good Kirk Cousins looked in their offence.
If something happened to RG3 before the ending of their perfectly aligned rookie contracts, Kirk was always going to be the guy to step in, and we know from real life that he was always going to make his chance count, being a better QB in Washington than Robert ever was in both 2015 and 2016 in real life, so basically, what I think it would require for Kirk to fall into the career backup slot is for either a) Washington to replace him as backup at some point down the line, which I don't think is realistic, or b) Have RG3 fall out for a very short stretch before 2016 and no longer, and have Kirk play very badly in those few games.
I think these things could've cost Kirk a real chance at the NFL, but in all honesty it's hard to bury a top five QB talent, which the Washington version of Kirk Cousins was. He went to Minnesota and never got it back, so people don't think of Kirk Cousins as a top five NFL QB anymore, but for those couple years in Washington, he was bona fide, so I don't think there's very much that could've held him down.
His chance was either coming in Washington when Robert faltered, like in real life, or when one of those coaches I mentioned before went off and became a head coach somewhere. One of them would've come back for him, because the stories are legendary of just how much better than RG3 Kirk was in practice from 2013 onwards, and RG3 after the injuries was a 0 EPA/Play guy. He was not unusable. He was just a diva no one wanted, and Kirk was so much better than him.
I hear you, but even in your scenario he isn’t in position to get the franchise tag contracts that the way it played out got him, so still made him a lot of money
You're right. He probably would've ended up with less total career earnings had RG3 held on for longer, but I still think he would've ended up with multiple extensions. He probably would've just found himself in the Sam Darnold-Geno Smith-Baker Mayfield bucket, where he has to take a discount on his first extension because of his reputation, or lack thereof.
I do like how you focused on the power struggles within the organisation
It was shameful that they used a rookie QB as a pawn in their pathetic power play games
You could be right on the knee, until the article I had either forgotten or never known about his college knee injury, that does change the calculus on my what if, you’re right
Power struggles ruin everything for everybody. This is true in real life as well as the NFL. I don't blame Mike Shanahan for this. He didn't put up as much of a bulwark against Dan's meddling as he could have, but if he hated being in Washington that much, I can't force him to have the team's best interests at heart. Dan Snyder on the other hand ruined everything. He should've mandated that the focus be on the future of Robert. Instead he did the opposite.
Yes, Robert did have a history of knee problems before he ever got to Washington. It's an often forgotten part of the story, because it's a key piece of evidence that it's not just the knee injuries that ruined everything. If it was, it would've happened at Baylor.
Dan Snyder was so awful, it’s why I love the Australian Rules Football structure of team ownership, where they are clubs, owned by the membership (season ticket holders) and the members get to vote for the board that runs the club and the board elects a President who then appoints an executive team to manage the club
Gives the fans, or season ticket holders at least, real power over how their club is run
I think you're in Australia if I remember, so maybe it's not that way over there, but North Americans have this weird cultural self-hatred going on, where we look at something great going on elsewhere, and simply handwave and say that will never work over here, and when you ask somebody why this is, the answer often comes down to 'we are different than them,' and considering the foreign systems are better than the North American ones in almost all cases, that translates quite closely to 'we're worse than them.'
Sports work in exactly this fashion. There is absolutely precedent that sports teams can be run as corporations, with the fans as the shareholders. It works, but Americans will throw their hands in the air and say that will never work in the North American context, because North American people are different (read: worse) than the non-North American people, who have no trouble implementing a system like this. The Green Bay Packers are operated in exactly this way, and their franchise has not exploded, so I'm not sure why more sports teams can't go for the corporation model.
The problem is cultural though. That's the point. It's not just in sports. It's everywhere. My hometown says they can't maintain the roads because it gets cold in the winters, but I've seen the roads in Norway, and they're great, so that excuse doesn't work for me, but when I bring this up at a meeting the response is generally 'we're different (read: worse) than Norway.'
I am a North American from Canada, and I am not this way, but you would be shocked on how many North Americans have this ingrained self-hatred within themselves, which is why we're willing to accept less than people everywhere else in the world is willing to accept. Once again, I am not, which is why I can speak in such a powerful voice on the internet without feeling self-conscious, but the majority are.
This manifests in sports too, with situations like the Washington Redskins, where people just have to wait for Dan Snyder to either die or sell, and then have it made clear just how much of a detriment he was with the success they're having now, immediately after he left. It's silly. The fans should've been able to do something about this, but with the American model, it just was not possible.
Yeah I do get frustrated at the ‘something that works everywhere else can’t work here’ thing
The Sydney Swans in the 80s went to a private ownership model, the owner was a Spiv, nearly killed the club in the early to mid 90s, but then they went back to a membership owned model and were arguably the team of the aughts, so it can be done
I will clarify though, our clubs aren’t corporations owned by shareholders, they’re non profit clubs owned by the membership, so there are no shareholders just stakeholders and the members (season ticket holders) have total power each year at the AGM to vote in or or the board. Now most members most years just buy their season ticket and support the club, very low voter turnout in elections is the norm, but if a club has a bad few years and the fans get angry, then they at least have a lever to use to change the leadership of the club, when these times happen then more people vote and change is forced on the club (even if that change is often forcing out one group of blazer wearing ex players & their corporate mates and replacing them with a different group of blazer wearing ex-players with different corporate mates)
Now the presidents who come into replace are very often businessmen who run on a promise to pour their own money into the club but it doesn’t matter how much money they put in, they don’t get any ownership stake, it’s just a status thing for them, like nobody knows who the guy is who owns ABC Widget company in Geelong, but everyone knows who is the President of the Geelong Football Club and that is what they get for their money, they don’t get to actually own the club in any way, the members are always the owners
Jim Everett led more top-10 passing offenses than John Elway. That stat is worth memorizing and plastering everywhere. It might be even better than David Garrard's career CPOE being higher than Tom Brady's.
There is a slight typo here. It's fixed now. What I meant was top twelve (theoretically playoff calibre) passing offences. In terms of top ten finishes, they're actually tied with five apiece. Jim has 1988, 89, 90, 91, 94. John has 1987, 1993, 95, 97, 98, but when you expand the parameters to twelve, Jim gets to add his team's 11th place finishes in both 1992 and 1995, while John gets to add one lowly twelfth place finish in 1996.
The funny thing about this is that Jim's passing offences also have an argument against John's in terms of peak performance. When we restrict things to just top five finishes, Jim has 1998, 1989, 1994, while John has 1987, 1997, 1998, and Jim's passing offences never had the benefit of Terrell Davis like John's did. These rankings are in terms of Net Yards per Attempt (my favourite old school passing stat), and Jim was in the top five while also having some of the most touches in the entire NFL. This is how Jim ends up number one on my 1989 results tier list over the top of 1989 Joe Montana.
None of this is even taking into account that John Elway qualified in six more seasons than Jim Everett did, so if we do things by percentages, Jim's lead gets even wider. Basically, the only difference between these two is that all the years John spent being a mediocre QB, mostly in the 1980s, Jim just didn't play. Is this enough of a difference to make one man a Hall of Famer, and one man an afterthought?
I'm shocked, shocked(!) to read that Dan Snyder was so much to blame for what happened to RG3. Oh wait, no I'm not. Every NFL owner should study Dan Snyder's time as the Redskins owner, so that they can know exactly what he would have done in any situation and then do the exact opposite.
It's a shame that Robert had to become the object of Dan's fascination. I didn't have time to go into it here, but it would become clear as early as 2013 that Kirk Cousins was the best QB on the roster. Dan Snyder insisted on Robert though, and this ended up hurting RG3's reputation a lot, even though it wasn't really his fault.
It's a typical story of a young man falling under the influence of some powerful people that did not necessarily have his best interests in mind. In this way, an imperfect analogy would be to say RG3 is like the football version of Mike Tyson, coerced into acting like people they were not for the entirety of their active careers, and with styles in their respective sports so warped from their original high heights that they became unrecognizable rather quickly.
Comparing Dan Snyder to Don King is a compliment to Dan, because at least Don was successful at what he did. All Dan Snyder did was distort and destroy the best thing his team had ever gotten its hands on, molding a good Texas boy in RG3 into a self absorbed prima donna, a mindset that it took a while for Robert to get out of. As far as I can tell, he's out of it now, and I'm happy for him as it relates to that. I'm just sad he couldn't have resisted Dan's incursions the first time around. If he could've just been the golden boy of the Shanahan offence for years and years and years, the sky would've been the limit for him, but it just wasn't meant to be.
I agree. I mean some good did come from it (Peyton ending up in Denver obviously), but it would have been fun to see RG3 if he had played with an honest organization that cared about his long term career and not just winning right away.
Indeed, but we must also take into account that no Washington means no Shanahan offence. This may mean Robert has a more long and storied football career, but in all likelihood, we would have to trade that for the best rookie xEPA/Play of all time. I'm not saying Robert wouldn't be willing to do that. He absolutely would, but as a neutral fan of a team in the other conference, this season was crazy. Crazy in a good way for me. I'm not sure I'd trade it for anything.
Kyle Shanahan and his staff including many future head coaches created the perfect scheme for RG3. Pistol option zone run and play action off it. Redskins Vs Ravens, Rams, Falcons, Bengals are some of my favorites. I never remember the outcomes. Won some, lost some.
I agree with you. These games were so fun to go back and watch in research for this piece. The weird thing about it is that the Redskins were dominant in a lot of these games, but kept finding ways to let them fall within one possession, or sometimes lose outright. That could be a rookie QB problem. It could be something else, but regardless, it made for an extremely fun season, where you never knew what was going to happen.
What unleashed RG3 was the Shanahan system of outside zone running and play action off it. But in Pistol, and optioning off the defensive end. If he went for the RB RG3 kept it and ran for 20. Or more! Once they saw that they'd stay put to prevent RG3 from running outside. So he does a Give read and lets the RB. 6th round rookie Alfred Morris get the ball. With the D end out of the play, 5OL and 1TE are blocking only 3 DL and climbing to take on 2 LBs and a box safety. Or theres a FB or 2nd TE to block 3 LBs. Defenses could never put 2 deep safeties, always had to commit 7-8 man boxes and so play action was deadly with RG3 having arm talent and accuracy. It's beautiful! Its what Kyle envisioned with Trey Lance, what I was hoping to see again.
The 2023 Ravens do it a little. But Lamar is such a good passer can read defenses they get big plays regardless and in 2024 Derrick Henry caused enough fear to get the same numbers advantages.
You're exactly right. It's basically a bunch of bells and whistles to set up a killer play action pass attack, and RG3 was such an effective runner that you basically had to let Washington do exactly what they wanted. This is how Alfred Morris can have 1613 yards in a season with just 123 RYOE in the whole year. I don't mean to put the man down, but he's not exactly Adrian Peterson (who rushed for 392.4 RYOE in his legendary 2012 season). If Alfred Morris could've overachieved his blocking by that amount, he would've been a 2000 yard guy himself. By the way, RG3 had over 100 RYOE in his limited sample of carries, so it's not a contest who the most effective runner on this team was.
A lot of Alfred's runs were just not that difficult, for exactly the reasons you set forth here. He generally got what was blocked for him, and just a little bit more. This is not like Adrian Peterson or CJ Spiller, who were getting what were blocked for them, plus an extra full yard, every time they touched the ball, but it was good enough when your offensive line and scheme blocked you up for almost 1500 yards. However, when RG3's knee went out on him, and he could no longer throw the ball accurately, it all fell apart.
It's the same reason this idea did not work with Trey Lance. Above all else, this offence requires a QB with more accuracy than you would expect it to require, because if not, the trade is no longer a trade. The defence simply says 'please pass,' and forces you to do just that. There are windows in the play action pass game with an offence like this, but with the receiving talent of the 2012 Washington Redskins (zero top 40 receivers), those windows are not huge, even when it's strictly one on one. You need a guy who can sling it in there. RG3 was that guy, and then all of a sudden he was not that guy.
The thing I always think of with RG3 is if Cousins doesn’t step in to win that mid season game, then they don’t make the playoffs, he isn’t pressured into playing on a terrible field with a bad knee, doesn’t get injured and potentially his whole career is different
This is where I quibble just a little bit. It depends if Dan Snyder still gets spooked and mandates the shift to a more pure West Coast offence.
If Kirk Cousins cannot overcome the second and 20 that RG3 left him in, and the Skins lose that Baltimore game, it's true they don't make the playoffs, but Robert would still be left with small tears in his LCL and meniscus, in addition to already having torn the ACL in that same knee a few years beforehand. Would this have been enough to spook everybody into doing what they did in real life, or was that only because he ended up needing total knee reconstruction?
I actually tend to lean the other way. I'm not sure how much the knee injuries end up mattering in the end, because of I have a lot of faith in the West Coast offence to kill the career of a QB not suited to run it. What we have in the career of RG3 is two cooperating forces, both working in tandem to kill his career. We have a shift to an offence that was not a fit for him, and we have him tearing the ACL in the same knee twice, which is always harder to come back from than tearing it once.
I like the way you've phrased it Lee. Potentially, losing that Baltimore game could've changed everything, but I'm not convinced it would've changed anything. It all depends how insistent Dan Snyder planned to be in the 2013 offseason before the total knee reconstruction, and we don't know the answer to that. What I know for sure is that the knee injuries get way too much credit for ending things, and the demands made in the 2013 offseason do not get anywhere near enough. They're often brought up as part of the story, but to me, they're not just part of the story. They're the co-headliner.
Also, there's the possibility that even if he didn't get injured in 2012, his already surgically repaired right knee, combined with his bad habit of just taking hits instead of avoiding them or sliding, in conjunction with the horrendous Washington turf, was a time bomb anyways, just looking for a place to go off. If it didn't go off at the end of 2012, perhaps it was going to go off in the 2013 offseason, or at some point during the 2013 season proper on that awful turf. We would've gotten a bit more elite RG3 out of it, but in this circumstance, it wouldn't have substantially changed anything.
This is the problem with reflecting on RG3. You have to nest your what-ifs within each other, because his career was killed in two different, interacting, ways.
Oh and one thing in reply to this
If to do accept my hypothetical (a big ‘If’. we both agree) and RG3 doesn’t have that playoff game, doesn’t get hurt and has 2 years plus as an effective starter, does that put Kirk in career backup bucket?
If it does, then that 20 minutes he played to win that game are arguably the most lucrative 20 minutes of sport ever played when you consider the contracts they led too
It depends how long RG3 goes for.
Remember, the Redskins were intent not to give Robert anybody as a backup that could even think about providing competition. This is how we end up with a QB room of two rookies in the first place, but Kirk had some mightily important people watching him in those practices. Shanahan, McVay, Jay Gruden, Bill Callahan etc.. Those were loaded Washington coaching staffs, and as those guys eventually all spread their wings and flew away from Washington, somebody was going to remember how good Kirk Cousins looked in their offence.
If something happened to RG3 before the ending of their perfectly aligned rookie contracts, Kirk was always going to be the guy to step in, and we know from real life that he was always going to make his chance count, being a better QB in Washington than Robert ever was in both 2015 and 2016 in real life, so basically, what I think it would require for Kirk to fall into the career backup slot is for either a) Washington to replace him as backup at some point down the line, which I don't think is realistic, or b) Have RG3 fall out for a very short stretch before 2016 and no longer, and have Kirk play very badly in those few games.
I think these things could've cost Kirk a real chance at the NFL, but in all honesty it's hard to bury a top five QB talent, which the Washington version of Kirk Cousins was. He went to Minnesota and never got it back, so people don't think of Kirk Cousins as a top five NFL QB anymore, but for those couple years in Washington, he was bona fide, so I don't think there's very much that could've held him down.
His chance was either coming in Washington when Robert faltered, like in real life, or when one of those coaches I mentioned before went off and became a head coach somewhere. One of them would've come back for him, because the stories are legendary of just how much better than RG3 Kirk was in practice from 2013 onwards, and RG3 after the injuries was a 0 EPA/Play guy. He was not unusable. He was just a diva no one wanted, and Kirk was so much better than him.
I hear you, but even in your scenario he isn’t in position to get the franchise tag contracts that the way it played out got him, so still made him a lot of money
You're right. He probably would've ended up with less total career earnings had RG3 held on for longer, but I still think he would've ended up with multiple extensions. He probably would've just found himself in the Sam Darnold-Geno Smith-Baker Mayfield bucket, where he has to take a discount on his first extension because of his reputation, or lack thereof.
I do like how you focused on the power struggles within the organisation
It was shameful that they used a rookie QB as a pawn in their pathetic power play games
You could be right on the knee, until the article I had either forgotten or never known about his college knee injury, that does change the calculus on my what if, you’re right
Power struggles ruin everything for everybody. This is true in real life as well as the NFL. I don't blame Mike Shanahan for this. He didn't put up as much of a bulwark against Dan's meddling as he could have, but if he hated being in Washington that much, I can't force him to have the team's best interests at heart. Dan Snyder on the other hand ruined everything. He should've mandated that the focus be on the future of Robert. Instead he did the opposite.
Yes, Robert did have a history of knee problems before he ever got to Washington. It's an often forgotten part of the story, because it's a key piece of evidence that it's not just the knee injuries that ruined everything. If it was, it would've happened at Baylor.
Dan Snyder was so awful, it’s why I love the Australian Rules Football structure of team ownership, where they are clubs, owned by the membership (season ticket holders) and the members get to vote for the board that runs the club and the board elects a President who then appoints an executive team to manage the club
Gives the fans, or season ticket holders at least, real power over how their club is run
Indeed. Americans love their monopolies though.
I think you're in Australia if I remember, so maybe it's not that way over there, but North Americans have this weird cultural self-hatred going on, where we look at something great going on elsewhere, and simply handwave and say that will never work over here, and when you ask somebody why this is, the answer often comes down to 'we are different than them,' and considering the foreign systems are better than the North American ones in almost all cases, that translates quite closely to 'we're worse than them.'
Sports work in exactly this fashion. There is absolutely precedent that sports teams can be run as corporations, with the fans as the shareholders. It works, but Americans will throw their hands in the air and say that will never work in the North American context, because North American people are different (read: worse) than the non-North American people, who have no trouble implementing a system like this. The Green Bay Packers are operated in exactly this way, and their franchise has not exploded, so I'm not sure why more sports teams can't go for the corporation model.
The problem is cultural though. That's the point. It's not just in sports. It's everywhere. My hometown says they can't maintain the roads because it gets cold in the winters, but I've seen the roads in Norway, and they're great, so that excuse doesn't work for me, but when I bring this up at a meeting the response is generally 'we're different (read: worse) than Norway.'
I am a North American from Canada, and I am not this way, but you would be shocked on how many North Americans have this ingrained self-hatred within themselves, which is why we're willing to accept less than people everywhere else in the world is willing to accept. Once again, I am not, which is why I can speak in such a powerful voice on the internet without feeling self-conscious, but the majority are.
This manifests in sports too, with situations like the Washington Redskins, where people just have to wait for Dan Snyder to either die or sell, and then have it made clear just how much of a detriment he was with the success they're having now, immediately after he left. It's silly. The fans should've been able to do something about this, but with the American model, it just was not possible.
Yeah I do get frustrated at the ‘something that works everywhere else can’t work here’ thing
The Sydney Swans in the 80s went to a private ownership model, the owner was a Spiv, nearly killed the club in the early to mid 90s, but then they went back to a membership owned model and were arguably the team of the aughts, so it can be done
I will clarify though, our clubs aren’t corporations owned by shareholders, they’re non profit clubs owned by the membership, so there are no shareholders just stakeholders and the members (season ticket holders) have total power each year at the AGM to vote in or or the board. Now most members most years just buy their season ticket and support the club, very low voter turnout in elections is the norm, but if a club has a bad few years and the fans get angry, then they at least have a lever to use to change the leadership of the club, when these times happen then more people vote and change is forced on the club (even if that change is often forcing out one group of blazer wearing ex players & their corporate mates and replacing them with a different group of blazer wearing ex-players with different corporate mates)
Now the presidents who come into replace are very often businessmen who run on a promise to pour their own money into the club but it doesn’t matter how much money they put in, they don’t get any ownership stake, it’s just a status thing for them, like nobody knows who the guy is who owns ABC Widget company in Geelong, but everyone knows who is the President of the Geelong Football Club and that is what they get for their money, they don’t get to actually own the club in any way, the members are always the owners
Jim Everett led more top-10 passing offenses than John Elway. That stat is worth memorizing and plastering everywhere. It might be even better than David Garrard's career CPOE being higher than Tom Brady's.
There is a slight typo here. It's fixed now. What I meant was top twelve (theoretically playoff calibre) passing offences. In terms of top ten finishes, they're actually tied with five apiece. Jim has 1988, 89, 90, 91, 94. John has 1987, 1993, 95, 97, 98, but when you expand the parameters to twelve, Jim gets to add his team's 11th place finishes in both 1992 and 1995, while John gets to add one lowly twelfth place finish in 1996.
The funny thing about this is that Jim's passing offences also have an argument against John's in terms of peak performance. When we restrict things to just top five finishes, Jim has 1998, 1989, 1994, while John has 1987, 1997, 1998, and Jim's passing offences never had the benefit of Terrell Davis like John's did. These rankings are in terms of Net Yards per Attempt (my favourite old school passing stat), and Jim was in the top five while also having some of the most touches in the entire NFL. This is how Jim ends up number one on my 1989 results tier list over the top of 1989 Joe Montana.
None of this is even taking into account that John Elway qualified in six more seasons than Jim Everett did, so if we do things by percentages, Jim's lead gets even wider. Basically, the only difference between these two is that all the years John spent being a mediocre QB, mostly in the 1980s, Jim just didn't play. Is this enough of a difference to make one man a Hall of Famer, and one man an afterthought?
Maybe.
I'm shocked, shocked(!) to read that Dan Snyder was so much to blame for what happened to RG3. Oh wait, no I'm not. Every NFL owner should study Dan Snyder's time as the Redskins owner, so that they can know exactly what he would have done in any situation and then do the exact opposite.
It's a shame that Robert had to become the object of Dan's fascination. I didn't have time to go into it here, but it would become clear as early as 2013 that Kirk Cousins was the best QB on the roster. Dan Snyder insisted on Robert though, and this ended up hurting RG3's reputation a lot, even though it wasn't really his fault.
It's a typical story of a young man falling under the influence of some powerful people that did not necessarily have his best interests in mind. In this way, an imperfect analogy would be to say RG3 is like the football version of Mike Tyson, coerced into acting like people they were not for the entirety of their active careers, and with styles in their respective sports so warped from their original high heights that they became unrecognizable rather quickly.
Comparing Dan Snyder to Don King is a compliment to Dan, because at least Don was successful at what he did. All Dan Snyder did was distort and destroy the best thing his team had ever gotten its hands on, molding a good Texas boy in RG3 into a self absorbed prima donna, a mindset that it took a while for Robert to get out of. As far as I can tell, he's out of it now, and I'm happy for him as it relates to that. I'm just sad he couldn't have resisted Dan's incursions the first time around. If he could've just been the golden boy of the Shanahan offence for years and years and years, the sky would've been the limit for him, but it just wasn't meant to be.
I agree. I mean some good did come from it (Peyton ending up in Denver obviously), but it would have been fun to see RG3 if he had played with an honest organization that cared about his long term career and not just winning right away.
Indeed, but we must also take into account that no Washington means no Shanahan offence. This may mean Robert has a more long and storied football career, but in all likelihood, we would have to trade that for the best rookie xEPA/Play of all time. I'm not saying Robert wouldn't be willing to do that. He absolutely would, but as a neutral fan of a team in the other conference, this season was crazy. Crazy in a good way for me. I'm not sure I'd trade it for anything.
Now THIS series of games is a favorite offseason memory lane trip. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbGLzzomCfA5npQeb0jTnkevd_2UmV-FA&si=1epdcHlJaYG1Pmsp
Kyle Shanahan and his staff including many future head coaches created the perfect scheme for RG3. Pistol option zone run and play action off it. Redskins Vs Ravens, Rams, Falcons, Bengals are some of my favorites. I never remember the outcomes. Won some, lost some.
I agree with you. These games were so fun to go back and watch in research for this piece. The weird thing about it is that the Redskins were dominant in a lot of these games, but kept finding ways to let them fall within one possession, or sometimes lose outright. That could be a rookie QB problem. It could be something else, but regardless, it made for an extremely fun season, where you never knew what was going to happen.
I feel that watching those close games don't know what's gonna happen lol.
What unleashed RG3 was the Shanahan system of outside zone running and play action off it. But in Pistol, and optioning off the defensive end. If he went for the RB RG3 kept it and ran for 20. Or more! Once they saw that they'd stay put to prevent RG3 from running outside. So he does a Give read and lets the RB. 6th round rookie Alfred Morris get the ball. With the D end out of the play, 5OL and 1TE are blocking only 3 DL and climbing to take on 2 LBs and a box safety. Or theres a FB or 2nd TE to block 3 LBs. Defenses could never put 2 deep safeties, always had to commit 7-8 man boxes and so play action was deadly with RG3 having arm talent and accuracy. It's beautiful! Its what Kyle envisioned with Trey Lance, what I was hoping to see again.
The 2023 Ravens do it a little. But Lamar is such a good passer can read defenses they get big plays regardless and in 2024 Derrick Henry caused enough fear to get the same numbers advantages.
You're exactly right. It's basically a bunch of bells and whistles to set up a killer play action pass attack, and RG3 was such an effective runner that you basically had to let Washington do exactly what they wanted. This is how Alfred Morris can have 1613 yards in a season with just 123 RYOE in the whole year. I don't mean to put the man down, but he's not exactly Adrian Peterson (who rushed for 392.4 RYOE in his legendary 2012 season). If Alfred Morris could've overachieved his blocking by that amount, he would've been a 2000 yard guy himself. By the way, RG3 had over 100 RYOE in his limited sample of carries, so it's not a contest who the most effective runner on this team was.
A lot of Alfred's runs were just not that difficult, for exactly the reasons you set forth here. He generally got what was blocked for him, and just a little bit more. This is not like Adrian Peterson or CJ Spiller, who were getting what were blocked for them, plus an extra full yard, every time they touched the ball, but it was good enough when your offensive line and scheme blocked you up for almost 1500 yards. However, when RG3's knee went out on him, and he could no longer throw the ball accurately, it all fell apart.
It's the same reason this idea did not work with Trey Lance. Above all else, this offence requires a QB with more accuracy than you would expect it to require, because if not, the trade is no longer a trade. The defence simply says 'please pass,' and forces you to do just that. There are windows in the play action pass game with an offence like this, but with the receiving talent of the 2012 Washington Redskins (zero top 40 receivers), those windows are not huge, even when it's strictly one on one. You need a guy who can sling it in there. RG3 was that guy, and then all of a sudden he was not that guy.