RGIII has been shut down for the rest of the season with three games left by Washington Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan.  The same head coach that had a gimpy RGIII playing at the end of last season when everyone could tell that he was broken.  Robert Griffin III is a talented quarterback and he had a very good rookie season going before the injuries started piling up quickly.

RGIII had a 65.6% completion percentage with 3200 yards.  He threw for 20 TDs with only 5 INTs for a 4:1 TD to INT ratio.  A 4:1 ratio for a starting quarterback in the NFL is tremendous.  Peyton Manning has only done it once although he is well on his way this season to getting his second.  Brett Favre only did it one time in his 20 year career and only two other times was he even 3:1.  Favre also only had 3 seasons where he was over a 65.6% completion percentage.  We also cannot forget to talk about Griffin’s rushing numbers.  815 yards rushing on 120 attempts with 7 rushing TDs.  That makes the best comparisons for him to be with Michael Vick and Randall Cunningham.

Michael Vick is the first person that everyone immediately thinks of when they think about a running quarterback in the NFL.  Even though he wasn’t first, the NFL has gained more popularity now than it had during Randall Cunningham’s day plus social media and the 24/7 media blitz of ESPN makes today’s players more at the forefront of thought.  Of course, the whole prison time and comeback for Michael Vick from the dogfight ring he ran gives him more notoriety.  Anyway, to focus on football stats, Michael Vick has never had a completion percentage as high as 65.6% nor has even ever come close to a 4:1 TD to INT ratio.  He has only passed for more than 3200 in one season and that was just 3303.  Vick does have 2 seasons where he rushed for more than 815 yards but he has never had more than the 4015 yards passing & rushing combined that RGIII had last season.

Randall Cunningham had 5 seasons with more than 3200 yards passing and 1 time had more than 815 yards rushing in any of his 16 seasons in the NFL.  The only time that he ever came near a 65.6% completion percentage was in a season that he only played 4 games.  Like Vick, Cunningham also never came close to a 4:1 TD to INT ratio.  Cunningham had a bigger arm than RGIII so from 1988-1990, he had more than the 4015 combined yards although in 1989 it was only by 6 yards.  In 1989, he had 6 more yards but he had 10 more INTs, a 54.5% completion percentage and only 1 more TD pass but 3 less rushing TDs.

In other words, RGIII had one of the greatest seasons in NFL history for a running quarterback last year and Mike Shanahan had no problems risking the future in the playoff game against the Seahawks and leaving a slow, limping, immobile sitting duck in the game to get teed off on by an aggressive defense.  Even as the game was progressing and the hits kept adding up and everyone on Twitter, Facebook, in the stands and on the broadcast was screaming from the mountain tops to get RGIII out of the game, Shanahan left him in there.  This is what ended up happening:

So you are perfectly fine risking the future and going against EVERYONE’S better judgment last season when he was ALREADY injured going into the game but now you are going to play it cautious at the end of this season when he isn’t already injured?  That makes absolutely no sense.  The Redskins staff rushed RGIII back to the field this season to try and deflect any leftover criticism from the decision to play him in the playoff game.  He was tentative.  He was scared.  He wasn’t playing like himself.  His completion percentage is down to 60.1%.  His TD passes are down to 16 (granted 2 less games so he could have gotten to 20.)  His interceptions were up to 12.  He had more completions but his yards per attempted pass and yards per completion were down.  He only ran the ball 86 times as opposed to 120 so his rushing yards were down to 489 and he had ZERO rushing TDs.  More importantly, since it is a team game, the Washington Redskins are only 3-10 this season.  I think it is safe to say that RGIII regressed this season just like the team did.

With Shanahan’s future up in the air, he makes a decision to sit RGIII for the last 3 games.  Way to make that call a year too late Coach.  I’m not a Washington Redskins fan but I hope that you haven’t damaged an exciting QB to watch beyond repair.