We are going to take Mike Shanahan apart today as if he’s some unfeeling, win-at-all-costs mercenary who should’ve taken Robert Griffin III out of the game long before his quarterback lay on the ground in agony.
And, I’m sorry, it’s not that easy.
Grading Robert Griffin III
Each week, let us know how the heralded rookie will play and then grade his performance.
Not in a culture that portrays Byron Leftwich’s Marshall teammates carrying him downfield after completing a pass — because he cannot walk — as an heirloom of on-field courage.
Really, the same people who say South Carolina’s Jadeveon Clowney’s brain-rattling, medieval hit last week are why they watch football now want to call out Shanahan for his callous insensitivity?
No. You want to take aim at someone, take aim at a world that still celebrates an arthritic, injured man taking the floor in Game 7 of the NBA Finals in 1970 as the single, greatest, gut-it-out moment in sports history — while not for one minute asking how bad Willis Reed’s osteoporosis is today and if he could have changed one moment from that night would he? (“No,” he told me five years ago. “I’d take all the mangled fingers that I have and the bad bones and joints for that moment.”)
We want our athletic heroes to leave it all out on the field, but the moment we get the face of the franchise face-down, unable to move — the moment we get Earl Campbell in a motorized wheelchair, unable to walk — we want to know what barbarian did this to him.
We can fight over this one forever, whether Shanahan should have left Griffin in the game, why James Andrews even shows up on the sideline if he doesn’t have the power to say, outright, “Don’t put him back in there.”
But let’s be clear: This is how it was always going to end.
Griffin on the ground in agony, Shanahan seeing his worst nightmare unfold — the face of the franchise who doesn’t always tell his coach the truth about his health, unable to get up under his own power; his coach ashen-faced, knowing he probably shouldn’t have been so swayed by a kid with such a huge heart, no matter how good he is.
The quarterback who said he wouldn’t come off the field unless he was carted off — and even then “I would try and get off the cart and back on the field,” Griffin had said after he was concussed earlier this season — convincing the coach whose own career ended only after he finished a game with a ruptured kidney and had last rites administered to him.
Ol’ blood and guts, these two — right till the bitter end of this enrapturing season.
“I think I did put myself at more risk by being out there,” Griffin admitted after Sunday’s loss.
When he replied, “Honestly, it’s up in the air right for me right now,” to the question of whether he hurt his anterior cruciate ligament, well, that was a between-the-lines answer if ever there was one.
The hope of this town, the guy primarily responsible for the resuscitation of a franchise at just 22 years old, may be soon looking at his second rehabilitation from a major injury to his right knee in less than four years.
“You have to go with your gut and I did,” Shanahan said. “I’m not saying my gut is always right, but I’ve been here before.”
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