It’s been a rough week for Robert Griffin III. It started on Monday, when his comments about being the “best quarterback in the league” took off, in large part because the real question is where he currently fits among the league’s worst. Then came Tuesday, when he lobbied the team’s P.R. department for a chance to address the media, in part so that he could chastise the media for using his name to stir up clicks.
The controversy became largely forgotten by Thursday, after he became coated in paper maché and stuffed with candy as the Lions swung sticks at him until he left the game with an injury that wasn’t a concussion until it was a concussion, possibly to keep him from talking to the media again.
In between Tuesday’s comments and Thursday’s game, a prominent member of the Washington media and former player on the team sounded off on Griffin’s habit of generating sound bites. Appearing on CSN Mid-Atlantic, Brian Mitchell started his passionate commentary on Griffin by responding to the notion that the media unfairly “took off” with his quotes.
“The media didn’t take off with anything,” Mitchell said. “I think everybody that heard him make the comments took off with it. And he says thing over and over again and then he has to come back and he wants to explain what he said. He’s a smart enough young man with enough intelligence to know how to say something the first time, where you don’t have to constantly come back and give a press conference after your team said you weren’t speaking, and he forced his way into speaking. . . .
“What I’m seeing right now is a team that’s coddling a young man, which is hurting him in the process. If they want to sit up here and blame the media for every damn thing that he does and every mistake that they make, it’s about time that they start doing their job.”
Mitchell then pointed out that the P.R. department has a responsibility to help protect players from saying unfortunate things by training them in what to say and how to say it.
“You talk a lot less, you have a lot less problems,” Mitchell said. “I don’t think [any] of us in the media will sit there and say, ‘Well, we’re gonna use Robert to make something happen.’ No, Robert says something that’s off-kilter and sometimes . . . absolutely stupid and asinine that makes us say things about him.”
Mitchell then pointed out the obvious fact that Griffin is the quarterback of an NFL team in Washington, D.C., and that when he says thing, people will react.
“It comes a point in time when someone’s gonna have to stand up and tell him what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear,” Mitchell said. “This young man seems to be a guy in my eyes that he loves people around him that says what he wants to hear, coddles him, doesn’t challenge him.”
But Mitchell said that, when he someone challenges him, it’s brushed off as “backstabbing.”
“It’s not about backstabbing,” Mitchell said. “Backstabbing is people that are so tight with you, then they do something wrong. We’re not tight with you. We have jobs.”
And Mitchell made it clear that his job doesn’t revolve around Robert Griffin III.
“We don’t wake up in the morning looking for him,” Mitchell said. “And, dude, you’re not that damn important where you think we need your name to go out there and get people to click on stories. There’s enough stupidity going on around here. . . . [Y]ou’re not that damn important. What’s gonna make you important . . . you need to shut the hell up and start playing football. That will make you important. Win football games in this city, and you would have this city at the palm of your hands. You had it, and you’re starting to lose it because you talk.
“And there a lot of people that were supporting him that are now starting to turn their back, because they see a guy who seems to be so full of himself and not doing what he’s supposed to be doing. You came here to be a football player, not a damn philosopher. . . . Not a guy that’s always giving us these damn quotes. Who gives a damn? Normally people care about quotes when you are successful, and he has not been successful enough to be giving me a quote.
“I’m 47 years old,” Mitchell said, who turned 47 the same day he unloaded on Griffin. “What the hell, I’m gonna listen to a little wet behind the ears 24-year-old kid who’s done nothing -- nothing -- to be sitting up here and think we’re gonna listen to him all day? Do your job. Which he hasn’t done. So don’t sit up there as a franchise, as a P.R. department, and sit up here and like this kid is so right. He’s wrong. He does a lot of stupid stuff, and it’s about time he hears it instead of people kissing his tail all the damn time.
“I watch this team. I’m passionate about this team. And I see this one dude who we talk about every day too damn much because he doesn’t know to shut up and perform.”
At a time when it seems like the organization is trying hard to salvage the guy for whom it gave up three first-round picks and a second-round pick to acquire in 2012, it feels like the entire situation is crumbling, and that the sooner the team moves on from Griffin, the sooner they can begin the process of searching for a path toward something resembling mediocrity.