LOVERRO: For Jay Gruden, expressing doubt about RG3 might be only way to push back

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Redskins coach Jay Gruden doesn’t appear to be clueless. He seems like a smart guy.

And, with his brother Jon in the booth for “Monday Night Football” broadcasts — a brother he is close to and has acknowledged he speaks to often — Jay Gruden likely has a certain level of media sophistication.

So I’m going to assume he knows exactly what he is saying — and what he is doing — when he publicly, without batting an eye, drops little bombs in the media like the ones he did Monday, following Washington’s 29-26 loss to the Minnesota Vikings.

When asked about Robert Griffin III, coming back for his first start after an ankle injury sidelined him in the second game of the season, Gruden didn’t exactly give the franchise quarterback the kind of endorsement you would expect a head coach to give the franchise quarterback — unless this coach isn’t buying Griffin as the franchise quarterback.

“What can you say?” Gruden said. “You start out with Robert, you give him all the reps in training camp and then he hurts his ankle and then he misses five or six weeks. We get a good look at Kirk [Cousins]. We get a good look at Colt [McCoy], and now it’s back to Robert. So, the jury is still out on that position.

“But we feel good about Robert’s progress so far, and we’ve just got to continue to build and see how he does from week to week to week, and hopefully we can see that here at the end of the season. That’s what we have to see, and that’s what we have to find out.”

The jury is still out at that position? I thought this was a kangaroo court, and that Griffin — after essentially being acquired for four picks ahead of the 2012 draft, after vacationing and palling around with the team owner, after the previous coach was fired because he couldn’t get along with the franchise quarterback — was hardly on trial.

When Gruden was hired, we all thought that the only question he needed to get right in the interview was, “Who is this team’s quarterback?”

I doubt if he told general manager Bruce Allen and owner Daniel Snyder that the “jury is still out.” I doubt he told them what he told CSN Washington Monday, that “we can’t self-appoint him to be the next quarterback of the future. We got to make sure he can play and continue to progress.”

So if Gruden knows every question he raises about Griffin sets off a wave of controversy — why? Why not just toe the party line?

Maybe this is Gruden’s way of fighting back. Maybe Gruden is talking to someone when he makes these comments — maybe the quarterback, maybe the owner.

Maybe, by going on the record time after time with seeds of doubt about Griffin, he is battling against the forces inside Redskins Park that have enabled the quarterback since he arrived.

Maybe he is thinking, “It’s going to be awfully hard to force Robert Griffin III down my throat when I spit it back up week after week, for all the world to hear.”

He didn’t just start doing this. Gruden’s been doing this ever since Griffin went down with his dislocated ankle in Week 2 against Jacksonville — opening the door for the quarterback that he really wanted to see, Kirk Cousins.

When given the chance to do what Cousins had done after he went in for an injured Griffin and led the team to a win over Jacksonville — “This is Robert’s team,” Cousins declared — Gruden was asked who would start when Griffin returned. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

He followed that up with a response to a question from the New York media before the Giants game: “He’s going to have a stretch of games here where he has to play and start,” a reporter asked. “I mean, could this develop into his team despite what happens with Robert down the road?”

Gruden’s response? “You know what? Crazy things have happened in the NFL,” he said. “I’m not going to discount anybody or anything. I’m not going to try to pull out a crystal ball and say what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next week, but I know the next six weeks we’re going to concentrate on Kirk as a quarterback, and we feel very strongly that he can get the job done. And then whatever happens after that, I’ll deal with then.”

This would seem like coaching suicide for Gruden here, putting him on a collision course with his general manager and owner. But maybe Gruden is savvy enough to realize that — if we are to believe the reports when he was hired — he has a five-year, $20 million guaranteed contract behind him.

So what are they going to do — fire him?

Gruden circled back Monday to one of the messages he put out there for all to see earlier this year when he said, “We have a young team. We have some fragile egos here. These guys are young guys trying their best, and they read in the paper that nobody likes them and they’re ’alienated’ as a football player, as an NFL football player playing here, you have to expect it.”

In June, Gruden saw this coming. “He doesn’t like negative publicity,” he said then of his quarterback. “He doesn’t like negative plays to happen. He wants everything to be right. He wants everybody to love Robert, and that’s not going to be the case at the quarterback position.”

That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case with the head coach of the Washington Redskins — and Jay Gruden seems perfectly willing to let everyone know it.

It may be his only way to fight back.

• Thom Loverro is co-host of “The Sports Fix,” noon to 2 p.m. daily on ESPN 980 and espn980.com