If there was a play that said everything about what Robert Griffin III’s career would become, it was one the block he threw in the shadows of his first NFL game, far from the cameras and prying eyes in the stands. Few in the New Orleans Superdome that day in September 2012 noticed when Washington’s new quarterback inexplicably ran ahead of team-mate Alfred Morris and knocked the Saints’ Roman Harper to the ground. But it should have been warning for the weeks and years to come. And for a football life that might be finished.
Only Griffin couldn’t understand that at the time.
“Cut him,” he said after the game, still beaming at the memory.
He and Harper tussled after the play. Quarterbacks don’t block safeties in the NFL and Harper didn’t care much for Griffin’s hit. They had words in that puffed-chest, bloated-ego way that football players do, and then RG3 went back to the congratulations of his new teammates.
“It shows he’s a football player,” Washington linebacker London Fletcher said that day. “That block shows he’s willing to sacrifice himself for the team.”
But it was also an alarming sign of a disaster to come. While RG3’s plunging knockdown of Harper might have sent hearts thumping on the Washington bench, it showed a recklessness, a need to prove his toughness through the kind of contact a quarterback should not want. It was the kind of thing he could never eliminate from his game, despite the pleas of too many coaches. Now it may have cost him the last great chance of his career.
On Monday, the Cleveland Browns placed Griffin on injured reserve after he broke a bone in his non-throwing shoulder on a play late in the team’s opening-game loss at Philadelphia. This means he will be out at least eight weeks and with Cleveland already looking to the future, his chances of playing for the Browns again are slim. If this really is the end for RG3, he will be finished not for his exuberance, or his struggles to master a pocket-passing game, but rather his refusal to keep from getting hit.
His brief NFL run has been filled with blows that have bent his knee, ripped ligaments and shaken his brain. Each time his coaches screamed that he needed to slide away from tackles or dash out of bounds. They said he wasn’t built like Cam Newton or Colin Kaepernick. They told him his wiry, hurdler’s frame wasn’t made to take football contact game after game. Each time he nodded and said he understood. Then he’d go in a game and get himself hit again.
Who knows why he never changed. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he had built himself into so much of a running and passing sensation at Baylor, winning the 2011 Heisman Trophy, that he couldn’t be anything else. His speed got him though college and made him the NFL’s rookie of the year in 2012. Perhaps running was all he knew and no level of good sense was going to teach him otherwise.
Lord knows everyone tried. After he tore his ACL in college, his father attempted to change him, propping him on a stool with his bandaged leg in a parking lot and ordering him to throw pass after pass to build his arm strength. In Washington, his first coach, Mike Shanahan, begged him to be more like the Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, who is masterful at dodging contact. His next coach at Washington, Jay Gruden, asked the same thing. As did Hue Jackson in Cleveland. Their pleas never worked. Griffin kept taking the shots.
Sunday’s hit was like so many of the others in his past. RG3 had taken off running, trying to stretch for extra yards, when he ran straight into Eagles cornerback Jalen Mills, who met Griffin’s shoulder with his own. When they got back up, it was Griffin’s shoulder, not Mills’s that dangled limply from under his pads. Ironically, Mills is a rookie from LSU, playing his college football just an hour from New Orleans, where Griffin made that block the first day of his career. Maybe it is fitting that a player from Louisiana might be the one to finish Griffin’s time in the NFL.
It will be sad if this is the end for Griffin. Few NFL players have ever been as interesting or willing to share themselves with the public. He might have confounded many because he never fit a stereotype for an NFL quarterback both on the field and off, but that was also his charm: he was not a football robot.
He couldn’t do the one thing he had to, however. He couldn’t avoid a hit. From that first block in New Orleans to that last blow in Philadelphia, he kept getting himself knocked to the turf. Why couldn’t he listen to good advice when it was given? Before it was too late?
