Last week, Washington NFL wanna-be-star-QB Bob Griffin was injured again. Concussion. Injured after being left in a preseason game last Thursday, wayyy too long behind a porous offensive line. The story has created a Mid-August Quarterback Controversy in DC. The tragedy has been covered from every angle, and I was going to leave it alone. And then came Mike Shanahan.
Former Skins Coach Mike Shanahan? Yeah. Him.
Promoting his involvement with the new Southern Bowl, Shanahan appeared on ESPN Radio’s “Mike and Mike,” where he was asked to comment “about either the way that [Griffin is] playing, or maybe some way that he can play better.”
“To be honest with you, you don’t get to study him on a day-to-day basis,” Shanahan said. “I don’t look at his film every day. But I can give you an opinion after my first year when I was there: you get a guy like Robert who’s been with an offense, very comfortable with what he did in college. He never had a playbook. Never had two-level throws or three-level throws. So you could see very quickly that was going to take some time.
“But you had a guy that had some great athletic skills, a guy that was very smart, a guy that was into the game,” Shanahan said. “And what you try to do is utilize those talents and go with it. You know, some guys, at the end of the season — like Robert did — he felt like he was a little bit more of a drop-back passer than a few of us thought. And now he’s going to have a chance to go out and prove himself.”
Then Shanahan was asked how to figure out when a “multi-talented” quarterback like Griffin or Marcus Mariota should be kept in the pocket, or utilized some other way.
“You know, I think there’s a few things in that evaluation process,” Shanahan said. “If you take a guy like Mariota — and I don’t know him — but if you take a look at him and you look at him last night a little bit: how he’s sitting in the pocket, how he was excellent with his footwork, dumped the ball off a couple times at the last second. And those are the things that you’re looking for from a coordinator standpoint or a head coach standpoint: does he have the ability to stay in the pocket, shuffle, kind of buy time a little bit, or is he looking at the pass rush?
“And sometimes that just takes a little bit more time than others,” Shanahan said. “Not that you can’t correct it, but you have to do the things that he’s comfortable in doing before you go to that, or you’ve got to make a decision [that] you’ve got to go with somebody else.”
On top of Shanny's tidbits, Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman today quoted an anonymous head coach on the latest Griffin-(Skins head coach Jay) Gruden drama. The coach said “I can’t think of a single head coach in the NFL who would take an injury-prone quarterback, put him behind a very shaky offensive line, in a preseason game, watch him take those kinds of hits and leave him in the game. It looks personal to me.” Ouch.
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