Robert Griffin was injured and ineffective during his third season in the NFL. While Andrew Luck led the NFL in touchdown passes, Griffin appeared as a turnover machine on a Redskins team that started three different players at quarterback.
Appearing on ESPN980, Griffin blamed his poor season on the ankle injury he suffered in Week 2. Griffin missed nearly two months of action and laughably got benched for Colt McCoy.
“The biggest thing for me is coming back healthy. Last year I wasn’t healthy, and it sucked, there’s no other way to say it other than that. When you get broken and dragged home in the second week of the season … When you and your team have big things in mind … It’s just getting healthy, getting the mental break, getting a chance to spend time with family, and then formulate my plan going forward for this year, and go ahead and win games and be playing again at this time next year.”
While Griffin is blaming the ankle injury for his poor performance, others suggest that NFL defenses have shifted and figured out mobile quarterbacks – a similar thing happened in San Francisco with Colin Kaepernick this season.
“I had never suffered an ankle injury to that severity before, so I didn’t know what to expect. And it just became harder and harder with the more games we lost, because you know how hard the guys work, and you want to get out there and help them win games.
“I could have sat out the rest of last year with as bad as the ankle was, but I felt like I could play, and I wanted to get out there and play with my guys and help them win games. And that didn’t happen when I got back out there, and coach made a decision. And that was an unfortunate decision, and something we all had to go with, because that was coach’s choice. But at the end of the day I got to go back out there with my guys, we had a little bit of fun, we beat Philadelphia and the season didn’t close the way we wanted it to, but we all know what we can do and we gotta go out there and do it, and there’s nothing that we can say that’s going to change what happened last year.”
Just 24, Griffin has time to prove he is an NFL quarterback but has to improve on the four touchdowns and six interceptions from last season. Griffin also commited four rumbles and was sacked 33 times in just nine games.
