Jim Harbaugh isn’t the only one firing back at the forked-tongue set.
Redskins offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan talked to reporters Thursday, effectively denying everything that’s been written about him lately, from the fact he didn’t want to work with his dad, to having too many of his buddies around to not having a relationship with Robert Griffin III.
(You’d think having a forked tongue would make you talk more slowly, but apparently not.)
“I was definitely bothered by it,” Shanahan said, via John Keim of ESPN.com. “I never had somebody attack me personally so it definitely bothered me.”
He said the two coaches he brought with him from Houston (quarterbacks coach Matt LaFleur and receivers coach Mike McDaniel) were there on their merits.
He also ripped people who ripped his play-calling, falling back on the old “never-played-the-game” standby that coaches love because no one possibly knows as much as they do about something as complicated as football.
“Not many people are educated enough to know what we’re doing, [but] I get that it’s part of the territory,” Shanahan said. “It’s bad play calling. It’s OK, I can look at it that way, too. When people attack stuff personally and say stuff about people who are good people who have earned their jobs and worked their tail off and people who are, . . . bitter, . . . I have zero respect for those people.”
He also said the notion he didn’t want to work with his father was 100 percent untrue, and while he was at it, he loved coaching Griffin.
“It sounds like there’s a report about everything now,” he said. “It’s pretty boring to talk about our three wins. So there’s a lot of stuff out there. Some things, there are partial truths to, but when it comes to working with Robert, no one works with Robert but myself and the QB coach and we love working with Robert. He’s great to coach.”
So there.
And if you don’t believe it, we’ll ask Judge Judy.