The Robert Griffin III Disaster, Or How To Ruin Everything

The news that head coach Jay Gruden named Kirk Cousins his starting quarterback for the 2015 season essentially meant the phenomenon formerly known as RGIII was over. Gruden admitted on Monday that Washington is now "Kirk's team." Robert Griffin III is still on that roster, but fading from it, and fast. The player who was once the future is now barely even present.

As recently as last year, Robert Lee Griffin III was the prince of the franchise and owner Dan Snyder's favorite son. The team traded four draft picks, three of them in the first round, for the chance to draft Griffin with the second pick of the 2012 NFL Draft. Snyder immediately gave Griffin perks and privileges no other player received, up to and including telling then-head coach Mike Shanahan how to do his job. As Gruden said this time last year, Griffin had "the keys to the franchise"—and given his family's all-access pass to team facilities, that was literally true.

Now Griffin—Heisman Trophy winner, Rookie of the Year, Pro Bowler, Washington socialite, wearer of becapéd socks—is a busted-up benchwarmer. Griffin is not blameless in this. He has been unlucky, but he also consistently refused to put in the work that would transform him from what he was—a dynamic but limited playmaker—into the Hall of Famer he could have become. But there's more to this undoing than Robert Griffin III.

Griffin's fate was brought about by the powerful people in his life, and how they used him for their own ends. Snyder and then-general manager Bruce Allen made a massive commitment to acquire Griffin, in relative and absolute terms, a sizable down-payment for what looked like a decade-long commitment to their new franchise quarterback.

And then, in the fourth round of that 2012 draft—with one of the few worthwhile selections the team had left after acquiring the rights to draft Griffin—Washington drafted Cousins. Instead of doing everything they could to fortify a 5-11 team for their young franchise quarterback, they hedged that all-in bet.

As Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio speculated at the time, a good-but-not-electrifying Big Ten quarterback with a lantern jaw and impeccable character could play stick to the millions of carrots being served to Griffin on silver platters. Should the exacting Shanahan find Griffin an unwilling or unable pupil…well, they weren't really committed to Griffin; there was another potential franchise quarterback right there.

Shanahan, and his son Kyle, did not doom Griffin to fail, and this is greatly to their credit. Instead of forcing the greenhorn to execute Shanahan's intricate version of the Bill Walsh offense, the Shanahans installed a read-option, play-action based offense based on what Griffin did at Baylor, and trickle-fed him more advanced NFL concepts throughout the season.

And, in Griffin's first supernova season, the results were spectacular. He shredded NFL offenses and put up astonishing numbers; wild new highlights were served weekly. He led the NFL in both average yards-per-attempt and interception rate, a Rodgersian combination of aggressiveness and precision. The success, the celebrity, the black-tie events and the close relationship with Snyder all wrapped up in each other. Griffin became the present and the future of the storied franchise Snyder had purchased back when Griffin was nine years old.

Cousins was a forgotten man—forgotten until Week 14, when Griffin was knocked out of a game against the rival Ravens with a ligament sprain. Cousins came off the bench and engineered an overtime win, then got the start against the Browns while Griffin was benched as a precaution.

"I was not happy with the decision," Griffin told ESPN at the time. "That's the decision they went with and I respect that. It doesn't mean I have to necessarily like it. I feel like I could have played this week, next week, the week after. But that's not my decision."

Three weeks later, Griffin made the decision to start that fateful playoff game against Seattle in what might end up being the only postseason start of his career. Griffin played and played and played on FedEx Field's green-painted dog track, taking shots from the fierce Seahawks defense and hobbling through the read-option offense on an obviously gimpy leg. It was shocking, but not quite surprising when his knee finally gave way late in the game.

It appeared obvious that Griffin's rehab had been rushed, which led to a halting and unimpressive return that had sapped his confidence. Reports later surfaced that Snyder told Griffin to ask Shanahan to use him as a classic dropback quarterback. The request, from owner to player to coach, poisoned Griffin and Shanahan's relationship. But such a shocking request was not all that surprising either.

Griffin was deactivated again in 2013 when it became obvious he was not going to win many games nor improve as a quarterback. Again, Cousins was given a chance to shine. "If he lights it up, hey, maybe we can bring a first-round draft choice back to this organization," Shanahan told Dan Steinberg of The Washington Post. "I think by him playing and Robert not playing, it gives us a chance to have a few options for our organization that we wouldn't normally have."

Cousins didn't light it up.

Gruden had two qualifications at the time when he was hired to take Shanahan's job:

1. He is the brother of the coach who previously won a Super Bowl with now-Washington executive Bruce Allen, who is himself the son of the Washington coach who won that playoff game in 1976.

2. He'd previously built a playoff-caliber offense around a mediocre Midwestern pocket passer.

Certainly, no one in the Washington franchise wanted Griffin to fail. Obviously, it would have been better if the massive investment in him paid off. But, at every turn, the organization made decisions that made his failure seem inevitable.

For a brief while, though, it worked. Snyder got to bask in the glow of real on-field success, while soaking up some long-awaited love from D.C. power players. Shanahan got out of a untenable situation while simultaneously proving he's still one of the best in the business. Allen got to hire "his guy" before taking a bump up into a fancier office and letting Scot McCloughan handle the difficult work of building a team. Gruden got a head-coaching gig he only questionably deserved. Cousins, through all of this, was seasoned and groomed for the starting job more carefully than any fourth-round draft pick could dare to hope.

Everyone in Washington got what they wanted out of this situation except Griffin, who now can only hope for better chance to realize his potential elsewhere.