The maturation of a quarterback, Jay Gruden says, does not always occur on the field.
Beyond calling plays and diagnosing coverages, orchestrating a play and precisely delivering a throw, there is another process unfolding away from the game. As a first-year head coach and former quarterback himself, Gruden understands this. And sometimes, he and Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III discuss it.
“We don’t just talk football in team meetings,” Gruden said Wednesday.
As the Redskins return from the bye week and prepare for Sunday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Griffin is focused only on winning. “We’ve got to get to 1-0 this week. That’s it,” he said. But no matter how the Redskins perform in the final seven games of the season, Gruden said his third-year quarterback must continue to show growth, both in how he handles the offense and how he handles criticism in the media.
“He is not perfect by any stretch, in any phase, off the field, on the field,” Gruden said. “But he is a guy that is willing to work at it, and hopefully we can get him there.”
After a Nov. 2 report claimed Griffin had “alienated” himself in the locker room, Gruden said “a quarterback’s No. 1 trait that he has to have — or any football player’s trait that he has to have — is you’ve got to be thick-skinned.” The next day, soft-spoken wide receiver DeSean Jackson spoke up in a team meeting on Griffin’s behalf, a gesture the quarterback said he appreciated.
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“That’s what teammates do. That’s what a family is,” Griffin said. “I think we’re getting closer as a family on this team and what DeSean said, like we said before, is just addressing the few. But we don’t know who those guys are and it doesn’t matter.”
Gruden has made it clear that Griffin is becoming more adept at navigating swirling media reports while also acknowledging there is room for improvement. On Wednesday, he was asked if he believes the third-year quarterback is “mentally delicate.”
“No, no,” Gruden said. “I just think people can chip away at you. If you continue to read everything written about you and listen to everything that is said about you on television, then — he is a human being — it can wear on you.
“I think really for a young kid that has been through as much as he has, both good and bad, already at age 24 or however old he is, he has shown the fact that he is a thick-skinned guy and really in good spirits, both mentally and physically. So you’ve just got to continue to grow and learn from every experience, both on and off the field, and that’s what great quarterbacks have to do.”
Griffin has often been a lightning rod for anonymously sourced reports since arriving in Washington in 2012. In the wake of the Nov. 2 report, much has been made about whether he has the full support of teammates in the locker room. But on Wednesday, he was asked a related question: does being liked even matter to him?
“You like everybody you work with?” Griffin replied with a smile. “It’s really not even about that. I think for us as a team, what we are focusing on and what D-Jack did stress, and what Ryan Clark has stressed and other guys, other leaders have stressed — [Jason Hatcher], [Stephen] Bowen, [Barry] Cofield — is that we can’t let anybody try to tear us apart from the outside in. It’s been pushed and pushed and pushed and everybody thinks it’s coming from the inside out, but we’re strong in that locker room. And we feel like we can’t let any of these reports or anything divide us.”
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Griffin’s teammates echoed that sentiment.
“We know what we have around this team,” wide receiver Andre Roberts said. “So, you know, what’s said outside and in the media, it’s going to happen. If you’re a name in any organization, if you’re making money in any organization, they’re going to talk really highly about you and they’re going to talk really bad about you. So we all understand that.”
Cofield, who was activated off short-term injured reserve Tuesday, said media scrutiny follows losing. “A lot of it is just people looking for answers,” he said. The defensive lineman chalked up the report about Griffin, and related talk about a lack of leadership in the Redskins locker room, as a byproduct of the team’s performance on the field.
“When you’re winning … no one worries about it. No one asks you, ’Who are the leaders?’ They just ask you, ’What did you do to win?’” Cofield said. “When you’re losing, when you’re struggling, I think there’s a spotlight cast on every little thing.”
That spotlight, however, has often proven difficult for Griffin to ignore. He follows much of what is written and said about him, occasionally hinting as much in his responses to questions about negative reports.
The best cure, Gruden suggested, will only come as Griffin matures. The easiest solution, however, is all that he is concerned with now.
“We want to win,” Griffin said. “That’s it. Win games.”
And maybe media silence will follow.
• Tom Schad can be reached at tschad@washingtontimes.com.
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