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The only good news coming out of Washington continues to be the Redskins. A lot of that interest is centered on their extraordinary quarterback Robert Griffin III who was drafted just this year. Sunday, WaPo had a page one profile of Griffin that shows how he, a rookie, became the undisputed leader of a team of veterans.
… Griffin, the son of two retired Army sergeants, had come into the Redskins’ organization as the equivalent of a five-star general — with a $21.1 million contract and four national television commercials before he had taken his first professional snap. But he was going to conduct himself like a private.
“My strategy was to come in and try to lead by example first,” Griffin said recently. “Being a rookie, you don’t want to come in talking right away. You can rub a lot of guys the wrong way. . . . One thing you can’t do as a leader is come out and say you’re the leader.”
Some eight months after he first walked through the doors of their practice facility, Griffin has the Redskins — a last-place team each of the previous four seasons — on the verge of the playoffs. A win over Dallas on Sunday would cement the team’s first division title in 13 years and earn the Redskins a home playoff game next weekend. Named to the NFL Pro Bowl team on Wednesday, Griffin is also a leading candidate for rookie of the year.
And there is little doubt, with all due respect to veteran linebacker London Fletcher, that the Redskins are Griffin’s team now. He wears a captain’s “C” on his chest, an extraordinary honor for a rookie, bestowed upon him at midseason. Especially on offense, but increasingly across the entire locker room, the Redskins take their cues from the 22-year-old superstar with the preternatural confidence.
“Everybody gets in line behind him and says, ‘Take us to the promised land,’ ” wide receiver Santana Moss, a 12-year veteran, said after last Sunday’s win over Philadelphia. “I know it sounds funny saying that, but he shows what it takes every day to get to where he’s trying to get by how he prepares. It shows up on the field on Sundays. There’s no question you want that guy to be a captain.”
You could argue, in fact, that Griffin’s greatest individual achievement this year isn’t the 104.1 passer rating that ranks second in the NFL, or the 752 rushing yards, which ranks first among quarterbacks, but the way in which he has altered the culture of the Redskins’ locker room. He has lifted it up with his overwhelming force of belief, rather than being dragged down by the weight of all the losing that met him when he arrived.
“His expectation of winning and playing great is a huge influence in here,” said veteran tight end Chris Cooley. “It’s been a drastic change of culture, and you could say Robert has been the biggest part of that. He’s a natural leader. When he talks, people listen — and people believe. No one said, ‘Okay, you’re the quarterback, so we’re going to listen to what you say.’ You build that trust. …
… Part of Griffin’s challenge was to break through that callousness and get teammates to rediscover the primal but dormant competitiveness inside them, a task made even more difficult by the culture of losing that had become entrenched around the Redskins. But while that culture perplexed Griffin in the beginning, according to people close to him, ultimately it was no match for the force of his personality.
“When you have a guy like that leading your team who is so excited to play — who wants to go out and do big things and take this team places it hasn’t been in years, it’s so easy to be excited with him,” long snapper Nick Sundberg said. “His attitude is extremely contagious.”
“His will to win,” said tight end Niles Paul, “is never-ending.”
The first major benchmark in Griffin’s ascension to the Redskins’ leadership throne may have been the win at New Orleans in his NFL regular season debut. It was one thing to make jaw-dropping plays in practice, or even in the preseason, and yet another thing do it in games that count — especially in a notoriously difficult place to win such as the Superdome.
“I think I earned their belief after the first preseason game, and I think I got their trust after the first regular season game,” Griffin said. “Because your work and your work ethic can only speak so much, but once you go out and do it in a game and you perform in the clutch, and you win a big season-opener like we did against the Saints, that’s when you can really earn guys’ trust.” …
.. The captain’s patch is about four inches tall, a white “C” above four stars. One of the stars on Griffin’s No. 10 jersey is gold — indicating his first year as a captain — and the other three are white. In subsequent years, more stars will turn to gold, and eventually in year four, the “C” itself will be gold, as it is on the No. 59 uniform of Fletcher, the Redskins’ longest-serving captain.
The patch was sewn on Griffin’s uniform by a tailor in Falls Church whom the Redskins use as a contractor, and was unseen by the quarterback himself until he arrived at FedEx Field on Nov. 18, the day of the Eagles game, and saw his jersey hanging in his locker.
“Words can’t describe what it means to be captain,” Griffin told ESPN’s Jon Gruden in a taping prior to the Redskins’ Monday Night Football appearance. “It shows me they truly believe in me.”
The extraordinary gesture — Redskins Coach Mike Shanahan, who has been in the NFL since 1984, is among those who can’t recall another example of a rookie being named a team captain — was the result of a vote by Griffin’s offensive teammates, and it came at a critical time for the Redskins, after their bye week, with the team’s record sitting at 3-6 following three straight losses. It also came two days after Griffin welcomed his teammates back from the break with a stirring speech about how there was still time to turn the season around.
By that time, Griffin had gradually taken on a more outwardly vocal position as a team leader, and his teammates had begun to view him as such. One particularly meaningful moment came after the concussion he suffered Oct. 7 against Atlanta, when he failed to get down quick enough near the sideline and was leveled by an oncoming linebacker. The next day, at RedskinsPark, Griffin apologized to his teammates for being so careless, and vowed not to let it happen again — a gesture that left some of them shaking their heads.
“He’s six or seven years ahead of what I’ve seen from anyone in our locker room, in terms of his status in the locker room, his ability to control a football team, his leadership,” said Cooley. “If you forget for a second that he’s a rookie, it doesn’t mean anything to you. You’re like, ‘Yeah, this guy is awesome. He’s the leader.’ But then you step back and think he’s only 22. He’s been in the NFL for six months. I mean, it blows me away.”
It is an intangible skill — the ability to possess humility and self-confidence in equal proportions — one that has tripped up countless other would-be leaders in professional sports.
“He’s got an aura about him. He just exudes confidence,” Sundberg said. “Without even saying a word, we know he’s going to go get the job done. It spreads to all of us. It’s something that’s vastly different from a year ago. His attitude, his want-to, above all else is what’s leading us.” …
The author of the above, Dave Sheinin, also wrote about Griffin back in July as the Skins were just getting into camp.
The moment required all of Robert Griffin III’s many intangible skills — his impeccable sense of timing, his penchant for the dramatic, his preternatural confidence, his heart-melting charm. He waited patiently until everyone at the dinner table seemed absorbed in conversation, then rose silently to his feet.
It was March 20 in Waco, Tex., in a private back room at the 135 Prime steakhouse, and Griffin and his family were having dinner with the top brass of the Washington Redskins: owner Daniel Snyder, Coach Mike Shanahan, offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan and General Manager Bruce Allen.
The next day, at Baylor’s pro day, would be the first time Griffin, the Baylor quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner, would throw passes in front of NFL personnel before the April 25 draft, for which the Redskins held the No. 2 overall pick.
At first, no one at the table seemed to notice as Griffin — trying to be casual, as if he was merely too warm — stood and began to remove his green Adidas hoodie. But then the others caught a glimpse of what he was wearing underneath: a burgundy, official NFL-issue T-shirt, with a large Redskins logo on the front.
The bold statement, which Griffin later acknowledged was “premeditated,” sent the room into spasms of laughter and applause. The Redskins’ brass seemed shocked, considering the draft was still five weeks away, the 22-year-old Griffin had yet to throw for them and there was still some uncertainty over what the Indianapolis Colts would do with the No. 1 overall pick. But they seemed blown away by the gesture. His mission accomplished, Griffin flashed his now-famous, toothy smile and sat back down.
“What if you had gotten the days mixed up,” Snyder, with a smile, leaned over and asked Griffin, “and worn a Colts shirt by mistake?”
Griffin laughed, he later recalled, but he was dead serious about his message: I want to be a Redskin.
“I wanted to show them where my mind was, where my heart was,” he said later. “I knew my pro day was going to go extremely well, [but] I didn’t want to make [the Colts] want me. I wasn’t going to play that game.”
The process of making Griffin a Redskin began on March 10, when the team traded four high-round draft picks to the St. Louis Rams to move up to the No. 2 spot in the draft, and became official Wednesday morning, when he signed his name to a four-year, $21.1 million contract in an office at Redskins Park in Ashburn, a week before the opening of training camp.
But that night in Waco, some four months ago, was when Griffin became a Redskin at heart. What followed — a dazzling performance at Baylor’s pro day, the draft itself and the signing of his contract — seemed like mere formalities. …
… The first thing Griffin noticed about the playbook was how huge it was — a three-ring binder, five inches thick, stuffed nearly full with pages. White with a Redskins logo on the front, its contents were tabbed for easy flipping and divided into chapters — cadences, snap counts, protections, plays, red zone offense, two-minute offense and more.
“They wanted to throw the whole offense at me, just so I could see — these are the possibilities,” Griffin said. “They wanted to confuse me. They wanted to make things hard, to see what I could handle.”
The Redskins had drafted another quarterback, Michigan State’s Kirk Cousins, in April, a decision widely criticized by analysts on ESPN and the NFL Network, but it gave Griffin a natural study partner.
During much of May, the rookies roomed together at a suites hotel a mile and a half from RedskinsPark, where they spent most of their evenings in their living room, on opposite sides of a coffee table, poring over their playbooks and taking nightly quizzes.
The quizzes, devised by Kyle Shanahan and quarterbacks coach Matt LaFleur, were designed to reinforce material in the playbook, not unlike the tests conceived by high school math teachers.
“It was just making sure we knew the route combinations, the protections,” Griffin said. “What was paramount was that you get it in your brain — it’s stuck there, so you can pull from it. It’s stuff like, ‘What protection do you have on 24-Jet?’ Some of [the answers] don’t come to you immediately, so you look them up in the playbook and write them down, and that makes you learn it.
“They were long quizzes, play after play after play. What’s your protection on that play? What’s your ‘hot’ on this play? What’s your primary read? What do you do against this coverage, [or] against that coverage? It’s an extreme attention to detail, and I loved it.”
The quizzes weren’t graded, but each morning Shanahan and LaFleur went over them and corrected the answers Griffin and Cousins had gotten wrong, making sure the young quarterbacks knew the right answers — and why they were the right answers.
On the practice field, the first thing Griffin would do after running every play — from the simplest handoff to the most complex throw — was to confer briefly with Kyle Shanahan, who would ask Griffin what he saw: What coverage was the defense in? Where were the safeties? Did all your receivers run the right routes?
The Shanahans appeared genuinely stunned by Griffin’s aptitude. Mike Shanahan noted the lack of a single busted play or wrong formation during the entire three-day rookie camp — Griffin’s first practices under the Redskins’ scheme.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had that [happen] in any minicamps I’ve been involved in,” he said. “. . . Very few people can take as much verbiage. It’s like learning a new language. Some people are able to pick it up very quickly and [others can’t]. Robert was able to pick it up very quickly, and it showed on the field.”
In early May, when Griffin arrived at RedskinsPark for his first day of work at rookie minicamp, he made his way to the locker room to discover that he had been placed next to linebacker London Fletcher, the 37-year-old veteran who is the team’s unquestioned spiritual leader. The placement was not accidental. …