Robert Griffin III gave his most effective performance of the year against the Eagles last Saturday. The stats show it. The stats show something else, too. RG has yet to out-perform opposing quarterbacks in any game he has played this year.
The papers are crushing Mark Sanchez today, but he played well enough to win. The problem is that he had “Romo disease” against the Redskins. No, I don’t mean the ill-timed interception that closed the door to a tie or win. Like Romo, Sanchez was not good enough to overcome a deeply flawed performance by his team.
The Eagles:
- controlled the game clock 32:04 to 27:56 for the Redskins.
- ran 30 more offensive plays than the Redskins.
- converted 56 percent of their third-down attempts; the ‘Skins converts a weak 22 percent of theirs.
- Out-gained the Redskins in yardage 495 to 305.
The Eagles lost this game as much as the Redskins won it.
As happy as Hog Heaven is with the win and with RG’s performance, Sanchez did more to help the Eagles than Griffin did to help the Redskins. Yes, I did take account of those two beautiful long bombs to DeSean Jackson (blah blah). It was not a complete performance. The Redskins will not win a conference title if that is all he can do. (See it in Table 1 at the end of this story.)
After 15 games, Washington’s quarterbacks have completed the exact percent of pass attempts (66.6%) as opponents and have virtually the same performance in passing yards per attempt (8.2 vs. 8.1) and longest passing plays (81 to 79 yards).
Other comparisons tell a different story. The Redskins suffered 55 sacks (30 by RG) to 36 imposed on opponents. The ‘Skins threw a mere 17 touchdown passes (9 by Cousins) to 33 scored by opponents. Washington bled 16 picks (10 by Cousins) to 6 imposed on opponents. (See Table 2 below.)
Redskins’ quarterbacks combined for a passer rating 89.6 to 108.9 for opponents. That gap is primarily at the feet of the defense, but show how far our quarterback corps must to go overcome that handicap for wins.
Hog Heaven’s snit
This is where Hog Heaven again criticizes the front office for its approach to the season. They gave Gruden the wrong mission. They may have made the wrong choice to sign Gruden whose offensive concepts mix poorly with RG’s strengths.
Daniel Snyder seemingly confuses strategy with the name recognition of players and coaches. Expect that to continue. Fixing Robert Griffin by force fitting him into a conventional NFL pocket paved the way to a losing season.
I want the old Robert back
RGIII as a conventional quarterback was not worth all the Draft picks. RGIII is quite average as a pocket quarterback. He was not “pro ready” like Andrew Luck. Nick Foles, Ryan Tannehill, Russell Wilson and Cousins were available in later rounds in that Draft. All of them, yes, even Cousins, may be better fits to Gruden’s preferred offense.
Griffin, the Heisman winner, was a dual threat who was a dangerous runner and deadly throwing on the run. The Shanahans made play-action and bootlegs part of his game. The Shanahans went away from that when RG briefly ran the team while recovering from two knee surgeries.
The Redskins made matters worse by forcing a near complete abandonment of Griffin’s game instead of doing it the other way around – keeping the read option, play action offense that worked so well in 2012 and blending in the pocket concepts that Gruden prefers to run as RG grew into them.
We suspect Griffin was resistant. Can’t say for sure because we were not in the meetings. We are sure that no Redskins player needed humbling more than Robert Griffin III.
Hog Heaven wrote last September that success for Griffin would be to throw 30 touchdown passes and that his rush to TD pass ratio should be 2:1. If RG threw 30 TD passes, we hoped to see no more than 60 rushing attempts on the season. He has 32 rushing attempts to three TD passes.
We will save this benchmark for next season when Griffin and Gruden get a do-over on their partnership. Neither can be successful without the other. I hope they work it out the way Joe Theismann and Joe Gibbs did in 1981.
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[table id=8 /]
UPDATE, Dec 29, 2014: Tables now include Week 17 game against Dallas Cowboys.
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