Rushing RG3

Robert Griffin III was knocked out of three games in 2012.
Photo credit to WKYC.com.

There isn’t a whole lot of news in the NFL today that grabbed my attention, and I don’t want to start looking at what each team needs to do this offseason until next week or the week after. So I decided to stay local and offer my two cents on a report released by Adam Schefter this morning.

The Redskins, according to Schefter, believe that Griffin’s progress up to this point has been good enough that he could definitely be ready to start in Week 1 of the 2013 season.

Honestly, this concerns me more than a little. He had pretty invasive surgery to repair is LCL and ACL. They had to operate on both knees, so it isn’t just his right knee that they have to rehab.

Everybody points to Adrian Peterson’s swift return as reason for hope that Griffin III can do the same. After all, they both had their ACL’s hurt and Dr. James Andrews performed both procedures to repair them. In addition, RG3’s injury came only about two week later in the season as Peterson’s did last year.

But Peterson did not have work done on his LCL. Andrews did not have to go into Peterson’s non-injured leg in order to repair his injured ACL.

Most importantly, Peterson, as far as we can tell, may not have been 100% at the start of the 2012 regular season. Remember that he was nowhere near his normal self in the first eight weeks of the season. It was the second half of the season where he ran circles around defenders.

If RG3 is 99% in Week 1 of the 2013 season, I would not start him. Having full strength in your legs is much more critical for a quarterback than for a running back. You have to be able to drive through your legs when fitting the ball between defenders on a line. You have to be able to shift your weight properly when delivering a high-arcing touch pass on a corner route.

You might say, “Griffin III can do all that effectively if he’s 90%, so why are you being so conservative?”

I say that because Cousins has proven himself as a capable backup and he will be working this entire offseason as if he is the starting quarterback. After all, he is until RG3 is healthy enough to take over.

Cousins can lead us to wins in the early part of the season as long as the Redskins shore up their defense and keep their offensive line healthy like they did this season.

Robert needs to not rush his recovery. Do it right. He has to understand that if Cousins has to start the season for us, no matter how Kirk does, RG3’s fate will not be the same as Alex Smith’s in San Francisco. We have reached a point where players know that they can lose their job because of injury. Robert is not in that category, though. The Redskins gave up too much to get him and he’s too remarkable an athlete for Washington to replace him.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt if Griffin III can learn to protect himself a little better. Sliding, getting out of bounds. We don’t need him to get 13 yards every time he runs, we can settle for 6 and him getting out of bounds safely.

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